Improving Economic Position of Women through Microfinance: Case of a Backward Area, Mayurbhanj-Orissa, India

This paper aims at assessing the potential of microfinance in extending credit facility to the rural poor in general, and women in particular, and examining how far such a programme has succeeded in ameliorating poverty in Orissa, the poorest state in the Indian Union. It is an attempt to arrest two individual but mutually dependent issues as regards the role of microfinance: has it succeeded in extending financial services to the poor women and has it influenced their economic condition and welfare significantly? Despite various targeted policy measures little success has been achieved in reducing the poverty level in the backward state of Orissa. The other alternative, microfinance, with its oft-repeated success story, has not made much headway in the state. The borrowers are not able to utilize the funds properly so as to help themselves out of the poverty level. The study makes some suggestions in this aspect and calls for a holistic approach encompassing financial assistance, entrepreneurial guidance and stage-wise supervision along with extensive awareness about benefits of joining a group.Economic Position of Women; Microfinance through SHGs; Models of SHGs

Environment and Changing Agricultural Practices: Evidence from Orissa, India

In this paper attempt is made to examine vulnerability of farm households’ to adverse consequences of climate variables and extreme conditions like: food and cyclone. Three key components impeding food security with in the substance production structure are identified as (i) Inadequate food production by farm households. (ii). Distribution and marketing constrains and (iii) Low households’ income & procurement. Sampled data was used in the Cobb-Douglass function. This model and its results reveal that agriculture is largely dependent upon input prices, prices of livestock, and that of fertilizers. Highly significant response of farms’ income to precipitation reveals that investment in irrigation would improve farms’ income.Environment, Vulnerability of Households, Changing Climate, Agriculture Production and Income

Collapsible Behaviour of Pond Ash

Vitality necessities for the creating nations like India specifically are met from coal based thermal power plants, where 75% of the aggregate force acquired is from coal-based thermal power plants. The coal used for power generation contains 30–40% of ash. The fly ash generation is more because of high ash coal. The fourth position acquired by the India on the world in the generation of coal ash as waste by-product after USSR, USA and China, in a specific order. Pond ash is the by-product of thermal power plants, which is a waste material and its disposal is a most important problem from an environmental point of view and also it needs a lot of disposal area. Acquiring open lands for disposal in creating nations. For example, India is troublesome, where the area to-population proportion is little. The area and population proportion is less so the area necessity and the expense of the area are expanding step by step, it is key to recover or enhance these ash beds so that the area could be used for the development of light and moderate common foundations. The slack ash fill structures may be susceptible to to collapse on wetting. So a research is carried out to observe the factors affecting the collapse of compacted ash fill on flood. If the ash beds intend to be used as footing subgrades to support civil infrastructure so we need to know its collapsibility behaviour. In the current work, importance has been given on the factors that affecting the collapse settlement of the compacted coal ash due to moistening. For this experimental study is taken up to known the collapsible potential of Pond ash. Attempts have been made to correlate the ash characteristics and the specific placement parameters such as dry unit weight, moisture content, and compaction energy and stress level at wetting with collapse. This was based largely on the single oedometer collapse test results. A sequences of tests, like, direct shear test, light compaction and in addition substantial compaction test are performed to evaluate the quality attributes of compacted pond ash and also tests like specific gravity test, grain size distribution test by mechanical sieve analysis and hydrometer test etc. are performed to get more or less physical properties of the pond ash. Total 145 single oedometer collapse tests were conducted to get the collapse potential of pond ash. The results of oedometer test were very much helpful for evaluating the factors affecting the collapse potential of pond ash

Gendered Spaces: Craftswomen’s Stories of Self-Employment in Orissa, India

The dissertation examines women’s capability in the intertwining of gender, craftwork and space in self-employment in the cottage industries sector (handicraft and handloom weaving) and the implications for workspace and well-being. This research is based on field research in four craft production localities in Orissa, India: Pipili, Puri, Bhubaneswar and Bargarh and explores craftswomen’s experiences and perceptions. Caught between old and new ways of labour demand and values in the commercial trade and tourist oriented crafts production, the gendered practices of women’s work in the unpaid work sphere inside becomes an important link between the private domain and public sphere of workplaces and business transactions. While increasing number of craftswomen continue to work in gendered homes, workshops and cooperative societies, balancing work, mobility, wages, and domestic responsibilities with little help from the men—kinships, officials, stakeholders—they do, however, maintain an ongoing struggle to challenge embedded gendered spatial relations, gendered practices and economic strategies within the family and in the workplaces. This research explores how consideration of a more coordinated and sustained embodiment contributes to an understanding of craftswomen’s socio-spatial relations and processes of labour marginalization in unorganised self-employment; how bargaining for workspace occurs, what shape it takes, and under what circumstances collective actions may be successful, how marginalized experiences reinforce and challenge dominant notions of women’s roles in self-employment (gender needs, economy, kinship relations, sexual division of labour, religious and commercial practices), and how do familial positions deprive women of full participation in development. Further, the research explores what individual stories inform us on how an ethically just, flexible and Indocentric value-based society may be achieved, how ideologies of religious spaces and social factors underpinning gender and labour identity in traditional craft productions (re)shape economic practices; how craftswomen challenge embedded patriarchal relations within market institutions, less regulatory institutional structures and networks of social relations at various spatial scale to negotiate protected workplaces. The theoretical and methodological shift in the Gender and Development debates within postmodernist developmental, feminist economic, and cultural geography discourses during the postcolonial years reflects a more general cultural turn across the subaltern workers’ studies—experiences on cultural and structural ideologies of economic liberalization practices—rejecting both positivists and its empiricists’ legacy and the substantive, focus on the marginalization of female labour. The clearly-grinded narrative analysis presented here is intended specifically to challenge practice approaches within development and economic geographies to show the significance of the culture of socio-spatial relations in determining and promoting marginalization of female labour and identity in self-employment and in presenting an alternative to capitalism. The narratives situate and legitimate women’s (homeworkers and self-employees) ‘embodied knowledge’ to reveal how local economic practice in Orissa establishes and maintains gendered ideologies that structure material opportunities and agencies differentially for men and women. To get an overview of the mutual embeddedness of local and global relations of capitalism in the gendered ideologies and discursive practices, the case studies and articles draw on individual narratives (14) and group discussions (205 craftswomen and 29 craftsmen) and their subjective perceptions and values towards spatial dimension of sexual division of labour, caste, access, control and well-being, paid and unpaid practices of workspaces, and institutional relations are analysed. The story of individuals is about their struggle to become successful businesswomen and highlights the interrelationship between their actions, their perceptions of work and the socio-economic spaces that they have to relate to. Craftswomen’s voices on decent work possess a determination. They have begun to speak a language of subaltern capacitation. Their subjective perceptions, values and beliefs about the domestic division of labour, cultural-specific notions of appropriate producers, ‘impurity/purity of the body’, and ‘dutiful wives’, as well as the broader social and ideological underpinnings, underlie women’s self-employment in Orissa. Craftswomen’s conviction that joint actions in cooperatives and trading should be facilitated succinctly capture the struggle of marginal women workers to overcome the sexual politics that play in the ideological creation on whose back crafts producers gain legitimacy. Their agency not only deconstructs their social world, but also for them to live their lives is to critique and unravel the day-to-day taken-for-granted sexual roles and labour processes in which they have been embedded. Narratives of craftswomen experiences reveal that self-employed women can act as role models for other women and contribute to capacitating women to undercut the private sector competitors (those who rely on clandestine labour). Apart from the local characteristics of place the success of crafts and weaving development lies in prioritizing women’s agency by organizing their own. I demonstrate capacitating women must, build on a feminist framework that is rooted in ‘Indocentric’ values and workplace ideology.dr.polit.dr.polit

Awareness and Knowledge of the Sustainable Development Goals Among Elderly People of Balangir Town, Odisha

The sustainable development usually means the development of economic growth without harming natural resource. The survey is conducted on urban area of Balangir taking 15 elderly people asking each of them about 70 questions about how much they aware with the word sustainable development and it’s impact on today’s generation with growing population. Then the individual response is recorded which include both positive and negative response is also included. Then a single pie chart for each people is obtained according to their responsibility

Polarity-driven extraction revealed potent bioactivities in rhizomes and leaves of Curcuma caesia Roxb.

The increasing demand for plant-based bioactive compounds has fueled interest in exploring natural antioxidants and antimicrobial agents. Curcuma caesia Roxb., commonly known as black turmeric, holds significant potential as a source of natural antioxidants and antimicrobial agents. This study investigated the antioxidant and antimicrobial potential of sequential extracts from C. caesia rhizomes and leaves, utilizing solvents of varying polarity (n-hexane, chloroform, ethyl acetate, methanol and water). The extraction yields varied between 1.69% and 6.34%, with n-hexane providing the highest yield of 6.34% for leaf extracts and 5.9% for rhizome extracts. Chloroform extracts were particularly rich in phenolics (total phenolic content: 95.17 ± 0.15 mg GAE/g for leaves and 84.16 ± 0.20 mg GAE/g for rhizome) and flavonoids (total flavonoids content: up to 75.98 ± 2.00 mg quercetin/g for leaves and 56.89 ± 0.15 mg quercetin/g for rhizomes). Antioxidant activity, determined through 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging assay, showed the strongest results in chloroform extracts, with IC50 values as low as 0.75 ± 0.02 microgram/mL for leaves. Additionally, nonpolar solvent extracts (n-hexane and chloroform) demonstrated significant antimicrobial activity against multidrug-resistant strains like Klebsiella pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus, with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values as low as 3.12 microgram/mL, comparable to standard antibiotics. These findings highlight C. caesia as a promising source of bioactive compounds for future phytopharmaceutical applications

Traditional plants utilized for the viral disease treatment

Ethnobotanical research is a well-established field of science that attracts a lot of interest in medicine. Plants are responsible for over 80% of folk remedies used in primary care worldwide. Traditional and herbal medicine knowledge is essential in scientific research, especially when the literature and survey data are not adequately examined. Viral diseases affect millions of individuals worldwide, and they have a significant impact on human health and socioeconomic growth. Many infectious and non-infectious illnesses have long been treated with medicinal plants. The value of medicinal plants has risen in recent centuries. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) alone affects almost 40 million people. Coronavirus disease is now the most common viral illness globally, affecting an estimated 176 million people worldwide (COVID-19). A wide range of plant species was found to be effective in treating viral diseases. This review summarizes viral illness, disease outbreaks, and medicinal plants and herbs with antiviral properties useful in drug development programmes

IMPROVING EXTRACTIVE TEXT SUMMARIZATION VIA EFFICIENT COATI ALGORITHM FOR SINGLE DOCUMENT

In the digital era, the rapid expansion of online information demands efficient automated text summarization techniques to extract key insights from large documents. This study introduces a novel single-document extractive summarization approach that utilizes Term Frequency-Inverse Topic Frequency (TF-ITF) for feature extraction and the Coati Optimization Algorithm (COA) for optimal sentence selection. COA enhances summarization performance by balancing precision and recall through an adaptive fitness function, improving the quality of extracted summaries. The proposed model is evaluated on DUC 2002, 2003, and 2005 datasets using ROUGE, BLEU, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. Comparative analysis against state-of-the-art optimization algorithms, including PSO, CSO, GWO, BCO, QABC, MCSO, and GLO, demonstrates that COA outperforms existing techniques, achieving higher recall and F1 scores while maintaining competitive precision. These findings establish COA as an effective optimization technique for enhancing automated text summarization

Black rice: A review from its history to chemical makeup to health advantages, nutritional properties and dietary uses

Rice is the most popular food variety globally and is consumed as a staple food due to its high nutritional value. It is primarily black rice because of its rich anthocyanin levels, carbs, lipids, proteins, dietary fibres and minerals. Consumers are increasingly more aware of consuming healthy foods to maintain good health. Because of the strong demand from consumers, cultivars are now more interested in developing black rice due to its high anthocyanin content. The rice appears black because of the presence of anthocyanin in rice bran. Lysine, tryptophan and other essential amino acids are found in black rice. It also contains many antioxidants, the first line that protects against free radical damage and helps maintain good health. This rice type offers several health advantages and may reduce the risk of several ailments, including chronic ones. There are several health benefits associated with eating black rice. Atherosclerosis is lessened, the digestive system is strengthened, high blood pressure is stabilized, allergies are lessened, the body is cleansed, diabetes is better controlled, weight loss is more manageable and cancer development is slowed. It is now used in different food industries as a substitute for wheat due to its high nutritional profile, increasing protein digestion and decreasing starch digestion. This variety is also gluten-free and gluten-sensitive consumers can consume it. Black rice's history, chemical makeup and nutritional and functional qualities are all examined in this study. Black rice scientifically verified therapeutic benefits are the focus of this study paper

EVALUATION OF ANTIBACTERIAL AND HAEMOLYTIC ACTIVITY OF PHYTOCHEMICALS FROM FRESHWATER MICROALGA, EUGLENA VIRIDIS (EHREN)

Objective: The main aim of this research work was to evaluate the antibacterial and haemolytic activities of different extracts of Euglena viridis (E. viridis), a freshwater microalga.Methods: The solvent extraction has been followed by a preliminary screening of phytochemicals. The ethanolic extract, Eu(EtOH) was chromatographed on a silica gel column. The column was eluted with hexane and then with ethyl acetate/hexane mixtures of increasing polarity, 16 fractions (Ef1-Ef16) were collected and grouped according to their TLC (Thin layer chromatography). Antibacterial activities of different fractions of E. viridis against Pseudomonas putida (P. putida) ATCC49828, P. aeruginosa MTCC 35672, Aeromonas hydrophila (A. hydrophila) MTCC 646, ATCC 49140, eleven strains of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and thirteen strains of Flavobacterium columnare (F. columnare) was done using disc diffusion methods. Haemolytic activity was carried out by using blood agar plate method. The MIC (Minimum inhibitory concentration) values of active fractions were determined by the broth dilution method.Results: The results showed that the Eu(EtOH) poses significantly (p≤0.5) higher zone of inhibition (14.0±0.28, 13.5±0.28 mm) against FLV8 and FLV9 respectively. Three strains of Flavobacterium (FLV5, FLV6 and FLV10) were highly sensitive (zone size, 17 mm, 17.5 mm) towards 30% EA: Hex chromatographic eluents (Ef11) with lowest MIC values, e. i 60 µg and 30 µg respectively. Two chromatographic fractions, Ef11 and Ef13 were highly effective (zone size, 14.5 mm and 13.5 mm) against S. aureus (SA5) with lowest MIC value (60µg). Haemolytic activities of all the algal extracts were noticed that both Eu(EtOH) and methanolic extract, Eu(MeOH) of Euglena gives negative results.Conclusion: These findings suggest that the extract obtained from E. viridis have active substances contributing to the increasing antibacterial potential