New cassava products of future potential in India

The Green Revolution and increasing living standards of the people of India, especially in Kerala, have resulted in a gradual shift in the cassava utilization pattern. Despite the fact that India has the world’s highest cassava yield, the crop’s importance for food security is giving way to its role as an industrial raw material. A well-organized grain distribution system and shifts to more remunerative plantation and horticultural crops also reduced the importance of cassava as a subsistence food crop in traditional farming systems in Kerala. In order to overcome this and retain cassava in the cropping system, concentrated efforts are being made to promote value-addition and find alternative uses. In the 1940s, cassava became an important raw material for the starch and sago industries established in Salem and Dharmapuri districts of Tamil Nadu. The cassava-based starch industry recorded a high rate of growth over the past five decades and has currently a turnover of 3000 million Indian rupees worth of starch and sago. The produce is marketed through a well-organized cooperative society, which is presently the largest agro-processing cooperative venture in South and East Asia. The sustainability of industrial growth of cassava depends to a large extent on diversification and value-addition, for increasing internal demand as well as export markets. Three and a half decades of research on cassava utilization at CTCRI has led to the development of several technologies for value addition and in situ utilization. The potential markets for products, such as pregelatinized instant and convenience foods, extruded and fermented food products, feed products using by-product utilization for poultry, and value-addition through microbial enrichment, modified starch products like adhesives, sweeteners, cold water-soluble starch, commodity chemicals like citric acid, ethanol, biodegradable polymers incorporating cassava starch, biogas from starch factory wastes, etc. are discussed in this paper. The future priorities and utilization strategies for cassava, comprising diversified products, setting up of rural agro-enterprises through the involvement of NGOs, by-product utilization as fish or poultry feed, biofertilizers from cassava starch factory waste and large commercial ventures like biodegradable plastics and alcohol are enumerated. The need for an effective technology transfer system to inform industrialists of the benefits of adopting root and tuber crop technologies is also highlighted

An epidemiological survey: Effect of predisposing factors for PCOS in Indian urban and rural population

Study objective: Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is a common multifaceted disorder found among females of the reproductive age presenting major clinical conditions of hirsutism, oligomenorrhea and infertility. Socioeconomic studies from India have observed PCOS as a lifestyle disorder highly prevalent among middle and high income urban population as compared to rural population. A large ethnographic study that identifies the prevalence of PCOS among different socioeconomic groups would be greatly helpful to reiterate women about lifestyle modifications. Design: Cross – sectional survey study. Setting: Random from the general population. Materials and methods: A survey was taken up by 502 young women (between 18 and 24 years) from Chennai and collectively 566 girls from Thiruvallur and Dindugal districts to represent urban and rural population respectively. The responses were entered into an excel workbook and were analyzed statistically for correlation of influencing parameters and manifestation of the disorder. Main outcome measures: From our survey, we have identified a PCOS prevalence rate of 6% in south India, according to the Rotterdam criteria. We have observed that the odds of urban women prone to acquiring PCOS are 0.1 times higher than women in rural India. Major conclusions: Family history was found to have a strong association in incidence and manifestation of the disorder. Stress was found to set off the symptoms pertaining to PCOS. We also noticed that the awareness, among the rural population especially, was very minimum and thus they were not oblivious of diagnosis

A natural neighbour method for materially non linear problems based on Fraeijs de Veubeke variational principle

The natural neighbour method can be considered as one of many variants of the meshless methods. In the present paper, a new approach based on the Fraeijs de Veubeke (FdV) functional, which is initially developed for linear elasticity, is extended to the case of geometrically linear but materially non-linear solids. The new approach provides an original treatment to two classical problems: the numerical evaluation of the integrals over the domain A and the enforcement of boundary conditions of the type u i = ũ i on S u . In the absence of body forces (F i = 0), it will be shown that the calculation of integrals can be avoided and that boundary conditions of the type u i = ũ i on S u can be imposed in the average sense in general and exactly if ũ i is linear between two contour nodes, which is obviously the case for ũ i = 0