Supply Side Constrains in Production of Pulses in India: A Case Study of Lentil

In India, annual production of pulses ranges from 11 Mt to 15 Mt, with yield of about 600 kg/ha. Due to the wide gap between supply and demand, import of pulses has increased from 0.38 Mt in 1993 to 2.82 Mt in 2008. Lentil is an important rabi pulse crop with a production of 0.85-0.95 Mt in India, after gram. The study has used both secondary and primary data collected from on-farm demonstrations and farmers’ fields to examine the ways to enhance the domestic supply of lentil. The study has found that there is a scope of increasing area under lentil during the rabi season, as its cost per hectare is less with higher net returns than the competing crops like wheat, gram and mustard in water-deficit and resource-poor conditions. There are large returns for adoption of disease management (80 per cent increase in net return), and improved small-seeded varieties (about 40 per cent increase in net return) in lentil. The study has found that lentil-based cropping systems are profitable and also have high water productivity, hence are suitable for mostly un-exploited rice-fallows under water-deficit conditions. Even though marketed surplus ratios have increased in recent years, there is a post-harvest loss to the extent of 7 per cent of production which needs to be curtailed to increase overall supply for final consumption. There is a case for larger institutional and policy support for pulse crops, keeping visible effects of pulse crops in increasing yield of subsequent crops in crop rotations.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Resource-use Efficiency of Paddy Cultivation in Peechi Command Area of Thrissur District of Kerala: An Economic Analysis

This study undertaken in the Peechi Command Area of Thrissur district in the Kerala state, has examined the resource productivity and allocative as well as the technical efficiency of paddy production. The study has used the primary data collected from 71 rice farmers of the command area using the stratified random sampling. The cost of cultivation of paddy in the command area has been found as Rs 21603/ha, resulting in a BC ratio of 1.34. The elasticity coefficients for chemical fertilizers, farmyard manure and human labour have been observed significant and positive. The allocative efficiency has indicated that marginal return per one rupee increase under these heads would be Rs 2.83, Rs 1.57 and Rs 1.17, respectively. The average technical efficiency of the paddy farmers in the command area has been found as 66.8 per cent. Education of the farmer and supplementary irrigation provided during the water-stress days have been identified as the factors which could enhance the technical efficiency. The study has called for an equitable distribution of canal water and enhanced extension services for resource management in the area.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Representation of Cyclotomic Fields and Their Subfields

Let \K be a finite extension of a characteristic zero field \F. We say that the pair of $n\times n$ matrices $(A,B)$ over \F represents \K if \K \cong \F[A]/ where \F[A] denotes the smallest subalgebra of M_n(\F) containing $A$ and $$ is an ideal in \F[A] generated by $B$. In particular, $A$ is said to represent the field \K if there exists an irreducible polynomial q(x)\in \F[x] which divides the minimal polynomial of $A$ and \K \cong \F[A]/. In this paper, we identify the smallest circulant-matrix representation for any subfield of a cyclotomic field. Furthermore, if $p$ is any prime and \K is a subfield of the $p$-th cyclotomic field, then we obtain a zero-one circulant matrix $A$ of size $p\times p$ such that (A,\J) represents \K, where \J is the matrix with all entries 1. In case, the integer $n$ has at most two distinct prime factors, we find the smallest 0-1 companion-matrix that represents the $n$-th cyclotomic field. We also find bounds on the size of such companion matrices when $n$ has more than two prime factors.Comment: 17 page

Asymmetric Two-component Fermion Systems in Strong Coupling

We study the phase structure of a dilute two-component Fermi system with attractive interactions as a function of the coupling and the polarization or number difference between the two components. In weak coupling, a finite number asymmetry results in phase separation. A mixed phase containing symmetric superfluid matter and an asymmetric normal phase is favored. With increasing coupling strength, we show that the stress on the superfluid phase to accommodate a number asymmetry increases. Near the infinite-scattering length limit, we calculate the single-particle excitation spectrum and the ground-state energy at various polarizations. A picture of weakly-interacting quasi-particles emerges for modest polarizations. In this regime near infinite scattering length, and for modest polarizations, a homogeneous phase with a finite population of excited quasi-particle states characterized by a gapless spectrum should be favored over the phase separated state. These states may be realized in cold atom experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figur

Bulk viscosity of spin-one color superconducting strange quark matter

The bulk viscosity in spin-one color-superconducting strange quark matter is calculated by taking into account the interplay between the nonleptonic and semi-leptonic week processes. In agreement with previous studies, it is found that the inclusion of the semi-leptonic processes may result in non-negligible corrections to the bulk viscosity in a narrow window of temperatures. The effect is generally more pronounced for pulsars with longer periods. Compared to the normal phase, however, this effect due to the semi-leptonic processes is less pronounced in spin-one color superconductors. Assuming that the critical temperature of the phase transition is much larger than 40 keV, the main effect of spin-one color superconductivity in a wide range of temperatures is an overall increase of the bulk viscosity with respect to the normal phase. The corresponding enhancement factor reaches up to about 9 in the polar and A-phases, about 25 in the planar phase and about 29 in the CSL phase. This factor is determined by the suppression of the nonleptonic rate in color-superconducting matter and, therefore, may be even larger if all quark quasiparticles happen to be gapped.Comment: 10 pages, 4 multi-panel figures, including one new in the final versio