Petroleum Subsidies and Macroeconomic Variables in India

The Government of India has been subsidizing petroleum products, particularly diesel, kerosene under Public Distribution System and domestic Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), where these products are sold below their market prices. It is argued that rising petroleum subsidies have contributed to fiscal pressures in India. The present paper attempts to compare the trend of petroleum subsidies with other forms of subsidies given by the Government of India, and then examine the impact of petroleum subsidies on key macroeconomic variables like Wholesale Price Index, GDP, gross investment, fiscal deficit and interest rate based on official  data from 1992-93 to 2012-13. From a comparison with other components of gross subsidy, the study observes that it is not petroleum subsidy but food and fertilizer subsidies have grown at a sharper rate.  From the use of Vector Autoregression (VAR) for the difference of logarithm of the macroeconomic variable like GDP, investment, interest rate, Wholesale Price Index and Fiscal Deficit, the study observes that the growth rate of petroleum subsidy has no significant impact on the growth rates of these variables. On the contrary, petroleum subsidy has rather been Granger caused by some of the variables like interest rate and fiscal deficit. On the basis of these observations, the obvious argument should be not to target petroleum subsidy singularly as a culprit for rising fiscal deficit and inflation. However, when we make a closer look on the amount of under-recoveries of the Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs), our argument favors periodic revision of prices of petroleum products partially accommodating the fluctuations in the crude petroleum prices without reducing subsidies for the consumers as given in cases of PDS kerosene and domestic LPG. JEL Classification Codes: C32, E60, H20, I38 Keywords:  Petroleum Subsidy, under-recoveries, macroeconomic variables, VAR, Indi

Design and Development of a Public Health Information Service Model for Rural Inhabitants of Balasore District of Odisha: A Case Study

Introduction: The government of India has started concentrating on developing rural health infrastructure to provide primary health care services to most of the rural population, which had been by and large remained neglected. Though the government provides healthcare facilities to rural people, they are not effectively reaching them. The purpose of the study is to explore the public health information services, which ascertain the information needs of the Balasore district's rural inhabitants, and to develop an integrated Public Health Information Service (PHIS) model for health communication that promotes public health. Methods: A survey was conducted with the help of a structured questionnaire developed to gather information regarding public health communication infrastructures and services rendered by the medical officers, rural inhabitants, and the librarians of the medical college and public libraries of the Balasore district of Odisha. Results: The authors found a situation that demands an assessment of a suitable PHIS model to fulfill the health information requirement of the rural inhabitants of the Balasore district of Odisha. Conclusion: This integrated public health information service model is conceptualized and is based on the suitability of health information exchange for rural people

Rural Infrastructure, Land Productivity and Crop Diversification in Odisha, India: An Assessment

Identifying the sources of agricultural growth in India has been an unsettled area of research. The debate mainly centres around the relative efficacy of price and non-price factors. The present study examines the impact of some non-price factors including rural infrastructure. Taking land productivity and crop diversification as the two principal indicators of agricultural growth, the study measures changes in these indicators vis-à-vis the stock of rural infrastructure in Odisha, an eastern Indian state. By using district-wise cross section data for the year 2011-12, indices for rural infrastructure are prepared with help of the Principal Components Analysis, and crop diversity indices are measured by the Theil Entropy formula. The study observes that rural infrastructure has significant positive impact on land productivity. However, along with high yielding variety paddy, infrastructure contributes to concentration rather than crop diversification. In addition, the study also observes persistence of regional divide in infrastructure, which may be considered as a major concern having wider implications

Design and Development of a Public Health Information Service Model for Rural Inhabitants of Balasore District of Odisha

This research paper focuses on the Public Health Information Service model for the rural inhabitants of the Balasore district, which is one of the objectives of the study. This integrated strategic model is conceptualized and is based on the suitability of health information exchange to rural people. It considers the various parameters of the public and the medical libraries; and the health information stakeholders. The model recommends the direct involvement of libraries in providing in-house and outhouse health information services to the public in a collaborative manner. This research paper presents an Integrated Public Health Services (IPHIS) model for rural people, which exemplifies in the form of the Health Information Center (HIC), which would adopt some attributes, and create an environment that enables rural people to access and avail health information services. The model would provide a health information exchange (HIE) environment, which would imply the best possible ways of health information transfer to promote health among the rural inhabitants of the Balasore district of Odisha

Corrosion impact analysis on residual life of structure using cathodic technique and algor simulation software

Damage to the reinforced concrete structure is mainly occurring because of two reasons either due to end of service life or due to load exceeds beyond structural capacity. Along with these two reasons degradation of material property is the one more major factor which causes the risk of failure. A concrete structure constructed in an aqueous environment get exposed to the corrosion process. Consequently, this causes the generation of crack, fragilization, a decrease of bond strength between reinforcement and concrete. All these factors affection static and dynamic behavior of concrete structure reducing the service life of an affected area. Whereas service life carries the major role in the economy of a concrete structure that is why various methods have been developed in the second half of the 20th century to find out the residual life of the structure. In this proposed work, a non-destructive technique is used to predict the residual life of reinforced concrete beams having different cracking levels, as results of steel reinforcement corrosion, considering the variation produced in the dynamic behavior, through the variation of the first natural vibration frequency. Whereas to accelerate the corrosion process, impress current technique is used in which a current is externally applied to induce corrosion in reinforcement and then crack widths and vibration natural frequencies were measured. A numerical model is proposed with the help of FEM based Auto desk Algor simulation software to predict attack penetration depth. At the end, the paper is concluded by giving an effect of “water to cement ratio” and “cover to diameter ratio” on the initiation and propagation of corrosion and residual life of corroded beam specimen is graphically represented

Dodecanacci superconductor-metamaterial photonic quasicrystal

Using the transfer matrix method, the present paper attempt to determine the properties of the photonic spectra of the Dodecanacci superconductor-metamaterial one-dimensional quasiperiodic multilayer. The numerical calculation is supported by using the transfer matrix method. At first, we analyze the transmission for Dodecanacci quasicrystal for different generations. After that, we analyze the effect of the thickness of the building blocks and the operating temperature. We observed that a vast number of forbidden bandgaps and transmission pecks are developed in its transmission spectra up to a certain generation number of Dodecanacci quasiperiodic sequence. If the generation number increases further, then the bandgaps become wider. According to the obtained results, depending on its generation, this structure can be used as an optical reflector or narrowband filter

Genetic Drivers of Heterogeneity in Type 2 Diabetes Pathophysiology

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a heterogeneous disease that develops through diverse pathophysiological processes1,2 and molecular mechanisms that are often specific to cell type3,4. Here, to characterize the genetic contribution to these processes across ancestry groups, we aggregate genome-wide association study data from 2,535,601 individuals (39.7% not of European ancestry), including 428,452 cases of T2D. We identify 1,289 independent association signals at genome-wide significance (P \u3c 5 × 10-8) that map to 611 loci, of which 145 loci are, to our knowledge, previously unreported. We define eight non-overlapping clusters of T2D signals that are characterized by distinct profiles of cardiometabolic trait associations. These clusters are differentially enriched for cell-type-specific regions of open chromatin, including pancreatic islets, adipocytes, endothelial cells and enteroendocrine cells. We build cluster-specific partitioned polygenic scores5 in a further 279,552 individuals of diverse ancestry, including 30,288 cases of T2D, and test their association with T2D-related vascular outcomes. Cluster-specific partitioned polygenic scores are associated with coronary artery disease, peripheral artery disease and end-stage diabetic nephropathy across ancestry groups, highlighting the importance of obesity-related processes in the development of vascular outcomes. Our findings show the value of integrating multi-ancestry genome-wide association study data with single-cell epigenomics to disentangle the aetiological heterogeneity that drives the development and progression of T2D. This might offer a route to optimize global access to genetically informed diabetes care

Genetic drivers of heterogeneity in type 2 diabetes pathophysiology

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a heterogeneous disease that develops through diverse pathophysiological processes1,2 and molecular mechanisms that are often specific to cell type3,4. Here, to characterize the genetic contribution to these processes across ancestry groups, we aggregate genome-wide association study data from 2,535,601 individuals (39.7% not of European ancestry), including 428,452 cases of T2D. We identify 1,289 independent association signals at genome-wide significance (P &lt; 5 × 10-8) that map to 611 loci, of which 145 loci are, to our knowledge, previously unreported. We define eight non-overlapping clusters of T2D signals that are characterized by distinct profiles of cardiometabolic trait associations. These clusters are differentially enriched for cell-type-specific regions of open chromatin, including pancreatic islets, adipocytes, endothelial cells and enteroendocrine cells. We build cluster-specific partitioned polygenic scores5 in a further 279,552 individuals of diverse ancestry, including 30,288 cases of T2D, and test their association with T2D-related vascular outcomes. Cluster-specific partitioned polygenic scores are associated with coronary artery disease, peripheral artery disease and end-stage diabetic nephropathy across ancestry groups, highlighting the importance of obesity-related processes in the development of vascular outcomes. Our findings show the value of integrating multi-ancestry genome-wide association study data with single-cell epigenomics to disentangle the aetiological heterogeneity that drives the development and progression of T2D. This might offer a route to optimize global access to genetically informed diabetes care.</p

Effect of standard deviation, strength of magnetic field and electron density on the photonic band gap of an extrinsic disorder plasma photonic structure

Transmission properties of electromagnetic waves within microwave region of the one-dimensional random extrinsic plasma photonic crystals were computed using the transfer matrix method. The layers thicknesses of the extrinsic random photonic structure follow a Gaussian distribution. Compared with the periodic extrinsic photonic crystal, wider photonic band gaps (PBGs) were found in case of random extrinsic plasma photonic crystals with few resonant peaks. The PBGs are much wider while the randomness was increased and the number and the strength of resonant peaks were enhanced. The above observations were confirmed through analysis of histogram of normalized average transmissions for four different values of standard deviation with one thousand random samples for each group. The normalized average transmission was controlled by changing the strength of external magnetic field and the electron density of magnetized cold plasma. These features of disordered extrinsic plasma photonic structures would have potential applications such as omnidirectional reflectors and random multichannel filters with lower and higher rate of disorder

The role of delay in vaccination rate on Covid-19.

The role of vaccination in tackling Covid-19 and the potential consequences of a time delay in vaccination rate are discussed. This study presents a mathematical model that incorporates the rate of vaccination and parameters related to the presence and absence of time delay in the context of Covid-19. We conducted a study on the global dynamics of a Covid-19 outbreak model, which incorporates a vaccinated population and a time delay parameter. Our findings demonstrate the global stability of these models. Our observation indicates that lower vaccination rates are associated with an increase in the overall number of infected individuals. The stability of the corresponding time delay model is determined by the value of the time delay parameter. If the time delay parameter is less than the critical value at which the Hopf bifurcation occurs, the model is stable. The results are supported by numerical illustrations that have epidemiological relevance