4,732 research outputs found
Rural indebtedness : concept, correlates and consequences: a study of four tribal villages in the North Lakhimpur subdivision, Assam
Indebtedness has been acknowledged as one of the most infamous stumbling blocks in the way of rural prosperity. It is cancerous, self-perpetuating, malignant and maleficent. It abates agricultural production, abashes social psyche, aggravates inequalities in the distribution of socioeconomic opportunities and benefits, arrests social progress and misdirects social efforts. In the Indian rural context, indebtedness characterizes: (i). unproductive usage of loan, (ii). usurious ensnaring of the borrower, (iii). captivation of productive resources, (iv). exercise of coercive and exploitative economic and social powers by the lender, (v). compulsion, plight, misery and feeling of guilt and helplessness, and (vi). erosion of social status of the borrower. In this study we propose an empirical study to measure indebtedness, identify its correlates and to assess the consequences of indebtedness on the productive and distributive performance on the rural economy. We have collected primary data from four tribal villages. The selection of these villages has been made purposively. We hold the opinion that the tribal population in the rural areas of Assam has been least exposed to the credit programmes launched by the public agencies and hence a study of indebtedness provides us with a deeper insight in the problem. We have observed that in the Indian context rural indebtedness is resonant with the overtones of unproductive usage, usurious ensnaring and deplorable condition of the poor farmers and agricultural labourers. We have surveyed four tribal villages and based on the data thus collected identified some measures of indebtedness that can help us operationally in analyzing the incidence, process and impacts of rural indebtedness. These measures are per capita loan and per capita loan per agricultural asset held by the households and these measures are good representatives of the degree of indebtedness. We have analyzed the productive and distributive effects of indebtedness and found that it leads to decline in agricultural productivity, captivation of productive resources and aggravation of inequalities in the rural community. Further, our finding is that indebtedness is initiated by unproductive expenditure. This in turn captivates agricultural assets, abates productivity and reduces the repaying capacity of the borrower. Our study may suggest that in order to ameliorate the conditions of the indebted rural mass we have to motivate them to minimize conspicuous consumption, especially if the households cannot afford it without borrowing. Educational planning may help us to attain this goal of making the rural mass aware of the merits of prudence and the demerits of conspicuous consumption. Further, to stop the captivation of productive assets, institutional loan should be provided on easy terms. This objective may be attained by making the cooperative and bank loans easily available.Rural indebtedness; correlates; consequences; measures of incidence; distributive effects; causal chain; Assam; primary data; tribal villages; poverty
Bright solitons in asymmetrically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate
We study the dynamics of bright solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)
confined in a highly asymmetric trap. While working within the f ramework of a
variational approach we carry out the stability analysis o f BEC solitons
against collapse. When the number of atoms in the soliton exceeds a critical
number , it undergoes the so called primary col lapse. We find an
analytical expression for in terms of appropriat e experimental
quantities that are used to produce and confine the conde nsate. We further
demonstrate that, in the geometry of the problem consi dered, the width of the
soliton varies inversely as the number of consti tuent atoms.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure
The prospects of measuring the angular power spectrum of the diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission with SKA1 Low
The diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission (DGSE) is the most important
diffuse foreground component for future cosmological 21-cm observations. The
DGSE is also an important probe of the cosmic ray electron and magnetic field
distributions in the turbulent interstellar medium (ISM) of our Galaxy. In this
paper we briefly review the Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) which can be used
to quantify the angular power spectrum of the sky signal directly from the
visibilities measured in radio-interferometric observations. The salient
features of the TGE are (1.) it deals with the gridded data which makes it
computationally very fast (2.) it avoids a positive noise bias which normally
arises from the system noise inherent to the visibility data, and (3.) it
allows us to taper the sky response and thereby suppresses the contribution
from unsubtracted point sources in the outer parts and the sidelobes of the
antenna beam pattern. We also summarize earlier work where the TGE was used to
measure the C_l of the DGSE using 150 MHz GMRT data. Earlier measurements of
the angular power spectrum are restricted to smaller angular multipole l ~ 10^3
for the DGSE, the signal at the larger l values is dominated by the residual
point sources after source subtraction. The higher sensitivity of the upcoming
SKA1 Low will allow the point sources to be subtracted to a fainter level than
possible with existing telescopes. We predict that it will be possible to
measure the angular power spectrum of the DGSE to larger values of l with SKA1
Low. Our results show that it should be possible to achieve l_{max} ~ 10^4 and
~ 10^5 with 2 minutes and 10 hours of observations respectively.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; Accepted for publication in Journal of
Astrophysics and Astronomy (JOAA) special issue on "Science with the SKA: an
Indian perspective
Performance Evaluation of Open-Ended ELSS Mutual Fund Schemes in India during Recession
This study examined the performance of the open-ended equity linked saving mutual fund schemes (ELSS) in India during the financial distress in 2008-2009. In this study, the month end net asset values of selected equity linked saving mutual fund schemes were considered and the data was obtained from the website of Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI). This paper empirically examined the risk-adjusted, selectivity, diversification and market-timing performances of the open-ended (ELSS) mutual fund schemes. Here, Sharpe, Treynor, Jensen and Treynor & Mazuy models were used to measure the above stated performances. It was observed that the Sharpe and Treynor ratios of the open-ended mutual fund schemes (ELSS) were negative during the recession. Similarly, the stock-selection and market-timing performances of the managers were statistically insignificant and finally, the diversification performances of the mutual fund schemes (ELSS) were found to be unsatisfactory. Therefore, it might be concluded that the overall performances of the open-ended mutual fund schemes (ELSS) were very unsatisfactory during the recession.Keywords: Mutual Fund, Performance, Recession, Sharpe model, Treynor mode
The visibility based Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) for the redshifted 21-cm power spectrum
We present the improved visibility based Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) for
the power spectrum of the diffuse sky signal. The visibilities are gridded to
reduce the computation, and tapered through a convolution to suppress the
contribution from the outer regions of the telescope's field of view. The TGE
also internally estimates the noise bias, and subtracts this out to give an
unbiased estimate of the power spectrum. An earlier version of the 2D TGE for
the angular power spectrum is improved and then extended to obtain
the 3D TGE for the power spectrum of the 21-cm brightness
temperature fluctuations. Analytic formulas are also presented for predicting
the variance of the binned power spectrum. The estimator and its variance
predictions are validated using simulations of GMRT
observations. We find that the estimator accurately recovers the input model
for the 1D Spherical Power Spectrum and the 2D Cylindrical Power
Spectrum , and the predicted variance is also in
reasonably good agreement with the simulations.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. The
definitive version will be available at http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org
Validating a novel angular power spectrum estimator using simulated low frequency radio-interferometric data
The "Tapered Gridded Estimator" (TGE) is a novel way to directly estimate the
angular power spectrum from radio-interferometric visibility data that reduces
the computation by efficiently gridding the data, consistently removes the
noise bias, and suppresses the foreground contamination to a large extent by
tapering the primary beam response through an appropriate convolution in the
visibility domain. Here we demonstrate the effectiveness of TGE in recovering
the diffuse emission power spectrum through numerical simulations. We present
details of the simulation used to generate low frequency visibility data for
sky model with extragalactic compact radio sources and diffuse Galactic
synchrotron emission. We then use different imaging strategies to identify the
most effective option of point source subtraction and to study the underlying
diffuse emission. Finally, we apply TGE to the residual data to measure the
angular power spectrum, and assess the impact of incomplete point source
subtraction in recovering the input power spectrum of the
synchrotron emission. This estimator is found to successfully recovers the
of input model from the residual visibility data. These results are
relevant for measuring the diffuse emission like the Galactic synchrotron
emission. It is also an important step towards characterizing and removing both
diffuse and compact foreground emission in order to detect the redshifted signal from the Epoch of Reionization.Comment: 18 pages, 1 table, 9 figures, Accepted for publication in New
Astronom
On colouring point visibility graphs
In this paper we show that it can be decided in polynomial time whether or
not the visibility graph of a given point set is 4-colourable, and such a
4-colouring, if it exists, can also be constructed in polynomial time. We show
that the problem of deciding whether the visibility graph of a point set is
5-colourable, is NP-complete. We give an example of a point visibility graph
that has chromatic number 6 while its clique number is only 4
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