Support of Social Development Foundation (SDF) and Its Impact on the Livelihood of Poor and Hardcore Poor Families: A Case of Two Villages in Bangladesh

This study was conducted in order to understand the livelihood improvement of the poor and hardcore poor families by utilizing the project support. Associated objectives included to understand the women empowerment and change in other social areas. This was a three months study carried out between mid-September to mid-December 2016 with the stakeholders of the Social Investment Program Project (SIPP) implemented by Social Development Foundation (SDF) (An autonomous body of Finance Ministry of Bangladesh). A field survey was carried out in November 2016, through FGD sessions and key informant interviews with selected poor and hardcore families of two project villages under Jamalpur District. Respondents totaled 80 in these surveys. Discussion was also held with the project staffs and leaders of the Village Organizations to learn more about the details of project activities. Through the study it is revealed that with the project support the beneficiaries are able to start income generating activities and also able to save on regular basis. Change also observed in other areas like sanitation, housing, women empowerment water source etc. It was found that the concerned members of the village organizations are very much interested in continuing with income generating and social development activities. Based on the findings, the study makes the following recommendations as; for future sustainability the village organizations needed to be registered under respective government department. More initiative is needed for new leadership development. Presently the leadership found concentrated on few members.  All sorts of documentation, financial and others needed to be maintained and update regularly in a transparent way. Ensure group meetings in regular basis with maximum participation.  More Initiative is required to develop market channel and group investment. Keywords: Social Development Foundation(SDF), Impact, Livelihood,  Poor and Hardcore Poor Families, Banglades

Development of a hot water treatment plant suitable for banana

Banana is a year round fruit in Bangladesh.  After harvesting, banana is attacked by postharvest disease caused by some fungi.  The quality and quantity losses of banana occur due to disease attacks and lack of proper postharvest handling.  Fungus can be destroyed or made inactive by chemical or heat treatment.  Most of the chemicals are hazardous to human health.  Heat treatment technology is simple and is a non-chemical method to kill or inactivate pest and to control fungus.  A hot water treatment plant was designed and developed with local materials for treating banana fruits.  Overall dimensions of the hot water treatment plant were 1600 mm×926 mm×1566 mm and operated by an electrical motor of 0.38 kW.  Water was heated by the six electric immersion heaters of 2,000 W of each.  The capacity of the plant was 350 kg h-1.  The price of the hot-water treatment plant was Taka 1,00,000 (US$1300) and treatment cost was Taka 0.55 kg-1 ($0.007).  The effective combinations of temperatures and exposure periods of BARI Kola 1 and Sabri Kola were found to be 55°C for 5 min.  When the banana fruits were treated with hot water, the shelf-life of the fruits was found to increase by 30% and the postharvest loss reduced by 70% over those of untreated bananas.  The break-even point of the plant was 70 h yr-1.  Banana fruits treated by the plant can be profitable to traders when the annual use of the plant exceeds 70 h.  Payback period of the plant was estimated to be 26 d.  Therefore, there is a good opportunity of farmers and traders to increase income and generate employment using the hot water treatment plant.   Keywords: Hot-water treatment plant, banana, temperature, exposure period, break-even point and payback perio

Fuzzy Multi-Objective Linear Programming for Project Management Decision under Uncertain Environment with AHP Based Weighted Average Method

Smooth implementation and controlling conflicting goals of a project with the usage of all related resources through organization is inherently a complex task to management. At the same time deterministic models are never efficient in practical project management (PM) decision problems because the related parameters are frequently fuzzy in nature. The project execution time is a major concern of the involved stakeholders (client, contractors and consultants). For optimization of total project cost through time control, here crashing cost is considered as a critical factor in project management. The proposed approach aims to formulate a multi objective linear programming model to simultaneously minimize total project cost, completion time and crashing cost with reference to direct, indirect cost in the framework of the satisfaction level of decision maker with fuzzy goal and fuzzy cost coefficients.. To make such problems realistic, triangular fuzzy numbers and the concept of minimum accepted level method are employed to formulate the problem. The proposed model leads decision makers to choose the desired compromise solution under different risk levels and the project optimization problems have been solved under multiple uncertainty conditions. The Analytical Hierarchy Process is used to rank multiple objectives to make the problem realistic for the respective case. Here minimum operator and AHP based weighted average operator method is used to solved the model and the solution is obtained by using LINGO softwar

Informality, Poverty and Politics in Urban Bangladesh: An Empirical Study of Dhaka City

Urbanization is one of the inevitable feature in the process of development, but rapid expansion of the urban process in Dhaka city has brought with it incredible transformation of lifestyle. Quality of urban life in Dhaka city has become major aspect of urban political economy. The paper aims at studing to explain the situation of informal sector’s worker’s life condition; explore the relation with the creation of slum because of the rising of informal sector, politics are the cause of the rising of urban chaos and there poverty condition. Most of them settle in slum where extreme poverty exists. They have lack of access to fundamental social service and they are being used by political leader. This study tries to explore the relationship among them. The study has been conducted in Dhaka city which is experiencing rapid urbanization and informalization in recent decades. The study is based on both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Urban ethnography has been used to conducted informal activities. Keywords: Informality, Poverty, Marginality,Politics, Urban,Bangladesh

Effects of inundation period and tillage option on field performance of self-propelled rice transplanter

Manual transplanting of rice seedlings in puddling condition is a common method of crop establishment in the irrigated rice systems of Asia though it is time consuming. Rice transplanters are outmost need to overcome the labor crisis in the peak transplanting periods. But, self-propelled transplanter requires an ideal field conditions to obtain better performance. Hence, a self-propelled rice transplanter (Model: DP480 and S3-680) was evaluated in clay loam (CLS), loam (LS) and sandy loam soil (SLS) during the irrigated dry season (Boro) of 2012-13 and 2013-14 under three inundation periods of 12, 18 and 24 hrs and three tillage options as strip tillage (ST), zero tillage (ZT) and conventional tillage (CT) to identify a suitable inundation period and tillage option. Soil penetration resistance decreased with the increased of inundation period in both the seasons and in three soil types. In CLS and SLS, CT showed lower penetration. In LS, ST gave higher resistance in strip compared to ZT and CT. 2-way interaction of tillage and inundation period as well as single effect of inundation period showed significant outcome in SLS during Boro/2013-14 where 18 hr inundation period for ST and CT and 24 hr for ZT gave significantly higher rate of area coverage. Average of two seasons, ST gave more rate of area coverage for 18 hrs inundation period irrespective of soil types whereas ZT gave more for 24, 18 and 24 hrs inundation period in CLS, LS and SLS respectively. ST and ZT saved 22 to 13% and 8 to 13% fuel requirement for transplanting in CLS and SLS compared to CT, respectively whereas CT saved fuel requirement by 2 to 7% over ST and ZT in LS. Contrary, ST reduced the percentage of missing hills (9.7%) compared to ZT (13.0%) and CT (10.7%) while percentage of missing hills reduced (13.7 to 9.2%) with the increased of inundation periods irrespective of seasons and soil types. Highest percentage of picker missing hills was observed for ZT in LS (4.8%) and SLS (4.6%) while 12 hrs inundation periods in SLS gave the highest and 18 and 24 hrs inundation periods in CLS and 24 hrs inundation periods in SLS gave the lowest picker missing hills. Damage hills increased in ZT from 2.6 to 3.0% compared to CT (1.0 to 1.6%) and ST (1.6 to 2.1%). Damage hills also increased in 12 hrs inundation period (2.4%) followed by 24 hrs (1.8%) and 18 hrs (1.7%) inundation periods. Highest floating hills were also observed for ZT followed by ST. Floating hills decreased with inundation periods in all types of soil. CT increased the buried hills significantly during the both seasons. However, highest percentages of buried hills were observed for 12 hrs inundation periods (2.6%) while lowest for 24 hrs inundation periods (1.6%). ST gave higher grain yield of rice compared to ZT and CT in both seasons under clay loam, loam and sandy loam soils except CLS during Boro 2012-13 seasons where ZT gave higher yield. Averaged over two seasons and three soil types, 24 hrs inundation periods gave higher yield followed by 18 hrs inundation periods. However, ST, ZT and CT gave higher yield for 18 (6.1 t/ha), 24 (6.0 t/ha) and 24 hrs (5.9 t/ha) inundation periods followed by 24 (5.9 t/ha), 18 (5.6 t/ha) and 18 hrs (5.7 t/ha), respectively. Finally, it can be stated that unpuddled minimum tillage is a resource saving technique of rice production while 18 hrs inundation prior to transplanting for strip and 24 hrs inundation for zero and conventional tillage showed more benefited for rice production

Transmission and pathology of Streptococcus inane in monosex Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) in aquaculture of Bangladesh

Streptococcus iniae is a major fish pathogen, recently emergent outbreaks were recorded in commercially cultured monosex Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) result in significant losses termed “streptococcosis”-causes unusual appearances with multi-focal pin-point haemorrhages, abscesses, necrosis and ascites in skin, fin, muscle, liver, spleen, kidney, blood, interstitial fluid specially in central nervous system and brain. This disease was more prevalent (>26%) at summer when the water temperature was approximately >25oC, percentage of mortality was higher >41% during the overcrowding and improper water chemistry. Raised levels of glucose and ammonium in blood serum causes reduced number of free blood cells released into the haemolymph to stomach and gut, result in refrain from eating in diseased tilapia. Stocking density (200 fish/decimal; class IV) had significant effect (P<0.01) on the total production (5,000 to 5,500 kg/ha). S. iniae in the circulating blood cells, extra-tubular haemal spaces containing blood vessels, fixed phagocytes in the hepatopancreas (gastrointestinal tract), bacteria-like particles in the brain tissue, vacuum and necrosis in hepatocytes revealed with histopathology. In vitro study revealed that cohabitation of dead or infected fish with healthy fish resulted infection (horizontal transmission mechanism) to the healthy fish

Regeneration potential of seedling explants of chilli (Capsicum annuum)

A study was conducted with hypocotyl, cotyledon and shoot tip of chilli as explants for regeneration on MS medium supplemented with different concentrations and combinations of auxins and cytokinins. Regeneration potential was determined by two ways. One is regeneration of shoot via callus formation from hypocotyls and cotyledon explants; another was direct shoot regeneration from shoot tip explant. The highest callus was induced from hypocotyl in a combination of BAP (5.0 mgL-1) with NAA (0.1 mgL-1) and cotyledon in a combination of BAP (5.0 mgL-1) with IAA ((1.0 mgL-1). The callus induction as well as shoot initiation was higher in hypocotyls than cotyledon. Shoot tips regenerated into plantlets directly with sporadic small callus at the base. Shoot elongation was accelerated by using additional supplementation of GA3 and AgNO3. Regenerated shoots rooted best on the MS medium supplemented with 0.1 mg L-1 NAA + 0.05 mg L-1 IBA

NO Sensing Property of Carbon Nanotube Based Thin Film Gas Sensors Prepared by Chemical Vapor Deposition Techniques

To prepare a gas sensor that can operate at room temperature, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were grown on Al 2 O 3 substrates with interdigital Pt electrodes (Al 2 O 3 substrate) by both pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In this combined method, Fe catalytic thin film was prepared by PLD and then CNTs were grown on the Fe thin film by thermal CVD using an ethylene gas. The surface images of the prepared CNTs on the substrates were observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and the sensitivity to NO gas was measured. The resistance of the prepared CNT-based gas sensor was found to decrease with increasing sensor temperature, and it decreased with increasing NO gas concentration at room temperature. In this paper, it is suggested that CNT gas sensors have a great possibility to be applied as innovative NO gas sensors on the basis of the experimental results

Farming of giant freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) in Bagerhat, Bangladesh

The study was carried out to know the present status of Macrobrachium rosenbergii culture in Bagerhat district, Bangladesh from March 2012 to January 2013. Education levels  of farmers were found as illiterate (12.3%), primary (36.19%), secondary (20%), SSC (13.33%), HSC (12.38%) and graduate (5.71%). M. rosenbergii culture was the primary and secondary occupation of 80% and 20% farmers respectively. Average stocking density and production in extensive, improved extensive and semi-intensive culture were 9609, 11502 and 22847 per ha and 193, 284 and 488 kg/ha/year respectively; rearing period ranges from 6-10 months and survival rate varied from 55 to 60%. In improved extensive and semi-intensive culture 82.86% and 71.43% farmers applied farm-made feed instead of company feeds respectively and 11.43% and 37.14% farmers used both feeds. 91.43%, 80% and 68.57% respondents responded on normal to high mortality in extensive, improved extensive and semi-intensive culture respectively. Lack of finance and appropriate technology, scarcity of quality PL, diseases and inadequate extension work were major problems of prawn culture

Socio-economic status of fishermen of the Marjat Baor at Kaligonj in Jhenidah district, Bangladesh

This study was carried out to assess the socio-economic status of fishermen of the Marjat Baor at Kaligonj of Jhenidah district. Fifty fishermen from 50 families were interviewed. Results revealed that 94% respondents were married and age varied between 30 and 45 years. Almost all the fishermen were Hindus (96%). Most of the people of the community were illiterate (60%) and among all of the school going children (58%) were boys and (42%) were girls. Above fifty percent people lived in nuclear family. 40% people lived in earthen house, constructed by grass leaves and mud. Only a few (18%) of them were found to be use electricity. Primary occupation of 60% respondents was fishing and few were also involved in agriculture. They were often found to suffer from various diseases due to lack of pure drinking water. Majority of them got fever and receive treatment from quack. Only twelve percent (12%) women were engaged in making nets for fishing. Annual household income of maximum beneficiaries (44%) was below BDT 30,000 and above BDT 50,000 found in only 4% cases. In the present study, educational, organizational, and technical credit support were very crucial to develop their better socio-economic conditions