AGROINDUSTRY FOR RURAL AND SMALL FARMER DEVELOPMENT: ISSUES AND LESSONS FROM INDIA

This article examines the priority given to agroindustries in India in the context of their role in rural and small farmer development. The features and constraints of agroindustry are examined to assess their real and potential contribution and challenges faced. Institutional and organizational models that have been tried or proposed in India are evaluated from the point of view of performance and contribution to rural and small farmer development. The article then draws policy and managerial implicationsAgribusiness, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

A process capability index for zero-inflated processes

The proportion of zero defect (ZD) outputs is as an integral characteristic of a zero-inflated (ZI) process or high quality process. Different ZI processes can almost equally satisfy the same USL of number of defects but they can produce substantially different proportions of ZD products. The application of conventional method for process capability evaluation fails to discriminate these processes because in the conventional method, the process capability is evaluated taking into consideration the USL of number of defects only. In this paper, a new measure of process capability for ZI processes is proposed that can truly discriminate different ZI processes taking into account the USL of number of defects as well as the proportion of ZD units produced in these processes. In the proposed approach, at first a measure of process capability index (PCI) with respect to the USL is computed, and then the overall PCI is obtained by multiplying it with an appropriately defined multiplying factor. A real-life application is presented

DECOLORIZATION OF DISTILLERY EFFLUENT WASTE BY MICROBIAL CONSORTIUM

Aim: The effluent discharged from sugarcane molasses based distilleries causes environmental pollution due to its large volume and dark brown colour. The effluents also acifidys soils and causes harmful effects on agriculture crops. The objective of this work was the decolourization of molasses waste water from Doiwala sugar industry, Dehradun was done using different microbial consortiums. Methodology and Results: The microbial strains used in this study were obtained from IMTECH, Chandigarh. They were designated as A is E. coli, B is Pseudomonas aeruginosa, C is Staphylococcus aureus, D is Serritia odoriferae, E is Proteus vulgaris and F is Candida albicans. A total of six combinations were prepared using these strains i.e A+B, C+D, E+F, A+B+C, D+E+F and A+B+C+D+E+F. These consortiums were subjected to decolorization experiment of molasses waste water from Doiwala Sugar Factory, Dehradun, India at regular time interval by measuring the optical density. It was observed that at 7th day incubation in each case all consortiums showed maximum decolorization after which the percentage of decolorization was stable. It was also observed that the bacterial consortiums showed higher decolorization than the mixture of bacteria and fungi. Consortium C+D showed highest decolorization i.e. 89%. Conclusion, significance and impact study: it is recommended that industry should work with this consortium for decolorization of molasses containing wastewater to solve this environmental problem.

Extra-judicial killings in India: a crisis of justice, faith and public morality?

This post discusses extrajudicial killings in India, the consequent legal challenges they create, and the increasing normalisation of such encounters through pop culture and public acclamation. Gauri Kumar and Naina Bhargava highlight these arguments using specific examples, and present the existing response of the Supreme Court of India regarding extrajudicial killings

Evaluating capability of a bivariate zero-inflated poisson process

A zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) distribution is commonly used for modelling zero-inflated process data with single type of defect, and for developing appropriate tools for instituting statistical process control of manufacturing processes. However, in reality, such manufacturing scenarios are very common where more than one type of defect can occur. For example, occurrences of defects like solder short circuits (shorts) and absence of solder (skips) are very common on printed circuit boards. In literature, different forms of bivariate zero-inflated Poisson (BZIP) distributions are proposed, which can be used for modelling the manufacturing scenarios where two types of defects can occur. Control charts are designed for monitoring for such processes using BZIP models. Although evaluation of capability is an integral part of statistical process control of a manufacturing process, researchers have given very little effort on this aspect of zero-inflated processes. Only a few articles attempted to evaluate the capability of a univariate zero-inflated process and no work is reported on evbaluating capability of a bivariate zero-inflated process. In this paper, a methodology for measuring capability of a bivariate zero-inflated process is presented. The proposed methodology is illustrated using two case studies.&nbsp

Optimization of Multiple Responses of Ultrasonic Machining (USM) Process: A Comparative Study

Ultrasonic machining (USM) process has multiple performance measures, e.g. material removal rate (MRR), tool wear rate (TWR), surface roughness (SR) etc., which are affected by several process parameters. The researchers commonly attempted to optimize USM process with respect to individual responses, separately. In the recent past, several systematic procedures for dealing with the multi-response optimization problems have been proposed in the literature. Although most of these methods use complex mathematics or statistics, there are some simple methods, which can be comprehended and implemented by the engineers to optimize the multiple responses of USM processes. However, the relative optimization performance of these approaches is unknown because the effectiveness of different methods has been demonstrated using different sets of process data. In this paper, the computational requirements for four simple methods are presented, and two sets of past experimental data on USM processes are analysed using these methods. The relative performances of these methods are then compared. The results show that weighted signal-to-noise (WSN) ratio method and utility theory (UT) method usually give better overall optimisation performance for the USM process than the other approaches

Feature-based decision rules for control charts pattern recognition: A comparison between CART and QUEST algorithm

Control chart pattern (CCP) recognition can act as a problem identification tool in any manufacturing organization. Feature-based rules in the form of decision trees have become quite popular in recent years for CCP recognition. This is because the practitioners can clearly understand how a particular pattern has been identified by the use of relevant shape features. Moreover, since the extracted features represent the main characteristics of the original data in a condensed form, it can also facilitate efficient pattern recognition. The reported feature-based decision trees can recognize eight types of CCPs using extracted values of seven shape features. In this paper, a different set of seven most useful features is presented that can recognize nine main CCPs, including mixture pattern. Based on these features, decision trees are developed using CART (classification and regression tree) and QUEST (quick unbiased efficient statistical tree) algorithms. The relative performance of the CART and QUEST-based decision trees are extensively studied using simulated pattern data. The results show that the CART-based decision trees result in better recognition performance but lesser consistency, whereas, the QUEST-based decision trees give better consistency but lesser recognition performance

Bayesian Neural Tree Models for Nonparametric Regression

Frequentist and Bayesian methods differ in many aspects, but share some basic optimal properties. In real-life classification and regression problems, situations exist in which a model based on one of the methods is preferable based on some subjective criterion. Nonparametric classification and regression techniques, such as decision trees and neural networks, have frequentist (classification and regression trees (CART) and artificial neural networks) as well as Bayesian (Bayesian CART and Bayesian neural networks) approaches to learning from data. In this work, we present two hybrid models combining the Bayesian and frequentist versions of CART and neural networks, which we call the Bayesian neural tree (BNT) models. Both models exploit the architecture of decision trees and have lesser number of parameters to tune than advanced neural networks. Such models can simultaneously perform feature selection and prediction, are highly flexible, and generalize well in settings with a limited number of training observations. We study the consistency of the proposed models, and derive the optimal value of an important model parameter. We also provide illustrative examples using a wide variety of real-life regression data sets

Assessment of Accessibility and Quality of Emergency Obstetric Care services: A cross sectional study in rural Varanasi

Background: Emergency Obstetrics care is an integrated strategy developed by the WHO, UNFPA and UNICEF that aims to equip health facilities with the capacity to provide evidence based, cost effective interventions to attend the leading causes of maternal mortality. Methods: A community based cross sectional study was conducted between April 2019 - July 2020. A total of 201 women who delivered in the last 6 months and had complications during their pregnancy were interviewed to find out accessibility and quality emergency obstetric Care (EmOC) services. Facility assessment was also done at two health facilities of Chiraigaon block for the assessment EmOC. Results: Findings show that only 41.8% respondents were able to reach the government health facilities in less than half-an-hour. Out of the total respondents who utilized government health facilities for EmOC, only 19% were attended by the health providers within 1 hour. Conclusion: Low percentage of respondents with complications were reaching the health facility within 30 minutes. Therefore, there is a strong need for strengthening of basic EmOC services at health facilities