Central Bank Governance and Challenges Posed By the Crisis

In the first section of this paper, it will be explained that though generalizations are misleading, some of the central banks, especially among the advanced and systemically important economies, may have to take some, though not entire responsibility, for causing the global financial crisis. The second section elaborates that central banks have acquitted themselves well in avoiding a financial collapse through support of respective governments, and coordination at global level enabled them to do so. The fiscal authorities were leading the coordinated actions towards managing the crisis and embanking on the stimulus on multiple fronts. It is likely that the transparency and accountability processes are also unconventional. The third section postulates that in regard to exit policies, central banks face pressures in terms of coordination among them and with fiscal authorities as well as other regulators within each country. The fourth section briefly mentions select issues arising out of reforms under contemplation in financial sector, as a consequence of the crisis. The fifth section lists the need to revisit governance issues in central banks in the light of experience with the crisis. The concluding part focuses on governance issues of special relevance to central banks in developing countries.

Fiscal policy economic reforms.

Given a parctitioner's perspective of fiscal policy and economic reforms based on his working experience from different Indian and International government institutions.Fiscal Policy ; Economic Reforms

Sustaining Rural Livelihoods in Fragile Environments : Resource Endowments or Policy Interventions?

This paper primarily assesses the status of rural livelihoods in fragile environments with diverse resource endowments and policy interventions. The objective was to examine the effectiveness of resource enhancing policy interventions like watershed development in reducing resource endowment imbalances across villages and regions. Livelihood assessment was carried out using the sustainable rural livelihoods (SRL) framework in the fragile regions of Andhra Pradesh. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to assess the rural livelihoods covering all the 555 households in three sample villages. It is argued that resource endowments determine the level and dynamics of livelihoods at the household level rather than policy interventions per se. On the other hand, policy interventions, given the status and structure of the economy, only act as catalysts. Policies for strengthening the resource base are necessary but not sufficient to address the livelihood issues. In the present case it is shown that availability of water (irrigation) is more important than the recent policy interventions like watershed development for improving the livelihoods. Nevertheless, policy interventions towards human capital development (education, skills, etc) could be rewarding in the long run. Unless policies are directed towards bringing changes in natural resource endowments (especially water) at the household level, it is unlikely that the on going policy interventions would transform the rural livelihoods in the fragile environments.Rural livelihoods, resource endowments, watershed development, policy

Sustaining rural livelihoods in fragile environments: Resource endowments or policy interventions?

This paper primarily assesses the status of rural livelihoods in fragile environments with diverse resource endowments and policy interventions. The objective was to examine the effectiveness of resource enhancing policy interventions like watershed development in reducing resource endowment imbalances across villages and regions. Livelihood assessment was carried out using the sustainable rural livelihoods (SRL) framework in the fragile regions of Andhra Pradesh. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to assess the rural livelihoods covering all the 555 households in three sample villages.Rural livelihoods, resource endowments, watershed development, policy interventions, Andhra Pradesh

Content Based Image Retrieval Using SVM Algorithm

Conventional content-based image retrieval (CBIR) schemes employing relevance feedback may suffer from some problems in the practical applications. First, most ordinary users would like to complete their search in a single interaction especially on the web. Second, it is time consuming and difficult to label a lot of negative examples with sufficient variety. Third, ordinary users may introduce some noisy examples into the query. This correspondence explores solutions to a new issue that image retrieval using unclean positive examples. In the proposed scheme, multiple feature distances are combined to obtain image similarity using classification technology. To handle the noisy positive examples, a new two step strategy is proposed by incorporating the methods of data cleaning and noise tolerant classifier. The extensive experiments carried out on two different real image collections validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme

Estimation of wheat crop evapotranspiration using NDVI vegetation index

The evapotranspiration of the wheat crop grown in Tarafeni South Main Canal (TSMC) irrigation command area of West Bengal, India was estimated based on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from LANDSAT images. The crop evapotranspiration (ETc) of wheat crop was estimated using the crop coefficient (Kc) maps and the reference evapotranspiration (ETo) in the TSMC irrigation command area. The ETo was estimated from the well known temperature based ETo estimation method, i.e. FAO-24 modified Blaney-Criddle method using measured maximum and minimum air temperatures data during January 2011 in the command area. The Kc maps were mapped in ARC GIS software using procured LANDSAT images for the study period. The area under wheat crop was clipped from land use/land cover map generated from LANDSAT image of January, 2011 for winter season. Further, the crop evapotranspiration map was obtained by multiplying Kc map with the estimated ETo value i.e., 5.76 mm/day for a particular day. The maximum crop evapotranspiration computed for Rabi crop was 5.57 mm/ day, whereas minimum was 1.59 mm/day for the TSMC command area

EARTH QUAKE PROGNOSTICATION USING DATA MINING AND CURVE FITTING TECHNIQUES

The title “EARTHQUAKE PROGNOSTICATION” is a Global Earthquake prediction, that is used to predict that an earthquake of a specific magnitude will occur in a particular place at a particular time, we however cannot tell the exact time and date the earthquake is going to occur but we can well predict that an earthquake will affect a given location over a certain number of years. The “Gutenberg Richter power-law distribution of earthquake sizes” implies that the largest events are surrounded by a large number of small events, with this statement we collected the data sets of all the EARTHQUAKES of magnitude ranging from small to big since 1900 to 2010 all over the world. After collecting this data we performed clustering techniques to the datasets available with latitude, longitude and time as parameters, which helped to find similarities between them and discovered patterns using non-linear regression functions that helped to forecast earthquakes. This prediction is based on both the historical seismic catalogue and the structural zoning