Contemporary Information and Knowledge Management: Impact on Farming in India

Farming is an important part of Indian economy and it involves a wide range of stakeholders, of whom the small holder farmers are the largest group. Information sharing on new production processes with farmers was prominent in the ‘sixties which was key to the success of the Green Revolution. Agricultural extension, the process of enabling farmers and experts to exchange information with each other, has since been institutionalized to a high degree and is assessed to be not as effective as it had been a generation back. The advent of digital, technology-mediated information and knowledge management was thought to offer significant new opportunities for knowledge exchange in Indian farming as a whole. These hopes led to the launching of a number of initiatives in different parts of India, which has emerged as the host of the largest number of rural development projects where contemporary information and communication technology (ICT) play a pivotal role. While analyzing the outputs of such initiatives, many studies have pointed out that farming is not a priority concern of most of them. On the other hand, we can notice a non-complimentary strand of ICT in agriculture projects operated by a number of institutions with ICT resources playing a key role in some of them. These efforts, generally speaking, do not promote user participation in information flows quite unlike the contemporary trends

A single acute hepatotoxic dose of CCl4 causes oxidative stress in the rat brain

Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), a hepatotoxic agent is widely used to study the toxic mechanisms in experimental animals. We have investigated whether oxidative stress is induced in the brain at a single hepatotoxic dosage (1 ml/kg bw) of CCl4. Increased lipid peroxidation (LPO), protein carbonyls (PC) content and glutathione (GSH) depletion were observed in the brain regions of rats treated with CCl4 which was higher than that of liver. A drastic reduction in the activity of glutathione-S-transferase (GST) was seen in the brain regions which was higher than that of liver. Similarly, activities of glutathione peroxidase (GPx), glutathione reductase (GR), superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), NADH- and NADPH-dehydrogenase were reduced in the brain regions similar to that of liver. Higher induction of oxidative stress in the brain compared to that of liver implies vulnerability of the brain for CCl4 neurotoxicity. Our study shows that a single hepatotoxic dose of CCl4 is equally neurotoxic to rats