Factors Determining Farmers’ Decision for Buying Irrigation Water: Study of Groundwater Markets in Rajasthan

The emergence of groundwater markets has helped in mitigating inequality in physical access to the groundwater resources, on the one hand, but on the other hand, it may lead to exploitation of the buyers of water, i.e. resource-poor, small farmers. For the sellers of water, it is becoming a remunerative business economically, leading to serious environmental as well as social concerns. The present study conducted in the arid and semiarid zones of Rajasthan has addressed these issues. The study has shown that prevailing terms of water transactions, particularly ‘in-kind’ terms, lead to the over-exploitation of groundwater resources. The credit policies and the power pricing policies of the government also help in the unsustainable and inequitable use of this resource. Water policy ensuring mandatory recharging of the abandoned wells mainly for the sellers of water is the need of hour for the efficient and sustainable use of this scarce natural resource. The analysis of farmers’ decision to participate in water markets employing logit regression has suggested that the farmers having higher fragmented landholdings have higher probability of buying groundwater. Joint ownership of wells is negatively associated with the farmers’ probability of buying groundwater. This implies that the consolidation of holdings or installing cooperative wells may economize the irrigation investment and lead to efficient management of resources of the farmers and sustainable utilization of water. In the national and state water policies as well as in the Model Bill to regulate and control the groundwater resources, this aspect has not been given any emphasis.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Technological Need Assessment and Capacity Building of Farm Women in Livestock Rearing

It has been reflected that women farmers are engaged in the livestock rearing for additional income generation for their family. They provide 60 percent of the livestock farming labour. Contribution of woman folk in dairy production system, like in all other land-related activities, is enormous. She harvests fodder-yielding crops and gather fodder and bedding material from the forest areas, make hay and stack it, feed and look after the animals, cleans animal shed, milks the animal, processes and markets the milk, and does almost everything relating to smallholder dairy farming. Men’s role in dairy is limited. He participates only in the marketing of milk, looking after grazing and sick animals, and in providing service to dairy animals. Although much of work of livestock farming is carried out by women, they have very limited knowledge about new technologies which can enhance their knowledge, skills, practices and income. Most of extension programme are designed and implemented with an assumption that all farm managers and decision makers are men. Although the contribution of women farmer is higher in livestock rearing but with traditional practices and poor knowledge base, they are not able to manage their animals properly. Hence, the present study has been initiated with the following objectives: To explore the technological needs of women farmers related to livestock rearing practices To organize capacity building programmes for empowering farm women in livestock rearing practices

Functional outcome of percutaneous screw fixation of intra-articular calcaneum fractures

Background: The treatment of displaced calcaneum fractures has been a subject of intense discussion. Displaced intra-articular calcaneum fractures gives poor result with conservative treatment and requires reduction and internal fixation for favourable long term results. Open procedures are more prone to complications regarding wound healing. Percutaneous fixation offers a middle pathway in treating simpler variety of displaced calcaneal fractures. The aim of the study was to access the functional outcome of intra articular fracture calcaneum managed with closed reduction by Essex-Lopresti technique and percutaneous screw fixation.Methods: This study was done in department of Orthopaedics Jhalawar medical college and SRG Hospital Jhalawar, Rajasthan from January 2015 to January 2018. 26 intra-articular calcaneal fractures treated with closed reduction and percutaneous screw fixation under image intensifier.Results: 25 cases evaluated (one patient had lost follow-up), all fractures were united, average time of union was 8 weeks. The mean AOFAS score was 80 (range from 45 to 96), 9 patients had excellent, 12 patients had good, 3 patients had fair and one patient had poor result for that subtalar arthrodesis was done after one year of follow-up. Average Bohler’s angle 24.5 and Gissane angle was 120 degree. No clinically significant varus or valgus in any case (less then 5 degree).Conclusions: Treatment of intra-articular fractures of calcaneum is challenging but close reduction and internal fixation with 6.5 cannulated cancellous screws yields favorable outcome in majority of cases

Singleton: System-wide Page Deduplication in Virtual Environments

ABSTRACT We consider the problem of providing memory-management in hypervisors and propose Singleton, a KVM-based systemwide page deduplication solution to increase memory usage efficiency. Specifically, we address the problem of doublecaching that occurs in KVM-the same disk blocks are cached at both the host(hypervisor) and the guest(VM) page-caches. Singleton's main components are identical-page sharing across guest virtual machines and an implementation of an exclusivecache for the host and guest page-cache hierarchy. We use and improve KSM-Kernel SamePage Merging to identify and share pages across guest virtual machines. We utilize guest memory-snapshots to scrub the host page-cache and maintain a single copy of a page across the host and the guests. Singleton operates on a completely black-box assumption-we do not modify the guest or assume anything about it's behaviour. We show that conventional operating system cache management techniques are sub-optimal for virtual environments, and how Singleton supplements and improves the existing Linux kernel memory management mechanisms. Singleton is able to improve the utilization of the host cache by reducing its size(by upto an order of magnitude), and increasing the cache-hit ratio(by factor of 2x). This translates into better VM performance(40% faster I/O). Singleton's unified page deduplication and host cache scrubbing is able to reclaim large amounts of memory and facilitates higher levels of memory overcommitment. The optimizations to page deduplication we have implemented keep the overhead down to less than 20% CPU utilization

CPLR and Water Resource Utilization by Livestock Farmers in Different Ecosystems of India

The common property resources comprises of all such resources that are meant for common use of the villagers including all resources. The National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), 1999 in its report defines CPRs as “Resources accessible to and collectively owned\held\managed by an identifiable community and on which no individual has exclusive property rights are called common property resources”. Over the time, there has been gradual decline in CPRs availability to the villagers. The CPRs play an important role in the livelihood of resource poor farmers. According to NSSO, 1999, the percentage of Common Property Land Resources in total geographical area, Common Property Land Resources per household (ha.), Common Property Land Resources per- capita (ha.) is 15, 0.31 and 0.06 respectively. Components of Common Property Land Resources include Community Pastures and grazing land (23%), Village Forest and woodlots (16%) and Other (61%) and there has been reduction of 19 ha in CPR land during last 5 years (per 1000 ha.). The animal land intensity in India is high with an average land holding size of 1.57 ha supporting nearly 2.94 bovines and 1.14 ovine. This in turn puts pressure on common property resources. In developing countries, common property resources (CPRs) can be an important source of income for certain individuals within households (Maggs and Hoddinott, 1997). The common lands are significant form of natural resource endowment in developing countries, play a vital role in maintaining the ecological balance, and in supporting the rural poor, in eking out their livelihood (Qureshi and Kumar, 1998). The objective of present study is to assess the utilization of CPLRs (Common Property Land Resources) and water resources in different ecosystems of India

Impacts of soil and water conservation measures on farm technical efficiency in the semi-arid tropics of central India

Natural resources such as soil and water are essential to agriculture, especially in arid and semi-arid rain-fed areas, yet the impacts of managing these crucial natural resources on farm technical efficiency are little known. Using data from 400 households with 1031 plots, we examined the impacts of soil and water conservation measures (SWCMs) on the technical efficiency of farmers in the semi-arid Bundelkhand (central India). We estimated stochastic production frontiers, considering potential self-selection bias stemming from both observable and unobservable factors in the adoption of SWCMs at the farm level. The farm technical efficiency for adopters of SWCMs ranged from 0.68 to 0.72, and that for non-adopters ranged from 0.52 to 0.65, depending on how biases were controlled for. As the average efficiency is consistently higher for adopter farmers than the control group, promoting SWCMs could help to increase input use efficiency, especially in resource-deprived rain-fed systems in the semi-arid tropics

Second Green Revolution: Growth Engine for Transformation. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India

The Indian agricultural sector needs to be revitalised to meet the demand of food and nutritional security of a growing population amidst challenging situations. While the first Green Revolution helped in meeting the production demands in the 1960s, the next revolution needs to focus on holistic development of the sector and sustainable in the long run. The next revolution has to help the small and marginal farmers in sustaining their livelihood. It will need to provide end-to-end services to the farmer, linking him to the market and facilitating access to better technology and other resources. The dairy revolution in the country is a prime example of such an approach. An inclusive market oriented approach can revolutionise the agricultural sector and attract the youth to take up to agriculture as another business venture. An agribusiness development path involving greater productivity growth throughout the entire agribusiness value chain provides for a solid foundation for rapid, inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction. Improving the skill levels of the farmers can help in diversifying and minimising the risk from the sector. This will also foster an ecosystem for innovations from within the community