Policy Issues in Rural Transformation (The Indain Scenerio)

Policy plays a significant role in nation building. This paper attempts to highlight the role of policy issues in bringing about rural transformation. India has its own peculiarities in both demographic and economic terms when we closely observe the urban and rural areas and its associated concerns. These peculiarities need to be kept in mind while formulating policies. If we take a snapshot of our history of the last 60 years since independence, we find that many policy initiatives taken by the government have indeed borne good results, albeit largely benefiting the urban population. The paper also highlights another peculiarity of India i.e. the growing disparity in application and use of technology in our day to day lives. The caution is that this growing ‘digital divide’ is not a healthy sign from sociological perspective. If unchecked, it may lead to social and economic fragmentation of the country. We also bring out few recent policy initiatives of the Government to achieve rural development as also the role played by the corporate sector and NGOs. The political leadership of the country has to rise above the ‘names-in-the-foundation-stone’ culture and ensure continuity of policies and implementation programmes. Only then, we can hope to go beyond paying ‘lip-service’ to rural transformation in our country.Policy,India

Anisotropic Isometric Fluctuation Relations in experiment and theory on a self-propelled rod

The Isometric Fluctuation Relation (IFR) [P.I. Hurtado et al., PNAS 108, 7704 (2011)] relates the relative probability of current fluctuations of fixed magnitude in different spatial directions. We test its validity in an experiment on a tapered rod, rendered motile by vertical vibration and immersed in a sea of spherical beads. We analyse the statistics of the velocity vector of the rod and show that they depart significantly from the IFR of Hurtado et al. Aided by a Langevin-equation model we show that our measurements are largely described by an anisotropic generalization of the IFR [R. Villavicencio et al., EPL 105, 30009 (2014)], with no fitting parameters, but with a discrepancy in the prefactor whose origin may lie in the detailed statistics of the microscopic noise. The experimentally determined Large-Deviation Function of the velocity vector has a kink on a curve in the plane.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Cyber Security Evaluation of Smart Electric Meters

In this thesis, effect of intermediate network systems on power usage data collection from Smart Electric Meter in Smart Grid was evaluated. Security integrity of remote data collection from GE’s Power Quality Smart Electric Meter EPM 6100 and EPM 7000 under cyber-attacks were evaluated. Experimental security evaluations of Smart Electric Meters were conducted to understand their operation under cyber-attacks. Integrity of data communication between the GE’s smart meters and remote monitoring computer was evaluated under different types of cyber security attacks. Performance comparison was done for security integrity of EPM 6100 and EPM 7000 power quality meter under various cyber-attacks

A Plain-text Compression Technique with Fast Lookup Ability

Data compression has always been an essential aspect of computing. In recent times, with the increasing popularity of remote and cloud-based computation, compression is becoming more important. Reducing the size of a data object in this context would not only reduce the transfer time, but also the amount of data transferred. The key figures of merit of a data compression scheme are its compression ratio and its compression, decompression and lookup speeds. Traditional compression techniques achieve high compression ratios, but require decompression before a lookup can be performed. This increases the lookup time. In this thesis, we propose a compression technique for plain-text data objects, that uses variable length encoding to compress data. The dictionary of possible words is sorted based on the statistical frequency of the use of words, which are encoded using the variable length code-words. Words that are not in the dictionary are handled as well. The driving motivation of our technique is to perform significantly faster lookups without the need to decompress the compressed data object. Our approach also facilitates string operations (such as concatenation, insertion and deletion and search-and-replacement) on compressed text without the need of decompression. We implement our technique in C++, and compare our approach with industry standard tools like gzip and bzip2 in terms of compression ratio, lookup speed, search-and-replace time and peak memory uses. Our compression scheme is about 81x faster as compared to gzip and about 165x times faster as compared to bzip2, when the data is searched, and restored into a compressed format. In conclusion, our approach facilitates string operations like concatenation, insertion, deletion and search-and-replace on the compressed file itself without the need for decompression