Broadbasing and Deepening the Bond Market in India

At the time of its independence in 1947 India had only the traditional commercial banks, all with private sector ownership. Like the typical commercial banks in other parts of the world, all banks in India were also not keen to provide medium and long-term finance to industry and other sectors for their fixed asset formation. The banks were willing to fund basically the working capital requirements of the credit-worthy borrowers on the security of tangible assets. Since the government was keen to stimulate setting up of a wide range of new industrial units as also expansion/diversification of the existing units it decided to encourage setting up of financial intermediaries that provided term finance to projects in industry. Thus emerged a well-knit structure of national and state level development financial institutions (DFIs) for meeting requirements of medium and long-term finance of all range of industrial units, from the smallest to the very large ones. Reserve Bank of India (the central banking institutions of the country) and Government of India nurtured DFIS through various types of financial incentives and other supportive measures. The main objective of all these measures was to provide much needed long-term finance to the industry, which the then existing commercial banks were not keen to provide because of the fear of asset-liability mismatch. Since deposits with the banks were mainly short/medium term, extending term loans was considered by the banks to be relatively risky. The five-year development plans envisaged rapid growth of domestic industry even in the private sector to support the import substitution growth model adopted by the national planners. To encourage investment in industry, a conscious policy decision was taken that the DFIs should provide term-finance mainly to the private sector at interest rates that were lower than those applicable to working capital or any other short-term loans. In the early years of the post-Independence period, shortages of various commodities tended to make trading in commodities a more profitable proposition than investment in industry, which carried higher risk. Partly to correct this imbalance, the conscious policy design was to increase attractiveness of long-term investment in industry and infrastructure through relatively lower interest rates. To enable term-lending institutions to finance industry at concessional rates, Government and RBI gave them access to low cost funds. They were allowed to issue bonds with government guarantee, given funds through the budget and RBI allocated sizeable part of RBI's National Industrial Credit (Long Term Operations) funds to Industrial Development Bank of India, the large DFI of the country. Through an appropriate RBI fiat, the turf of the DFIs was also protected, until recently, by keeping commercial banks away from extending large sized term loans to industrial units. Banks were expected to provide small term loans to small-scale industrial units on a priority basis.

Two phase detonation studies

An experimental study of the passage of a shock wave over a burning fuel drop is described. This includes high speed framing photographs of the interaction taken at 500,000 frames per second. A theoretical prediction of the ignition of a fuel drop by a shock wave is presented and the results compared with earlier experimental work. Experimental attempts to generate a detonation in a liquid fuel drop (kerosene)-liquid oxidizer drop (hydrogen peroxide)-inert gas-environment are described. An appendix is included which gives the analytical prediction of power requirements for the drop generator to produce certain size drops at a certain mass rate. A bibliography is also included which lists all of the publications resulting from this research grant

Endophytic Mycoflora of Indian Medicinal Plant, Terminalia arjuna and their Biological Activities

Studies were undertaken to isolate, identify and evaluate the biological activities of endophytic mycoflora of Indian medicinal plant, Terminalia arjuna. A total of 20 isolates of endophytic fungi were obtained from the leaves, twigs and bark tissues of the Terminalia arjuna. Out of 20, six isolates exhibited promising antibacterial, antifungal and anti-inflammatory activities when cultivated at shake flask level. The selected isolates were identified on the basis of morphology and ITS gene sequencing. Three isolates, designated as TA BA 1, TA L1 and TA L2 were identified as Aspergillus flavus whereas; the remaining three endophytic fungi were identified as Diaporthe arengae (TA TW2), Alternaria Sp. (TA TW1) and Lasiodiplodia theobromae (TA BA2). Aspergillus flavus was found as the predominant endophyte in leaves and bark tissues of the plant. The crude extract of the test isolates showed considerable antimicrobial activity against common human bacterial (Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus vulgaris, Salmonella abony and Bacillus subtilis) and fungal (Candida albicans, Aspergillus niger and Penicilium sp.) pathogens. The extract of Diaporthe arengae (TA TW2) significantly reduced the concentration of DPPH free radical as percent DPPH scavenging activity was found to be highest (69.56%) in comparison with other isolates. The % inhibition of hemolysis of RBCs was found to be highest (82.85%) with Diaporthe arengae (TA TW2) in comparison (83.26%) with standard drug (Ibuprofen). Among all, the extract of the Diaporthe arengae (TA TW2) showed excellent biological activities and hence was subjected to further characterization. The phytochemical investigation of the extract revealed the presence of terpenoids as the major phytoconstituents which was supported by TLC and UV spectroscopic studies. The results indicate that the isolated endophytes could be the valuable source of these bioactive molecules with diverse biological activities. The bioactivities may be attributed to the terpenoids present in the endophytic extract

Perturbations in a Bouncing Brane Model

The question of how perturbations evolve through a bounce in the Cyclic and Ekpyrotic models of the Universe is still a matter of ongoing debate. In this report we show that the collision between boundary branes is in most cases singular even in the full 5-D formalism, and that first order perturbation theory breaks down for at least one perturbation variable. Only in the case that the boundary branes approach each other with constant velocity shortly before the bounce, can a consistent, non singular solution be found. It is then possible to follow the perturbations explicitly until the actual collision. In this case, we find that if a scale invariant spectrum developed on the hidden brane, it will get transferred to the visible brane during the bounce.Comment: 15 pages, minor modifications, a few typos correcte

The Cosmology of Massless String Modes

We consider the spacetime dynamics of a gas of closed strings in the context of General Relativity in a background of arbitrary spatial dimensions. Our motivation is primarily late time String Gas Cosmology, where such a spacetime picture has to emerge after the dilaton has stabilized. We find that after accounting for the thermodynamics of a gas of strings, only string modes which are massless at the self-dual radius are relevant, and that they lead to a dynamics which is qualitatively different from that induced by the modes usually considered in the literature. In the context of an ansatz with three large spatial dimensions and an arbitrary number of small extra dimensions, we obtain isotropic stabilization of these extra dimensions at the self-dual radius. This stabilization occurs for fixed dilaton, and is induced by the special string states we focus on. The three large dimensions undergo a regular Friedmann-Robertson-Walker expansion. We also show that this framework for late-time cosmology is consistent with observational bounds.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, references added (again

Automatic Classification of Medicinal Plants Using State-Of-The-Art Pre-Trained Neural Networks

Now a days every mankind is suffering due to infections. Ayurveda, the science of life helped to take preventive measures which boost our immunity.  It is plant-based science. Many medicinal plants found useful in daily life of common people for boosting immunity. Identifying the plant species having medicinal plant is challenging, it requires botanical expert. In the process of manual identification, botanical experts use various plant features as the identification keys, which are examined adaptively and progressively to identify plant species. The shortage of experts and trained taxonomist created global taxonomic impediment problem which is one of the major challenges.  Various researchers have worked in the field of automatic classification of plants since the last decade. The leaf is considered as primary input as it is available throughout the whole year. The research paper mainly focuses on the study of transfer learning approach for medicinal plant classification, which reuse already developed model at the starting point for model on a second task. Transfer learning approach is a black box approach used for image classification and many more applications by extracting features from an image. Some of the transfer learning models are MobileNet-V1, VGG-19, ResNet-50, VGG-16. Here it uses Mendeley dataset of Indian medicinal plant species which is freely available. Output layer classifies the species of leaves. The result provides evaluation and variations of above listed features extracted models. MobileNetV1 achieves maximum accuracy of 98%

Solvent Effect on Fluorescence Quenching of 7, 8 Benzo‑4‑azido Methyl Coumarin by Aniline

Fluorescence quenching of biologically active studies of 7, 8 benzo-4-azidomethyl coumarin (7BAMC) by aniline in four different organic solvents namely benzene, dioxane, tetrahydrofuran and acetonitrile has been carried out at room temperature with a view to understand the quenching mechanisms. The Stern–Volmer (S-V) plot has been found to be non-linear with a positive deviation for all the solvents studied. In order to interpret these results we have invoked the ground state complex formation and sphere of action static quenching models. Using these models various quenching rate parameters have been determined. The magnitudes of these parameters suggest that sphere of action static quenching model agrees well with the experimental results. Hence the positive deviation is attributed to the static and dynamic quenching. Further, with the use of Finite Sink approximation model, it was possible to check these bimolecular reactions as diffusion-limited and to estimate independently distance parameter R’ and mutual diffusion coefficient D. Finally an effort has been made to correlate the values of R’ and D with the values of the encounter distance R and the mutual coefficient D determined using the Edward’s empirical relation and Stokes – Einstein relation

String Gas Cosmology and Structure Formation

It has recently been shown that a Hagedorn phase of string gas cosmology may provide a causal mechanism for generating a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of scalar metric fluctuations, without the need for an intervening period of de Sitter expansion. A distinctive signature of this structure formation scenario would be a slight blue tilt of the spectrum of gravitational waves. In this paper we give more details of the computations leading to these results.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure