Agricultural Credit in Bangladesh: Present Trend, Problems and Recommendations

Economic theory undoubtedly proved the crucial importance of agricultural sector of a country in case of it’s economic transition. A timely flow of agricultural credit can meet farmers demand to ensure agricultural productivity. The purpose of this study is to explore the pattern of present trend of agricultural credit flow over the recent years, specially from the formal sector banking institutions. This study reveals that formal sector has flourished in recent years in disbursing agricultural credit where previously informal sector dominated the rural credit market for agriculture. NGOs have a stronger network throughout the country and many local private commercial banks and foreign banks use these channel to provide agricultural credit. Although PCBs (which includes domestic and foreign commercial banks) contributes a significant amount to total agricultural credit from formal sector, their percentage contribution to agricultural credit remain almost stagnant since the time they started to disburse agricultural loan.  It will also entail discussion about the problem involved in case of agricultural loan disbursement as well as some policy recommendation that may minimize the leakage in agricultural credit distribution to the rural farmers. Keywords: Agricultural Credit, Formal Sector, PCBs, NGOs, SCBs, SBs, Bangladesh

Factors Affecting Depression and Anxiety in Diabetic Patients: A Prospective Cohort Study from a Tertiary Care Hospital in Eastern India

Background: Diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases in the world and its prevalence in India is rising day by day. Diabetic patients often suffer from depression and anxiety which has a negative impact on patients resulting in non-adherence to medication, rapid disease progression and overall poor prognosis. Aims: The study aims to determine the prevalence of depression and anxiety among diabetic patients and the factors associated with these. Methods: A prospective cohort study was conducted with 305 participants among which 152 were diabetic while 153 were non diabetic patients. Informed written consent was obtained from all study participants. Patients having known psychiatric illnesses, other long standing chronic illnesses, terminally I’ll, or on corticosteroids were excluded from the study. Depression and anxiety of the patients was measured through PHQ-9 scale and GAD-7 scale respectively. Factors associated with prevalence of depression and anxiety in the diabetic population was analyzed. Results: In our study 305 participants were recruited among which 153 were non-diabetic (NDM) and 152 were diabetic (DM). The socio-demographic, clinical features and disease characteristics are shown in Table 1. Age and gender distribution among the 2 groups (NDM and DM) were similar (p=0.571). Most of the study participants belonged t age group 45-60 years. Number of widowed participants were significantly higher in the DM group (p=0.009). There was no difference in place of residence, educational status, and income between these groups. Body mass index (p=0.001), fasting blood sugar (p=0.001), and post prandial blood sugar (p=0.001) levels were significantly higher in the DM group compared to the NDM group. Hypertension was also more commonly seen in the DM group (35.9% versus 64.5%, p=0.001). There was a significant difference in depression and anxiety in these groups. In the DM group, 60 (39.5%) and 55 (36.2%) patients had depression and anxiety respectively. In contrast, 19 (12.4%) and 22 (14.4%) patients had depression and anxiety respectively in the NDM group. A subgroup analysis within the DM group (Table 2,3) was done to analyse the predictors of depression and anxiety among the participants. Educational status (OR:0.168, CI:0.050-0.563, p=0.004), marital status (OR:7.334, CI:1.339-40.156, p=0.022), insulin therapy (OR:3.596, CI:1.249-10.351, p=0.018), retinopathy (OR:5.521, CI:2.193- 13.903, p=0.001), hypertension (OR:0.167, CI:0.065-0.431, p=0.001) and ischemic heart disease (OR:5.646, CI:1.923-16.577, p=0.002) were significantly associated with depression. Marital status (OR:6.132, CI:1.214-30.996, p=0.028), retinopathy (OR:7.668, CI:3.120-18.845, p=0.001), neuropathy (OR:3.054, CI:1.239-7.527, p=0.015) and ischemic heart disease (OR:5.356, CI:1.922-14.924, p=0.001) were significantly associated with anxiety. Conclusion: Our study shows depression and anxiety are highly prevalent among diabetic patients. All diabetic patients while seeking clinical contact should be screened for depression and anxiety especially those patients with predisposing risk factors.         &nbsp

Induced breeding, embryonic and larval development of Macrognathus pancalus (Hamilton, 1822) under captive condition

The present study was carried out to enumerate induced breeding technique and larval development of Macrognathus pancalus (Hamilton, 1822) reared under captivity. Five different doses of Ovasis hormone (T1, T2, T3, T4, and T5) with 3 replicas each were administered to the matured brooders to standardize the breeding performance of the target species. The results indicated variation in fertilization rate, latency period, egg output and hatching rate in response to different treatments. Spawning was occurred between 20-24 hrs of injection in all the experiments at 26.33±0.88°C water temperature. Among all the experimental trials, the highest fertilization rate was observed in T3 (96.15±0.60) of E2 and the highest hatching rate was observed in T3 (92.49±1.00) of E2. The present work elucidated the viability of seed production of M. pancalus reared under confined condition which will useful for aquaculture and conservation

Authorship Diversity in General Surgery Related Cochrane Systematic Reviews

Background This study sought to determine the gender and country diversity in authorship representation in the authorship of Cochrane systematic reviews related to General Surgery.   Methods We searched and extracted data from the Cochrane Library on 3 September 2022 using ‘keyword:General surgery’, and included published reviews, protocols, and withdrawn publications. We extracted authors’ details and searched online to determine their gender, attempting to capture at least one webpage demonstrating it. Authors whose gender could not be ascertained were excluded from gender-based analyses. For graphical representation, we used a choropleth-style map. We treated a collaborative author group belonging to a single country, e.g., MRC Clinical Trials Unit (UK), as a single author. A second author independently cross-verified the extracted data.   Result Two hundred and fifty publications with a total of 1420 authors were included in the current study. Four authors had affiliation to two countries. The leading five represented nations (Figure 1A) in authorship were United Kingdom (n=562, 39.4%), China (n=163, 11.5%), Italy (n=144, 10.1%), Canada (n=91, 6.4%), and United States of America (n=89, 6.2%).   Syria is the only country among all the low-income countries which had authorship representation and constituted 0.34% (n=5) of all the authors. India (n=8, 0.6%) and Nigeria (n=2, 0.1%) were the only countries from lower-middle income groups who had representation. Male (n=957) to female (n=453) ratio in this study was 2.11:1 (Figure 1B). Sex data for ten authors couldn’t be retreived and were categorized as ‘unknown’ group.  There were 169 (67.3%) male and 82 (32.6%) female first authors (sex ratio 2.06:1). One study had designated two authors as co-first authors. Women (n= 81) constituted 32.4% of all the corresponding authors (sex ratio 2.06:1). One article didn’t have any designated corresponding author. One hundred and fifty (60%) studies didn’t have any female representation in any lead author (corresponding or first author) position. Fifty-eight (23.2%) studies didn’t have any female authors at all, whereas in contrast there were only eight studies (3.2%) which did not have any male authors.   Conclusion Authors from high-income countries continue to be the largest contributors to Cochrane systematic reviews in General Surgery, source of one of the highest quality evidence. There is extremely poor representation of female authors and authors from low and low-middle-income countries. Active capacity-building efforts are needed in several countries for advancing authorship diversity

Availability of a system maintained through several imperfect repairs before a replacement or a perfect repair

Employing the Fourier transformation technique, we find the availability of a system maintained through several imperfect repairs before a replacement or a perfect repair is allowed. We obtain exact expressions for the availability when both lifetime and repair time distributions are exponential (with possibly different parameters). Comparison is made with the system availability under the perfect repair policy.Reliability Continuous monitoring Minimal repair Renewal Laplace transform Residue calculus Singularity

Philanthropic giving, market-based performance and institutional ownership: Evidence from an emerging economy

This paper investigates the association of philanthropic giving with market-based performance and institutional ownership using data from banks in Bangladesh from 2007 to 2013. Our findings suggest that banks with a higher level of philanthropic giving achieve better performance, with a positive association also found between philanthropic giving and institutional ownership. This implies that institutional owners invest in banks that contribute more to philanthropic activities. These findings should be of interest to managers, regulators and policy makers in countries that share similar financial and socio-economic systems

Retinitis as the presenting feature of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis in an Indian male: A case report

Measles virus is a rare but important cause for acute retinitis as it can eventually lead to the fulminant complication of SSPE. We report a case of a young Indian male with acute viral retinitis who subsequently developed SSPE. It is of paramount importance to consider measles virus and SSPE as a cause in an immunocompetent young adult with necrotizing viral retiniti

Delineation of seven species of genus Channa from upper Assam region, India using sagittal otolith morphology

Morphology of sagittal otoliths of seven species of genus Channa from upper Assam, India was studied to obtain baseline information for their prospective role in taxonomic studies. In the present study, variations were recorded in morphological characteristics of sagittal otolith among the studied species. Of all the studied parameters, otolith shape, sulcus acusticus, ostium, and cauda, in particular, were found to be taxonomically important features for the identification of the species. The pentagonal shape of sagitta in Channa punctata, pseudo-ostiocaudal sulcus acusticus in C. marulius, bent concave ostium in C. stewartii, straight cauda in C. bleheri were found to be species-specific features. Sagitta size was smallest in C. gachua while the largest was recorded in C. striata. The proposed taxonomic keys enumerated through the combination of different otolith characters from the present investigation will be useful in the identification of these species when standard methodologies fail to deliver satisfactory results

Holographic entanglement entropy for relativistic hydrodynamic flows

Abstract We study the behaviour of holographic entanglement entropy (HEE) in near equilibrium thermal states which are macroscopically described by conformal relativistic hydrodynamic flows dual to dynamical black brane geometries. We compute HEE for strip-shaped subsystems in boundary dimensions d = 2, 3, 4, which provides us with general qualitative inferences on the interplay between fluid flows and entanglement dynamics. At first, we consider the zeroth order in hydrodynamic derivative expansion, holographically described by stationary boosted black branes. Working non-perturbatively in fluid velocity, we find that, as the fluid velocity approaches its relativistic upper limit, the UV regulated HEE exhibits a divergence at arbitrary temperature. Also, the holographic mutual information between two relatively close subsystems vanishes at some critical fluid velocity and remains zero beyond it. We then compute HEE in an excited state of the fluid in the presence of the sound mode. As a simplified setup, we first work with non-dissipative dynamics in d = 2, where the time evolution of HEE is studied in the presence of the sound mode and a propagating pressure pulse. In d = 4, working upto first order in derivative expansion, we find that dissipative sound modes produce an additional dynamical UV divergence which is subleading compared to the ‘area law divergence’. No such divergence is observed for dissipative sound mode in d = 3