Self-Governance in Farmer-Managed Irrigation Systems in Nepal

Effective governance of natural resources is a key challenge facing many developing nations. There is general agreement that without effective institutions, resources will be underprovided and overused. What is less certain, however, is what these institutions might be and who ought to provide them. Should governments take the lead in supplying institutions and organizing collective action, should this task be resolved through market forces, or should resource users of a "common pool resource" be encouraged to take the lead? This paper presents the view that it is difficult for external actors to design optimal institutions and enforce rules at low cost because solutions tend to be conditional and situation specific. Therefore, local resource users are better equipped to develop or be major participants in developing institutional solutions. Support for this idea is drawn from empirical studies of irrigation systems in Nepal. Comparisons of the performance of farmer-managed irrigation systems with that of agency-managed irrigation systems show that the former consistently out perform the latter on most performance measures. This paper offers two key insights: developing effective institutions is as important as developing physical infrastructure and local resource users may be able to offer better institutional solutions under certain conditions than government agencies when resources are local in scal

Matrix transform of irregular weyl-heisenberg wave packet frames for L² (R)

Cordoba and Fefferman [4] introduced wave packet systems by applying certain collections of dilations, modulations and translations to the Gaussian function in the study of some classes of singular integral operators. In this paper, we introduce the concept of matrix transform M = (αp,q,r,j,k,m) and with the help of matrix transform we study the action of M on f ∈ L2 (R) and on its wave packet coefficients. Further, we also obtain the tight frame condition for matrix transform of f ∈ L2 (R) whose wave packet series expansion is known.Publisher's Versio

Investigation Into Tribological Behaviour of AL7075 and AL7075 Hybrid Composites

The aluminium metal matrix composite (AMMC) is widely used in aerospace and automotive applications. The AMMC reinforced with titanium diboride (TiB(_2)), exhibits excellent tribological properties. In this study, molybdenum disulfide (MoS(_2)) was used as a reinforcement to improve the tribological properties of the Al7075-TiB(_2) composite. The Al7075 hybrid composites were produced with 12 wt% of TiB(_2) with varied mass loading of MoS(_2) (x = 0, 1.5, 3, 4.5) by using the powder metallurgy method. The energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) test confirmed the presence of reinforcements. The Al7075 composites were examined for the study of microstructure, microhardness and tribological behaviour by using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), Vickers microhardness tester and pin-on-disc equipment, respectively. The tribological properties of Al7075 hybrid composites are superior to those of aluminium alloy Al7075. The low wear loss (10 mg) and coefficient of friction (0.109) were produced at the sliding velocity of 2 m/s, the sliding distance of 1000 m and the applied load of 5 N in the Al7075-12%TiB(_2)-4.5%MoS(_2) composite