Role of Mobile Phone Technology in Improving Small Farm Productivity

Telecommunication, especially mobile phones have the potential to provide solution to the existing information asymmetry in various lagging sectors like agriculture. India’s agricultural sector suffers from low growth rates and low productivity. Issues in access to information are weak points at every stage of the agri-supply chain. For small farmer-based economy like India, access to information can possibly enable better incomes and productivity to the farmers. This paper through focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with farmers, has tried to find answers to the use and impact of mobile phones and mobile-enabled services on agricultural productivity. The answers to these questions are of relevance to develop better policy environment conducive for small and medium farmers and have implications for mobile phone operators, information service providers, and policymakers. The study has shown that although, mobile phones can act as catalyst to improving farm productivity and rural incomes, the quality of information, timeliness of information and trustworthiness of information are the three important aspects that have to be delivered to the farmers to meet their needs and expectations. There exist critical binding constraints that restrict the ability of the farming community to realize full-potential gains and it is more so for small than large farmers.Agricultural and Food Policy,

A novel two-point gradient method for Regularization of inverse problems in Banach spaces

In this paper, we introduce a novel two-point gradient method for solving the ill-posed problems in Banach spaces and study its convergence analysis. The method is based on the well known iteratively regularized Landweber iteration method together with an extrapolation strategy. The general formulation of iteratively regularized Landweber iteration method in Banach spaces excludes the use of certain functions such as total variation like penalty functionals, $L^1$ functions etc. The novel scheme presented in this paper allows to use such non-smooth penalty terms that can be helpful in practical applications involving the reconstruction of several important features of solutions such as piecewise constancy and sparsity. We carefully discuss the choices for important parameters, such as combination parameters and step sizes involved in the design of the method. Additionally, we discuss an example to validate our assumptions.Comment: Submitted in Applicable Analysi

Contextual Bundling and E-Commerce: Strategizing for Online Bundle Formulation

Bundling has emerged as a key issue in current marketing and online business thinking. By extending contemporary conceptualizations, this paper proposes a new approach to bundling for both marketing of products and services in E-commerce. It reviews the literature on both bundling and consumer product evaluations and puts forward a new approach. It demonstrates that contextual bundling can constitute the strategic core of a company utilizing E-commerce for its business; at least if the firm’s primary goal is to maximize the opportunities of attracting valuable customers, online content purchase and its consumption. This research carries forward some results from previous studies, while it finds other prior results to be questionable. Shows that strategic implications of online bundle formulation is only partially explained in terms of a price or product focus, which is where most of the previous research has concentrated on. A context specific price or product bundling focus can have more strategic implications than a simple price or product focus on consumer purchase evaluations. Businesses must define bundling through an indepth appraisal of the actual contextual experience of the customers, rather than focusing solely on reservation prices, which is where previous literature has put maximum emphasis

Development Strategy for the Hill Districts of Uttarakhand

Uttarakhand, in spite of being a small state, has certain key features that make it distinct from other states of the country and highlights its potential for development. However, development has predominantly been in the plains, and the hill districts have been left behind. All the hill districts have subsistence farming as their main economic activity. Due to subsistence livelihood, migration and a remittance economy operate in the hill districts. They are land-locked with huge distances between the markets and resources. Because of these constraints, traditional agriculture cannot be the lead sector for development. Thus the state faces the challenge of promoting livelihoods to minimize migration through local employment and income generation, and to enhance the quality of life of people living in villages. The positive features of these hill districts are that they have enormous potential for tourism, a suitable climate for high-value agriculture, and a pleasant environment due to 60 pert cent forest cover. These have to be harnessed for a development strategy. The development strategy for Uttarakhand hills should be based on developing brand equity under the name of Organic Green State and an Uttarakhand Brand Equity Fund should be set up. This can be achieved by working towards this common goal through infrastructure development, tourism promotion, agriculture diversification, poultry- and wool-based livelihoods, and SMEs based on the above that capture linkages with industry and tourism.Uttarakhand, Development Strategy, Organic Green State

Impact On Small Farmers and Fishermen Through Use Of Mobiles in India

Telecommunication and more specially mobile phones have the potential to provide solution to the existing information asymmetry in various lagging sectors like Agriculture. India’s agricultural sector suffers from low growth rates and low productivity. Issues in access to information is a week point at every stage of the agrisupply chain. For small farmers base economy like India, access to information can possible enable better incomes and productivity to the farmers. This paper through focus group discussions and in-depth interview with farmers in villages of India, has tried to find answers to the use and impact of mobile and mobile enabled services on agricultural productivity. The answers to these questions are of relevance to develop better policy environment conducive for the small and medium farmers and has implications for mobile operators, for information service providers, and for policy-makers. The results show that although, mobiles can act as catalyst to improving productivity and rural incomes, the quality of the information, the timeliness of the information and trustworthiness of the information are the three important aspects that has to be delivered to the farmers, to meet there needs and expectations. There exist critical binding constraints that restricts the ability of the farming community to realise gains at full potential and this is more for the small than to large farmers.Mobile and Agriculture, India, Productivity, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Marketing, Production Economics, Q13, Q16, Q18,

An Empirical Evaluation of Visual Question Answering for Novel Objects

We study the problem of answering questions about images in the harder setting, where the test questions and corresponding images contain novel objects, which were not queried about in the training data. Such setting is inevitable in real world-owing to the heavy tailed distribution of the visual categories, there would be some objects which would not be annotated in the train set. We show that the performance of two popular existing methods drop significantly (up to 28%) when evaluated on novel objects cf. known objects. We propose methods which use large existing external corpora of (i) unlabeled text, i.e. books, and (ii) images tagged with classes, to achieve novel object based visual question answering. We do systematic empirical studies, for both an oracle case where the novel objects are known textually, as well as a fully automatic case without any explicit knowledge of the novel objects, but with the minimal assumption that the novel objects are semantically related to the existing objects in training. The proposed methods for novel object based visual question answering are modular and can potentially be used with many visual question answering architectures. We show consistent improvements with the two popular architectures and give qualitative analysis of the cases where the model does well and of those where it fails to bring improvements.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted in CVPR 2017 (poster