Institutional and Economic Dynamics of Water Users Cooperative (WUC) Societies in Cauvery Basin of Karnataka

The economic and institutional dimensions of water users cooperative (WUC) societies have been analyzed with regards to performance, membership and transaction costs in forming organization in the Cauvery basin of Karnataka. Field data have been collected from presidents and members of 30 WUC societies in Tirumakudalu Narasipura taluk of Mysore, Karnataka. Using cluster analysis, these have been grouped into (i) well performing, (ii) moderately performing, and (iii) poorly performing WUC societies. To understand institutional and economic dimensions, the selected WUC societies have been grouped based on command area, membership and conjunctive use of water. The odds ratio determined using logit model has indicated that for every one chance of not willing to pay additional water charges, there are seven chances of willingness to pay. Landholding size of farmer, conjunctive use and distance of the farm from canal have been found to significantly influence his/her willingness to pay for the assured summer irrigation. The mean willingness to pay amount for assured summer canal water has been found as ` 178 over and above the existing charge of ` 100. With all the odds being faced by these cooperatives, this study has revealed the inner strength of water user cooperative societies in canal water distribution through collective action.Water users cooperative society, Institutional economics, Water institutions, Cauvery Basin, Agricultural and Food Policy, Q13, Q15, Q25, K00,

A Generative Product-of-Filters Model of Audio

We propose the product-of-filters (PoF) model, a generative model that decomposes audio spectra as sparse linear combinations of "filters" in the log-spectral domain. PoF makes similar assumptions to those used in the classic homomorphic filtering approach to signal processing, but replaces hand-designed decompositions built of basic signal processing operations with a learned decomposition based on statistical inference. This paper formulates the PoF model and derives a mean-field method for posterior inference and a variational EM algorithm to estimate the model's free parameters. We demonstrate PoF's potential for audio processing on a bandwidth expansion task, and show that PoF can serve as an effective unsupervised feature extractor for a speaker identification task.Comment: ICLR 2014 conference-track submission. Added link to the source cod

Groundwater markets and water use efficiency: The case of Karnataka

This study, based on primary data collected from 120 groundwater users in eastern dry zone of Karnataka compares the water use efficiency among different categories of water users, viz. well owners who do not sell water, well owners who sell water either for agricultural or non-agricultural use and water buyers (both agricultural and nonagricultural). Some of the important findings are- • The cropping pattern varies between categories, with both the sellers and buyers preferring low water intensive mulberry crop, while the self user's category grew more water intensive crops. • Farmers who sold water for non-agricultural purposes earned the highest return (because of higher end-use price) and also made the most efficient use of water. Thus, making a point that end-use pricing is a key in shaping marginal productivity of water. • Compared to the self-users, farmers selling water for either agricultural or non-agricultural purposes realized higher marginal productivity. Thus,groundwater markets acted as an effective tool in enhancing efficient use of a scarce resource.This study explores efficiency and equity in groundwater markets in the hard rock areas of Karnataka. It compares the water use efficiency of farmers using groundwater for irrigating their land and also selling it for agricultural purpose (WSA, n=30), farmers using water for irrigating their land and also selling for non-agriculture purpose (WSNA, n=15), farmers who do not either sell or buy water but use it on their farms (WO, n=30), farmers who are buying groundwater for agriculture purpose (WBA, n=30), and buyers of water for non-agriculture purpose (WBNA, n=15). The Nash equilibrium framework describing the bargaining power of buyers and sellers of groundwater is used. Sidlaghatta taluk in eastern dry agroclimatic zone (EDZ) of Karnataka is chosen because it supports intensive groundwater markets. The objective of the study is to find out water use efficiencies among different groups of water users with the hypothesis that WSNA obtain higher water use efficiency than WSA, WBA, and WO.Groundwater markets, efficiency, equity, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Groundwater markets and water use efficiency: The case of Karnataka

Research highlight based on a paper titled “Groundwater markets promoting efficiency in water use in agriculture in Karnataka.”Water market, Groundwater extraction, Water use efficiency, Wells, Crop production, Irrigation water, Domestic water, Pricing, Models, Policy, India, Karnataka, Demand and Price Analysis, Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Security and Poverty, Productivity Analysis,

Economic Analysis of Transaction Cost on Kolaramma Tank Watershed in Eastern Dry Zone of Karnataka

The transaction cost incurred on the Kolaramma tank watershed in the Kolar district of Karnataka, with a geographical area of 6,570 hectares and covering 26 catchments has been found to be Rs 78,89,210. The decomposition of this transaction cost into information, contractual and enforcement costs has revealed that enforcement cost amounted to a vast share of 82.0 per cent, followed by contractual cost (13.6%) and information cost (4.4%) in the total transaction cost. Considering the overall transaction cost, the investment on information and contractual cost has been quite less. These need to be increased by economizing on the administrative expenses of the implementing agency. Any additional investment on information and contractual cost would greatly benefit the actual beneficiaries in the watershed.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Externalities of groundwater contamination due to pollution and effects on human and animal health in Karnataka

In this study, negative externality due to distillery pollution on agriculture in Kabini command in Nanjanagudu taluk, Mysore District is estimated. The spent wash let in lagoons enables settling heavy metals to infiltrate soils, gradually affecting soil and health. The distillery opened during 1985 and farmers apparently began experiencing the negative externalities due to pollution from 1995. The groundwater extracted for irrigation was the first victim of distillery pollution rendering it unfit even for irrigation purposes. Paddy, sugarcane, Banana, Jowar, Mulberry, Coconut, Ragi are the major crops being grown in this command area. For this study, all the 35 distillery pollution affected farmers in the Distillery Dffluent Polluted Villages (DEPA, comprising Geekalli, Goluru) are selected. As a control, 35 farmers who were located in Devarasanahalli in the Kabini command area, but who are away from the distillery pollution area are studied. The major effect of groundwater pollution is the downward shift in sugarcane area due to pollution to the tune of 60 percent in DEPA. Area under paddy did not alter after pollution. Thus, farmers considered paddy to be the only crop which can tolerate / withstand, pollution levels. Crop diversity in terms of area under crops like tomato, ragi, jower, cucumber and banana increased in DEPA as the farmers shifted from sugarcane. In the control village, major crops grown are paddy and sugarcane due to assured supply of good quality of water through out year, and these occupied 20 and 50 per cent of the area respectively.Sand mining, externality, groundwater depletion, Environmental Economics and Policy, Health Economics and Policy, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Gated-Attention Architectures for Task-Oriented Language Grounding

To perform tasks specified by natural language instructions, autonomous agents need to extract semantically meaningful representations of language and map it to visual elements and actions in the environment. This problem is called task-oriented language grounding. We propose an end-to-end trainable neural architecture for task-oriented language grounding in 3D environments which assumes no prior linguistic or perceptual knowledge and requires only raw pixels from the environment and the natural language instruction as input. The proposed model combines the image and text representations using a Gated-Attention mechanism and learns a policy to execute the natural language instruction using standard reinforcement and imitation learning methods. We show the effectiveness of the proposed model on unseen instructions as well as unseen maps, both quantitatively and qualitatively. We also introduce a novel environment based on a 3D game engine to simulate the challenges of task-oriented language grounding over a rich set of instructions and environment states.Comment: To appear in AAAI-1

Contract farming and its implications for input-supply, linkages between markets and farmers in Karnataka

This study is focused on the economic analysis of contract farming with a comparison of income, access to technology and credit of contract and non-contract farmers. The advantages of contract farming for smallholders have also been evaluated. In contract farming, quality inputs such as seeds, fertilizers and plant protection chemicals are provided to the farmers at their farm gate, coupled with the technical advice on production aspects. This not only reduces the working capital needs of farmers but also substantially reduces their transaction cost per unit of output. Borrowing of crop loans has been found 33 per cent higher by non-contract farmers than contract farmers, as the former have to buy material inputs. The net returns have been found higher for contract than non-contract farmers. Within contract farming, net returns have been recorded higher under domestic than foreign contracts for both baby corn and chilli. In the case of non-contract farmers, the net returns (Rs 3,035) have been found less than one-third of domestic contract farmers (Rs 10,610) and slightly more than one-third of foreign contract farmers (Rs 8,050). In the case of chilli also, the net returns realized per acre have been recorded maximum under domestic contract farmers, followed by foreign contract farmers and non-contract farmers. The returns per rupee invested have been noted higher in farming of baby corn in all the three categories than those of chilli farming. The constraints identified in the study include delay in payment and delivery of inputs, delay in lifting the produce, access to seeds, manupulation of grades by the buyers, and high cost of inputs in contract farming. Factors inducing farmers into contract are: low initial investment, better price for the produce, access to market, technical support on package of practices, access to inputs and easy transportation facilities.Farm Management,