Wells and ill-fare: impacts of well failures on cultivators in hard rock areas of Madhya Pradesh

WellsDrillingCostsGroundwater depletionWater tableGroundwater irrigationOwnershipEconomic impactSocial impactCrop managementFood security

Business Analytics in (a) Blink

The Blink project’s ambitious goal is to answer all Business Intelligence (BI) queries in mere seconds, regardless of the database size, with an extremely low total cost of ownership. Blink is a new DBMS aimed primarily at read-mostly BI query processing that exploits scale-out of commodity multi-core processors and cheap DRAM to retain a (copy of a) data mart completely in main memory. Additionally, it exploits proprietary compression technology and cache-conscious algorithms that reduce memory bandwidth consumption and allow most SQL query processing to be performed on the compressed data. Blink always scans (portions of) the data mart in parallel on all nodes, without using any indexes or materialized views, and without any query optimizer to choose among them. The Blink technology has thus far been incorp

Wells and ill-fare: impacts of well failures on cultivators in hard rock areas of Madhya Pradesh

In Kumar, M. Dinesh (Ed.). Managing water in the face of growing scarcity, inequity and declining returns: exploring fresh approaches. Proceedings of the 7th Annual Partners Meet, IWMI TATA Water Policy Research Program, ICRISAT, Patancheru, Hyderabad, India, 2-4 April 2008. Vol.1. Hyderabad, India: International Water Management Institute (IWMI), South Asia Sub Regional Offic

Wells and ill-fare: impacts of well failures on cultivators in hard rock areas of Madhya Pradesh

Over exploitation of groundwater water resources is causing progressive decline in water table in the arid and semi arid parts of India. The socio-economic impacts of these phenomena range from increased cost of well irrigation to reduced returns from irrigated agriculture, to growing inequity in access to groundwater depending on the aquifer conditions and the overall socio-economic conditions of the communities. In hard rock areas, over exploitation is leading to decline in yield and drying up of open wells. This forces farmers to go for either well deepening or drilling new bore wells. But due to the poor success in hitting water through bore well drilling in hard rock areas and the consequent increase in costs of setting up a bore-well based irrigation scheme, small cultivators are the worse affected. This paper focus on the phenomenon of well failure in the hard rock areas of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh. It highlights the causes of well failure and related welfare impacts on the cultivators especially small landowners. The major impacts were found to be on the cropping pattern, extent of well irrigation, crop yields, net returns and food security in the surveyed region. In addition, discussion is centered on power subsidies in the state which have promoted indiscriminate use and further depletion of groundwater from the already low yielding aquifers

Employment guarantee during covid-19 : Role of MGNREGA in the year after the 2020 lockdown

This study examines the performance of MGNREGA during the Covid-19 pandemic in eight blocks across four states of India, viz. Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. MGNREGA functioning is analysed along the following dimensions: overall impressions of the programme among job card holding households, extent of unmet demand, wage payments, changes in programme functioning during the pandemic, and effectiveness of MGNREGA as a safety net. The blocks were chosen from a list of blocks in which Civil Society Organisations part of the NREGA Consortium are working. All blocks on this list were ranked based on their performance in MGNREGA as reflected in the Management Information System (MIS). Highest and lowest ranked blocks were chosen in each state and are referred to as high performing and low performing blocks in the study The blocks chosen were - Phulparas (Madhubani) and Chhatapur (Supaul) in Bihar, Bidar (Bidar) and Devadurga (Raichur) in Karnataka, Khalwa (Khandwa) and Ghatigaon (Gwalior) in Madhya Pradesh, and Wardha (Wardha) and Surgana (Nashik) in Maharashtra. A two stage random sampling was followed in the chosen blocks. In the first stage, five Gram Panchayats (GP) were randomly chosen in each block based on the Census 2011 list. In the second stage, 50 households were randomly selected in each GP from the MGNREGA MIS list of job card holders. The sampling method ensures representativeness of the results at the block level for all job card holding households. The survey was conducted in November-December 2021. Two reference periods were employed. The first covered the pre-Covid financial year (April 2019 to March 2020) and the second covered the Covid financial year (April 2020 to March 2021). This also includes executive summary of the report