Women's collective action and sustainable water management: case of SEWA's water campaign in Gujarat, India

"This paper discusses the case of the Self Employed Women's Association's (SEWA) Women, Water and Work Campaign which began in 1995 in the semi-arid regions of Gujarat. SEWA's women's groups, which are initiated through collective action, have been active in sustaining local water management through water harvesting, watershed management, handpump repair, pipeline maintenance and revival of traditional sources of water. Some of the significant factors that have sustained collective action of women are the presence of strong grassroots institution (pani samiti), the establishment of a technical cadre of women (barefoot technicians), the ability of women's groups to transcend social barriers and continuous dialoguing with the state. The impact of collective action is far reaching both for SEWA as well as the women it serves. SEWA's membership has increased manifold due to the success of the water campaign. Women have benefited in terms of increased income, reduced drudgery, improvements in the livelihoods of their families, reduced migration of both women and men and increased participation in SEWA's other programs. The most important impact observed is the strengthening of women's collective agency and women's confidence to independently negotiate in the public domain in the water management sector, which was earlier occupied by men. Women's collective agency has catalyzed some gender-equitable change processes, although perceptible changes in gender relations at the household level are not as significant. Some policy implications are discussed in terms of involving women at all levels of water management programs – planning, designing, implementing as well as monitoring Author's AbstractCollective action, Sustainability, Water management, Gender relations, Gender,

Women Identity and Self-Assertion: A Study of Two Contemporary Retellings of Mahabharata

Mythology has been very foundation of many cultures and civilizations. The western world has inherited the base from the classical mythology of Greek and Roman civilization but for India this is all about the rich heritage of its own mythology which is culturally and religiously much more vibrant. In this project, the retellings, refolding and revisiting of mythology has been greatly emphasized which shows the especially perspective of women. It is also describing the changing role of women in our society. The two major epics that hugely influenced the Indian culture are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, for this paper I found the Mahabharata interesting and convincing. This study will analyse how the female perception differs from the male discourse especially by contrasting the myths from the Mahabharata. Indian feminist begun to step out from the shadow and rewrote mythology, which was written by Man. This was necessary because male discourse elides women. Men written myths have the functions to infantilize women, to irradiate the dysfunction women have to write for themselves in discourse. From these retelling of mythology I have taken two of the novels for my study i.e. “The Palace of Illusions” by Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni and “Karna’s wife: the Outcast Queen” by Kavita Kane. The objective of the study is to contemporizing the past and bringing mythical era to the present. The second objective is to blurring the line between the past and mythology for this 21st century society

Unusual echocardiographic finding leading to diagnosis of pulmonary sequestration

Pulmonary sequestration is an embryonic mass of non- functioning lung tissue that does not communicate with the tracheobronchial tree and has a reported incidence of 0.15%-6.4% of all the pulmonary malformations. This anomaly is classified as either intralobar or extralobar with the later variety lying outside the normal investment of visceral pleura. The arterial supply is predominantly by an anomalous artery usually arising from either abdominal or thoracic aorta, while the venous drainage occurs commonly via systemic rather than pulmonary veins. Identification of the anomalous arterial supply has therapeutic implication because the majority of infants clinically present large shunt lesions attributed to these channels in early infancy. The diagnosis in such cases is usually established by computed tomography (CT), angiography, magnetic resonance angiography and conventional angiography. This article reports a 28 day old neonate who presented with features of large shunt lesion, in which echocardiography was instrumental in the diagnosis of a large collateral supplying the sequestrated lung.peer-reviewe

A Novel Soft Computing Based Model For Symptom Analysis & Disease Classification

In countries like India, many mortality occurs every year because of improper pronouncement of disease on time. Many people remain deprived of medication as the people per doctor ratio are nearly 1:1700. Every human body and its physiological processes show some symptoms of a diseased condition. The proposed model in this paper would analyze those symptoms for identification of the disease and its type. In this proposed model, few selected attributes would be considered which are shown as symptoms by a person suspected with a particular disease. Those attributes can be taken as input for the proposed symptom analysis and classification model, which is a soft computing model for classifying a sample first to be diseased or disease free and then, if diseased, predicting its type (if any). Number of diseased and disease free samples are to be collected. Each of these samples is a collection of attributes shown / expressed by a human body. With respect to a specific disease, those collected samples form two primary clusters, one is diseased and the other one is disease free. The disease free cluster may be discarded for further analysis. Depending on the symptoms shown by the diseased samples, every disease has some types based on the symptoms it shows. The diseased cluster of samples can reform clusters among themselves depending on the types of the disease. Those clusters then become the classes of the multiclass classifier for analysis of a new incoming sample

Contributory factors of disease diagnosis: Review as per Ayurveda

Ayurveda believes to eliminate disease completely. There are different causative factors of various diseases these factor may be food, life style or imbalance of tridosha. As per ayurveda disease diagnosis play important role in disease treatment and different disease need different consideration since every individual having specific Prakriti. Since ayurveda treats diseases as per the constitution of an individual thus it is known as a highly accurate and personalized method of analyzing diseases. Mainly all diseases are caused by aggravation of the tridosha i.e. vata, pitta and kapha. In ayurveda “Nidana†encompasses various approaches of disease diagnosis. As per ayurveda various factors contributes significantly towards disease diagnosis. This article describes all those factors which need to be considered for the proper diagnosis and treatment of disease

Adverse drug reaction reporting in a tertiary care teaching hospital in eastern India: a retrospective study

Background: Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are one of the prime causes of morbidity and mortality, increase in hospital stay and socioeconomic burden on the patients. Periodic monitoring aids in formulating methods for safe usage of medicines in hospitals. This study was undertaken to study the patterns, assessment of causality, severity, preventability, body systems affected from ADRs received by the Pharmacovigilance cell, Department of Pharmacology between April 2018 to June 2019.Methods: The present study is an observational, retrospective, non-interventional analysis of voluntarily reported ADRs. Demography of patients, causative drugs, reactions, outcome, and severity are recorded. Data were analysed and expressed in numbers, percentages.Results: A total of 180 ADRs were spontaneously reported. Dermatology (42.8%), psychiatry (23.9%) and general medicine (18.3%) are the major departments reporting ADRs in our hospital. 60.6% reports were in males. The body system with maximum reactions is dermatological (51.1%). Drug class most commonly affected is anti-microbials (36.1%). Paracetamol (8.9%) is the most common drug with reactions. Causality assessment stated that 41.7% ADRs are probable and 58.3% were possible. Severity assessment showed 86.7% as mild and 13.3% as moderate. Preventability assessment stated that 93.3% ADRs not preventable, 5.6% probably preventable and 1.1% definitely preventable.Conclusions: The study provides a valuable insight with regards to the pattern of ADRs in our hospital. This will be useful in initiating a reporting culture, increase awareness, reducing under-reporting of ADR in our set up

Adverse cutaneous drug reactions reporting in a tertiary care teaching hospital in Eastern India: a retrospective study

Background: Any unwanted changes to mucous membrane, skin, its appendages and drug eruptions related adverse events are known as adverse cutaneous drug reaction (ACDR). It has 2-5% incidence in developing countries. The current study was undertaken to analyse adverse cutaneous drug reactions spectrum clinically, drugs responsible, assessment of causality, severity, and preventability in our setup.Methods: Current study was an observational, retrospective, non-interventional analysis of voluntarily reported ADRs forms, between April 2018 and January 2020.  All cutaneous ADRs reported within this period were identified. Data obtained were expressed in numbers, percentages.Results: 130 cutaneous ADRs was reported during the period of study. Fixed drug eruptions (30%) was the most common cutaneous reaction. The most common causal drug groups were antimicrobials (58.5%). Amongst antimicrobials, ornidazole (8.5%) was the most common drug. The most common drug in NSAID group was paracetamol (14.6%). The major drug causing ACDRs in our study was Paracetamol (14.6%). Assessment of causality revealed 37.7% were probable and 62.3% were possible reactions. Assessment of severity showed 78.5% as mild and 21.5% as moderate. Assessment of preventability showed that 6.1% probably preventable and 93.9% not preventable.Conclusions: Knowledge of the pattern of cutaneous reactions and the causative drugs guides us in early diagnosis of the condition, better management and associated decrease in morbidity, mortality. In the current study, the most common causal drug group were antimicrobials. The most common morphological pattern and drug causing ACDRs were fixed drug eruptions and paracetamol, respectively

Knowledge, attitude and practice of pharmacovigilance towards adverse drug reactions reporting among health care professionals (nurses) in a tertiary care teaching hospital in Eastern India: an observational study

Background: Nursing staffs spend most time in patient care and are bedside caregivers. To expect voluntary reporting of adverse reactions, it is essential that they possess proper knowledge, right attitude and practice reporting. Therefore, the present study was aimed to assess the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Pharmacovigilance towards ADRs reporting.Methods: A prospective, cross sectional, observational, questionnaire-based survey was conducted among nurses in a tertiary care teaching hospital in Eastern India. Questionnaire containing 15 questions was used to assess knowledge, attitude and practice. The questionnaire was administered to 150 nurses. Analysis of data was done using statistical software..Results: The response rate in our study was 86.67%. Nurses have good knowledge of pharmacovigilance and adverse reaction. However, only 10% have reported an adverse reaction in our study. This shows that in spite of having a good knowledge of reporting, nurses have poor attitude, which is reflected by a low reporting rate. Nurses opined that taking patient care is of prime importance than report an adverse reaction. This corroborates the low reporting rate in our set up.Conclusions: Majority of nurses have good knowledge on pharmacovigilance and adverse drug reaction. The concern remains on the low reporting rate. Continuous training programmes, and reminders likely to enhance the voluntary reporting from the nursing staffs

Pharmacokinetic Interaction of Salbutamol Co-administered with Vasicine Isolated from Adhathoda vasica on Rabbit

Background: The study aims at the establishment of pharmacokinetic interaction between vasicine and salbutamol in low and high dose combinations on rabbits. Methods: Previously developed in vitro simultaneous estimation method of vasicine and salbutamol was further validated by recovery study in the spiked plasma sample. Pharmacokinetic interaction study was performed on the rabbit at 30 and 60 mg/kg vasicine administered with 2 and 4 mg/kg salbutamol orally based on literature reports. Vasicine and salbutamol were extracted from plasma up to 12 hr post drug administration, analyzed by HPLC and pharmacokinetic parameters were calculated. Results: HPLC co-analysis of vasicine and salbutamol in the spiked plasma samples showed recovery in the range of 92.44 to 99.14% and RSD less than 1%. Vasicine showed the limit of quantification 136 ng/ml with interday and intraday variation less than 1% indicating reproducibility. Co-administration of vasicine and salbutamol significantly (p < 0.001) elevates elimination rate constant, decreases clearance, biological half-life and volume of distribution of salbutamol compared to administration alone. Salbutamol showed high (p < 0.001) clearance and AUC value, whereas vasicine showed significantly high (p < 0.01-0.001) elimination rate constant, clearance, volume of distribution and AUC when co-administered. Conclusions: Combined administration of vasicine and salbutamol has drastically increased the bioavailability of salbutamol though vasicine bioavailability was practically unchanged. This study signifies that concurrently administered salbutamol with vasicine can induce occurrence of serious life threatening adverse event may be due to additive vasodilatory effect