Community Slum Sanitation in India: A Practitioner's Guide

Following the launch of the National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP, 2008), a number of initiatives were taken: states formulated their State Sanitation Strategies, and more than 150 cities drafted or are in the process of drafting the City Sanitation Plans (CSPs, by March 2014). The NUSP recommended development of special strategies for slums and poor settlements as an integral part of the CSPs. But the significant presence of slums in Indian cities (estimated between 9 and 14 million, or 12 to 16 percent of India's 79 million urban households), and the specific difficulties that these settlements face in accessing basic sanitation (and other) services, demanded a greater understanding of the conditions, and exploration of strategies used to address these. Section one presents a short introduction to the context of urban India and urban sanitation, followed by a brief review of programmatic responses by GoI to improve slum sanitation services. Thereafter, the guide draws out the critical factors or drivers using examples from successful community slum sanitation initiatives reported from the urban centers selected for this study. A set of generic activity clusters and steps are included at the end the preparatory, planning, implementation, and M&E stages of community sanitation initiatives

Effectiveness of helmets in preventing severe injuries in a setting with poorly enforced quality standards

Helmets save lives, yet many countries do not have laws about their quality assessment or how they should be worn. We assessed the effectiveness of helmet use in preventing injuries in such a setting. The data were extracted from a large road traffic injury surveillance study in Karachi, Pakistan. We assessed the association of wearing helmets with several injury outcomes including deaths, injury severity (via New Injury Severity Score, NISS ≥ 9) and moderate or severe injury (via Abbreviated Injury Score, AIS ≥ 2) to head, face, or other regions of the body. The data about helmet use was available for about 109,210 riders injured between January 2007 and December 2013. Only 6% of riders wore helmets, whereas this proportion was less than one percent in pillion riders and women. The rates were also lower among those aged 18 years or younger (1%) and those aged 18 to 25 years (4%). About 2% of riders died; 34% had an injury to the head region, 30% to face, 1% to chest, 5% to abdominal, 46% to extremities, and 61% to external body regions. Likelihood of dying was low among helmet users (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 0.37, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.28 to 0.50). Helmets reduced the likelihood of moderate to severe injuries to the head (aOR = 0.68, 95% CI = 0.58 to 0.80) but not to the face region (aOR = 1.37, 95%CI = 1.17 to 1.62). Helmet users also had severer injuries in other body regions except for chest injuries. Helmets prevented deaths and severe head injuries but had limited effectiveness in preventing facial injuries in this setting with poor helmet use standards. More work is needed to understand the helmet wearing and rider behaviours in helmet users in this setting

Decentralization and service delivery

Dissatisfied with centralized approaches to delivering local public services, a large number of countries are decentralizing responsibility for these services to lower-level, locally elected governments. The results have been mixed. The paper provides a framework for evaluating the benefits and costs, in terms of service delivery, of different approaches to decentralization, based on relationships of accountability between different actors in the delivery chain. Moving from a model of central provision to that of decentralization to local governments introduces a new relationship of accountability-between national and local policymakers-while altering existing relationships, such as that between citizens and elected politicians. Only by examining how these relationships change can we understand why decentralization can, and sometimes cannot, lead to better service delivery. In particular, the various instruments of decentralization-fiscal, administrative, regulatory, market, and financial-can affect the incentives facing service providers, even though they relate only to local policymakers. Likewise, and perhaps more significantly, the incentives facing local and national politicians can have a profound effect on the provision of local services. Finally, the process of implementing decentralization can be as important as the design of the system in influencing service delivery outcomes.Public Sector Economics&Finance,National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Governance Indicators

Screening of Wheat Germplasm for Various Phenological and Grain Yield Traits

Wheat germplasm were evaluated at experimental Farm of ARI, Mingora Swat, for various characteristics. The experiment was arranged in Randomized Complete Block design with three replications. A plot size of 4x5 m2 was maintained. Wheat Genotype,  WG6 took maximum (138) days to heading followed by Genotype WG13 with maximum of 136 days while Genotypes, WG1, WG3, WG5, and WG12 took minimum of 133 days to heading. Genotypes WG1 and WG12 took maximum (184) days to maturity while Genotype WG2 and WG8 matured earlier (175 days). Maximum plant height (103 cm) at maturity was recorded in wheat Genotype WG11 which was significantly more than that of all other used Genotypes. The minimum of 88 cm plant height was recorded in Genotypes WG14 and WG19. Significantly higher yield of 4642 kg per hectares was recorded in Genotype WG15 followed by Genotype WG20 with grain yield of 4442 kg per hectares. It is concluded that variety well adapted to the agro-ecological conditions of Swat can be selected from these Genotypes for cultivation. Keywords: Screening, Wheat germplasm, Phonological traits, Grain yiel

An Improved DC Recovery Method from AC Coefficients of DCT-Transformed Images

Motivated by the work of Uehara et al. [1], an improved method to recover DC coefficients from AC coefficients of DCT-transformed images is investigated in this work, which finds applications in cryptanalysis of selective multimedia encryption. The proposed under/over-flow rate minimization (FRM) method employs an optimization process to get a statistically more accurate estimation of unknown DC coefficients, thus achieving a better recovery performance. It was shown by experimental results based on 200 test images that the proposed DC recovery method significantly improves the quality of most recovered images in terms of the PSNR values and several state-of-the-art objective image quality assessment (IQA) metrics such as SSIM and MS-SSIM.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, ICIP 201

Economic Analysis Based on Benefit Cost Ratio Approach for Rice Varieties of Malakand Division

Different rice varieties of Malakand division were economically compared using cost benefit analysis approachduring 2014. Data was recorded on a randomly selected sample size of 50 farmers in three districts (Swat,Malakand and Lower Dir) by structured questionnaire. Rice varieties namely, Fakhre Malakand, JP5, Basmati-385, Sara Saila and Mardanai were used in the study. The total per acre paddy and straw yield of rice varietiesamounted a sum of Rs.165000 for Fakhre Malakand, Rs. 115000 for Basmati 385, Rs.110000 for JP5,Rs.104000 for Sara Saila and Rs.93000 for Mardanai. The Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) was higher for varietyFakhre Malakand having value of 3.24 and least for variety Mardanai with a value of 1.39. The varieties Basmati385, JP5 and Sara Saila presented a close value of Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) with respect to each other viz. 1.95,1.82 and 1.67 respectively. On the basis of BCR values Fakhre Malakand found to have more commercialbenefits to the farming community of the area than the other cultivated varieties.Keywords: Cost benefit ratio, Rice varietie

ITERATIVE APPROXIMATIONS FOR GENERALIZED NONEXPANSIVE MAPPINGS USING K ITERATION PROCESS IN BANACH SPACES

Let $H$ be a nonempty subset of a Banach space $X$. A mapping$T:H\rightarrow H$ is said to be generalized $\alpha$-nonexpansive if there is a realnumber $\alpha\in[0,1)$ such that for all $x,y\in H$, we have\begin{eqnarray*}\frac{1}{2}||x-Tx||\leq||x-y||\end{eqnarray*}\begin{eqnarray*}||Tx-Ty||\leq\alpha||Tx-Ty||+\alpha||Ty-x||+(1-2\alpha)||x-y||.\end{eqnarray*}In this paper, we obtain some weak and strong convergence theoremsfor such mappings using K-iteration process in uniformly convex Banach space setting. Our results extend and improve many results in the literature

Students’ Perception on Character Education in the Novel Calabai

This study aims to find the value of character education in Novel ‘Calabai’ through students’ perception. This study also accustoms Literature students doing analysis and finding the surface and the latent meaning in a literary work. This study reveals that  literary work not only displays a beautiful word string but beyond it there are meanings of life education. This study uses descriptive qualitative method where this study described the results of students’ perception about character education in novel “Calabai”. Data resource of this research is the novel Calabai by Pepy Al Bayquni. Coding sheet is used to code or to take a note of four students’ overview, understanding, thinking or interpretation on values of character education in novel Calabai. Three stages of analyzing data: deconstruction, interpretation, and reconstruction. There are 91 data contains character education. The  91 data are spreaded into 32 values of  character education