Rural indebtedness : concept, correlates and consequences: a study of four tribal villages in the North Lakhimpur subdivision, Assam

Indebtedness has been acknowledged as one of the most infamous stumbling blocks in the way of rural prosperity. It is cancerous, self-perpetuating, malignant and maleficent. It abates agricultural production, abashes social psyche, aggravates inequalities in the distribution of socioeconomic opportunities and benefits, arrests social progress and misdirects social efforts. In the Indian rural context, indebtedness characterizes: (i). unproductive usage of loan, (ii). usurious ensnaring of the borrower, (iii). captivation of productive resources, (iv). exercise of coercive and exploitative economic and social powers by the lender, (v). compulsion, plight, misery and feeling of guilt and helplessness, and (vi). erosion of social status of the borrower. In this study we propose an empirical study to measure indebtedness, identify its correlates and to assess the consequences of indebtedness on the productive and distributive performance on the rural economy. We have collected primary data from four tribal villages. The selection of these villages has been made purposively. We hold the opinion that the tribal population in the rural areas of Assam has been least exposed to the credit programmes launched by the public agencies and hence a study of indebtedness provides us with a deeper insight in the problem. We have observed that in the Indian context rural indebtedness is resonant with the overtones of unproductive usage, usurious ensnaring and deplorable condition of the poor farmers and agricultural labourers. We have surveyed four tribal villages and based on the data thus collected identified some measures of indebtedness that can help us operationally in analyzing the incidence, process and impacts of rural indebtedness. These measures are per capita loan and per capita loan per agricultural asset held by the households and these measures are good representatives of the degree of indebtedness. We have analyzed the productive and distributive effects of indebtedness and found that it leads to decline in agricultural productivity, captivation of productive resources and aggravation of inequalities in the rural community. Further, our finding is that indebtedness is initiated by unproductive expenditure. This in turn captivates agricultural assets, abates productivity and reduces the repaying capacity of the borrower. Our study may suggest that in order to ameliorate the conditions of the indebted rural mass we have to motivate them to minimize conspicuous consumption, especially if the households cannot afford it without borrowing. Educational planning may help us to attain this goal of making the rural mass aware of the merits of prudence and the demerits of conspicuous consumption. Further, to stop the captivation of productive assets, institutional loan should be provided on easy terms. This objective may be attained by making the cooperative and bank loans easily available.Rural indebtedness; correlates; consequences; measures of incidence; distributive effects; causal chain; Assam; primary data; tribal villages; poverty

Bright solitons in asymmetrically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate

We study the dynamics of bright solitons in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined in a highly asymmetric trap. While working within the f ramework of a variational approach we carry out the stability analysis o f BEC solitons against collapse. When the number of atoms in the soliton exceeds a critical number $N_c$, it undergoes the so called primary col lapse. We find an analytical expression for $N_c$ in terms of appropriat e experimental quantities that are used to produce and confine the conde nsate. We further demonstrate that, in the geometry of the problem consi dered, the width of the soliton varies inversely as the number of consti tuent atoms.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

The prospects of measuring the angular power spectrum of the diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission with SKA1 Low

The diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission (DGSE) is the most important diffuse foreground component for future cosmological 21-cm observations. The DGSE is also an important probe of the cosmic ray electron and magnetic field distributions in the turbulent interstellar medium (ISM) of our Galaxy. In this paper we briefly review the Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) which can be used to quantify the angular power spectrum of the sky signal directly from the visibilities measured in radio-interferometric observations. The salient features of the TGE are (1.) it deals with the gridded data which makes it computationally very fast (2.) it avoids a positive noise bias which normally arises from the system noise inherent to the visibility data, and (3.) it allows us to taper the sky response and thereby suppresses the contribution from unsubtracted point sources in the outer parts and the sidelobes of the antenna beam pattern. We also summarize earlier work where the TGE was used to measure the C_l of the DGSE using 150 MHz GMRT data. Earlier measurements of the angular power spectrum are restricted to smaller angular multipole l ~ 10^3 for the DGSE, the signal at the larger l values is dominated by the residual point sources after source subtraction. The higher sensitivity of the upcoming SKA1 Low will allow the point sources to be subtracted to a fainter level than possible with existing telescopes. We predict that it will be possible to measure the angular power spectrum of the DGSE to larger values of l with SKA1 Low. Our results show that it should be possible to achieve l_{max} ~ 10^4 and ~ 10^5 with 2 minutes and 10 hours of observations respectively.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; Accepted for publication in Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy (JOAA) special issue on "Science with the SKA: an Indian perspective

Performance Evaluation of Open-Ended ELSS Mutual Fund Schemes in India during Recession

This study examined the performance of the open-ended equity linked saving mutual fund schemes (ELSS) in India during the financial distress in 2008-2009. In this study, the month end net asset values of selected equity linked saving mutual fund schemes were considered and the data was obtained from the website of Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI). This paper empirically examined the risk-adjusted, selectivity, diversification and market-timing performances of the open-ended (ELSS) mutual fund schemes. Here, Sharpe, Treynor, Jensen and Treynor & Mazuy models were used to measure the above stated performances. It was observed that the Sharpe and Treynor ratios of the open-ended mutual fund schemes (ELSS) were negative during the recession. Similarly, the stock-selection and market-timing performances of the managers were statistically insignificant and finally, the diversification performances of the mutual fund schemes (ELSS) were found to be unsatisfactory. Therefore, it might be concluded that the overall performances of the open-ended mutual fund schemes (ELSS) were very unsatisfactory during the recession.Keywords: Mutual Fund, Performance, Recession, Sharpe model, Treynor mode

The visibility based Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) for the redshifted 21-cm power spectrum

We present the improved visibility based Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) for the power spectrum of the diffuse sky signal. The visibilities are gridded to reduce the computation, and tapered through a convolution to suppress the contribution from the outer regions of the telescope's field of view. The TGE also internally estimates the noise bias, and subtracts this out to give an unbiased estimate of the power spectrum. An earlier version of the 2D TGE for the angular power spectrum $C_{\ell}$ is improved and then extended to obtain the 3D TGE for the power spectrum $P({\bf k})$ of the 21-cm brightness temperature fluctuations. Analytic formulas are also presented for predicting the variance of the binned power spectrum. The estimator and its variance predictions are validated using simulations of $150 \, {\rm MHz}$ GMRT observations. We find that the estimator accurately recovers the input model for the 1D Spherical Power Spectrum $P(k)$ and the 2D Cylindrical Power Spectrum $P(k_\perp,k_\parallel)$, and the predicted variance is also in reasonably good agreement with the simulations.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. The definitive version will be available at http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org

Validating a novel angular power spectrum estimator using simulated low frequency radio-interferometric data

The "Tapered Gridded Estimator" (TGE) is a novel way to directly estimate the angular power spectrum from radio-interferometric visibility data that reduces the computation by efficiently gridding the data, consistently removes the noise bias, and suppresses the foreground contamination to a large extent by tapering the primary beam response through an appropriate convolution in the visibility domain. Here we demonstrate the effectiveness of TGE in recovering the diffuse emission power spectrum through numerical simulations. We present details of the simulation used to generate low frequency visibility data for sky model with extragalactic compact radio sources and diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission. We then use different imaging strategies to identify the most effective option of point source subtraction and to study the underlying diffuse emission. Finally, we apply TGE to the residual data to measure the angular power spectrum, and assess the impact of incomplete point source subtraction in recovering the input power spectrum $C_{\ell}$ of the synchrotron emission. This estimator is found to successfully recovers the $C_{\ell}$ of input model from the residual visibility data. These results are relevant for measuring the diffuse emission like the Galactic synchrotron emission. It is also an important step towards characterizing and removing both diffuse and compact foreground emission in order to detect the redshifted $21\, {\rm cm}$ signal from the Epoch of Reionization.Comment: 18 pages, 1 table, 9 figures, Accepted for publication in New Astronom

On colouring point visibility graphs

In this paper we show that it can be decided in polynomial time whether or not the visibility graph of a given point set is 4-colourable, and such a 4-colouring, if it exists, can also be constructed in polynomial time. We show that the problem of deciding whether the visibility graph of a point set is 5-colourable, is NP-complete. We give an example of a point visibility graph that has chromatic number 6 while its clique number is only 4