Women and Informal Employment: An Analysis of Socio-Economic and Health Conditions of Women Home-Based Workers in Chennai, India

This study seeks to analyse the socio-economic and health status of women workers in the informal sector in Chennai, India. Informal employment consists of various kinds of micro-enterprises offering commodities and services and home-based work. Of all these different types of work in the informal sector, home-based work is associated with women because of its nature and characteristic features. Home-based work is piecework for remuneration that is completed in the premises of the worker’s choice rather than the workplace of the employer. Women homeworkers face many issues such as long hours of work, low wages, meagre rates per piece, lack of social security and lack of union or organizational support. More importantly, their conditions of work and health are deplorable. The present study has followed the descriptive research method to carry out the survey. The data for this study has been collected directly using the field survey method. A formally structured questionnaire was prepared and circulated among the target sample for this purpose. The questions were formulated using the variables taken from the literature review and research gap. A stratified random sampling method was adopted for the survey. The sample size was justified on the calculation of secondary data and by applying the appropriate formula to collect data from 150 sample respondents in the study area. As the study focuses on female home-based workers, a direct survey was conducted among women workers. The data collected relates to the socio-economic and work conditions of women workers. The findings reveal that 59.2 percent of the home-based women workers are in the age group 25 to 35 years, and the average wage is low at Rs.164.7 per day, based on a fixed piece rate. Further analysis of the data shows that 35.5 percent of the respondents earn Rs.100 per day, which is significantly below the minimum wage. Therefore, the findings reveal that female home-based workers are subject to multiple forms of exploitation such as low wages, delayed and irregular payments and sporadic work. In conclusion, the researcher states that despite these problems, home-based work is the most suitable avenue for poverty alleviation and employment generation among urban women. However, low wages, lack of micro-capital for entrepreneurial ventures and non-payment of dues on time are serious issues that these workers face

Application of phycoremediation technology in the treatment of wastewater from a leather-processing chemical manufacturing facility

Phycoremediation is the use of algae for the removal or biotransformation of pollutants from wastewater. Employing this technology in the treatment of industrial effluents presents an alternative to the current practice of using conventional methods, including physical and chemical methods. In the present study, the effluent from a leather-processing chemical manufacturing facility, situated at Ranipet, Tamil Nadu, India, was treated using the microalga, Chlorella vulgaris, which was isolated from the effluent itself. The objective of this study was to treat the effluent as well as ETP (effluent treatment plant) solid waste by phycoremediation (pilot-scale field study as well as laboratory study) and to analyse the physico-chemical parameters before and after treatment. The results obtained showed that Chlorella  vulgaris exhibited appreciable nutrient scavenging properties under both laboratory and field conditions, although phycoremediation carried out in sunlight (field study) gave better results. Moreover, the growth of Chlorella vulgaris was faster under field conditions.Keywords: Phycoremediation, microalgae, Chlorella vulgaris, effluent, ETP soli

Review Study on Larvicidal and Mosquito Repellent Activity of Volatile Oils Isolated from Medicinal Plants

Mosquito is a vector for serious human diseases like dengue fever, hemaorrhagic dengue fever and chikungunya, .yellow fever, malaria, filaria and encephalitis among these dengue, hemaorrhagic dengue and chikungunya are highly endemic diseases in Southeast Asian and African countries, causing millions of deaths each and every year. Mosquito repellents thus play a major role in preventing man-mosquito contact and there by minimize the chance of infections and its adverse effects. The development of resistance to chemical insecticides, results rebounding vectorial capacity. Synthetic repellents are chemicals which used worldwide for protection against mosquito-borne diseases and it adversely affects the environment by contaminating water, soil and air. There is an urgent need to find alternatives to the synthetic insecticides. Plants are rich source of alternative agents for control of mosquitoes and its vectors. Extracts and isolated compounds from different plant families have been evaluated for their promising larvicidal and mosquito repellent activities. Literature has documented that essential oils and extracts have been traditionally used as effective repellents. The essential oils whose repellent activities have been demonstrated, as well as the importance of the synergistic effects among their components are the main focus of this review study. Essential oils are volatile mixtures of hydrocarbons with a diversity of functional groups, and their repellent activity has been linked to the presence of monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes. The present review study focused the larvicidal potential and mosquito repellent activity of different volatile oils of medicinal plants. From an economical point of view synthetic chemical is still more frequently used as repellents than essential oils; these essential oils have the potential to provide efficient and can be used as a cheap, eco-friendly, safer for humans and the environment and also efficient alternative to the chemical larvicides

Thermal Time Scales in a Color Glass Condensate

In a model of relativistic heavy ion collisions wherein the unconfined quark-gluon plasma is condensed into glass, we derive the Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann cooling law. This law is well known to hold true in condensed matter glasses. The high energy plasma is initially created in a very hot negative temperature state and cools down to the Hagedorn glass temperature at an ever decreasing rate. The cooling rate is largely determined by the QCD string tension derived from hadronic Regge trajectories. The ultimately slow relaxation time is a defining characteristic of a color glass condensate.Comment: 5 pages, ReVTeX format, nofigure

METHODOLOGY STUDY AND ANALYSIS OF MAGNESIUM ALLOY METAL MATRIX COMPOSITES

ABSTRACT Magnesium alloys have been increasingly used in the automotive and aircraft industry in recent years due to their Light weight Magnesium alloys have excellent specific strength and stiffness, exceptional dimensional stability, high damping capacity, and high recycle ability. Magnesium and its alloys are becoming widely recognized as playing an increasingly important role in automotive, aircraft, and electronic consumer products. Magnesium alloy metal matrix composite (MMC) containing 14 vol. % Saffil fibres. The squeeze casting process was used to produce the composites and the process variables evaluated were applied pressure, from 0.1 MPa to 120 MPa, and preform temperature from 250 °C to 750 °C

Excitation energy dependence of electron-phonon interaction in ZnO nanoparticles

Raman spectroscopic investigations are carried out on ZnO nanoparticles for various photon energies. Intensities of E1-LO and E2 modes exhibit large changes as the excitation energy varied from 2.41 to 3.815 eV, signifying substantially large contribution of Frohlich interaction to the Raman polarizability as compared to deformation potential close to the resonance. Relative strength of these two mechanisms is estimated for the first time in nanoparticles and compared with those in the bulk.Comment: 13 pages. 3 figures Journa