Factors Affecting the School Dropout in Rajasthan: A Study Based on NSSO Data

Education is the basic requirement for human development. With education, employment opportunities are broadened and income levels are increased. Each welfare state attempts to achieve this goal through universalizing literacy and ensuring the quality of education. As a result, some improvement also observed in Rajasthan in term of literacy rate between 2001 to 2011. The challenge of ‘Education for All’ is still substantial, especially for some section of society. Despite the government’s efforts for education, the phenomenon of school dropouts remains a blot on the progress of education not only in India but also in most the states including with the Rajasthan. Present study is an attempt to understand the differentials and determinant of school dropouts in Rajasthan by analyzing the NSSO 64th Round (2007-08) data on education. We applied cross tabulation and logistic regression techniques to identify the factor which determine the school dropouts among children age 5-29 years. It was found that only 59% of the children in the age group 5 to 29 years are currently attending school. Differential in school dropout are observed not only with socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of household but also with the school infrastructure. Results shows that gender differentials are different in case of Rajasthan as girls are less likely to dropout than boys. Gender and age of children, Residence, caste, monthly household expenditure and the distance from the school are emerged as strong determinant of school dropout in Rajasthan. Therefore, Government needs to special focus on these areas in its education policy and programme in order to overcome with the dropout problem among the children. Keywords: Education, Rajasthan, School Enrolment, Dropout, NSSO, Logistic Regressio

Analysis of Marketing Efficiency of Wheat in Different Grade Regulated Markets in Madhya Pradesh

Marketers need to design creative solutions like e- marketing to overcome challenges typical of the rural environment such as physical distribution, channel management promotion and communication. The study has been undertaken to examine the facilities and services available and to analyse the marketing efficiency of wheat in different grade regulated markets of Madhya Pradesh. The present investigation is restricted to Sehore (A), MHOW (B), Kalapipal (C) and Katangi (D) grade regulated markets in Madhya Pradesh. The study reveals that A grade (Sehore) regulated market was found to facilitate more as compared to the other market but this particular market was found less price efficient than the other market. All the markets has poor market facilities with regards to post office, restaurant, fire extinguishers, bank, grading and analysing laboratory, extension unit, public address system, rest house for farmers, audio visual aid and garbage disposal system. Hence suggested that these facilities should be provided in each regulated markets with National e-agriculture market (e-markets) and bringing them all to one platform so that registered farmers will be able to sell their produce online in any of the markets where they can get the best price. The e-market also ensured that intermediaries (and money lenders) do not compel farmers to sell their produce at throw away prices and their produce should first be bought at the regulated market to be put for auction to sell, which will get them all a fair price, reduce the chances of middlemen by adding any extra cost or seeking double commission. This will also brought transparency in the syste

E. coli-quantum dot bioconjugates as whole-cell fluorescent reporters for probing cellular damage

A quantum dot (QD) conjugated whole-cell E. coli biosensor (E. coli–QD bioconjugates) was developed as a new molecular tool for probing cellular damage. The E. coli–QD bioconjugates were viable and exhibited fluorescence emission at 585 nm. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis of E. coli–QD bioconjugates revealed that the QDs were immobilized on the cell-surfaces and the fluorescence emission from QDs present on cell-surfaces was visualized by confocal microscopic examination. The E. coli–QD bioconjugates were employed as whole-cell fluorescent reporters that were designed to function as fluorescence switches that turn-off when cellular damage occurs. In this study, multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were utilized as a model nanomaterial to probe cellular damage. Fluorescence spectra were recorded after the exposure of E. coli–QD bioconjugates with CNTs. We observed a strong correlation between fluorescence emission spectra, SEM and confocal microscopic analysis demonstrating that CNTs induced a dose and exposure time-dependent cellular toxicity. This toxicity mainly occurred by the physical interaction and cellular trafficking mechanisms that led to the collapse of the cellular structure and thus loss of fluorescence. The responses of E. coli–QD bioconjugates against CNTs were also visualized by simply exposing the cells to UV light and therefore rapid toxicity analysis and screening can be made. Our study demonstrated an easy and simple method to determine an important mechanistic perspective for the biological toxicity of chemicals or nanomaterials (NMs)

SecureFlow: Knowledge and data-driven ensemble for intrusion detection and dynamic rule configuration in software-defined IoT environment

There is a massive growth in the rate of heterogeneous devices configured in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment for efficient communication. The IoT devices are limited in resources, and there are no defined protocols in terms of security during communication in the IoT-based platforms. Several solutions are framed to make communication secure in the IoT ecosystem. However, the existing schemes need to be more reliable to handle the cyber threats and unwarranted incidents (such as intrusions, anomalies and attacks) coming from IoT endpoints owing to the unstructured patterns of IoT data and dynamic network conditions. Moreover, heavy cryptographic primitives have their deployment challenges due to the resource constraints of the IoT ecosystem. The dynamic nature of IoT traffic requires flexible and varied rules to handle the threats in different deployment scenarios. Therefore, a programmable interface enabled through Software-defined Networking (SDN) can handle heterogeneous threats and incidents in the IoT cyber world. Thus, in this paper, we have designed a novel framework, SecureFlow, an intrusion detection and dynamic rule configuration system based on the knowledge-based and data-driven ensemble. The proposed framework is robust and fault tolerant owing to dual-layer Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and rule configuration modules that can work without one of them. SecureFlow validated through several experiments performed through emulations in Mininet. The results depict that the proposed framework is effective and promising