CLIMATE SENSITIVITY OF INDIAN AGRICULTURE

Climate change impact studies on agriculture are broadly based on agronomic-economic approach and Ricardian approach. The Ricardian approach, similar in principle to the Hedonic pricing approach of environmental valuation, has received significant attention due to its elegance and also some strong assumptions it makes. This paper attempts to extend the existing knowledge in this field by specifically addressing two important issues : (a) extent of change in climate sensitivity of Indian agriculture over time; (b) importance of accounting for spatial features in the assessment of climate sensitivity. The analysis based on four decades of data suggests that the climate sensitivity of Indian agriculture is increasing over time, particularly in the period from mid-eighties to late nineties. This finding corroborates the growing evidence of weakening agricultural productivity over the similar period in India. The results also show presence of significant positive spatial autocorrelation, necessitating estimation of climate sensitivity while controlling for the same. While many explanations may exist for the presence of spatial autocorrelation, this paper argued that inter-farmer communication could be one of the primary reasons for the spatial dependence. Field studies carried out in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu through focus group discussions provided limited evidence in this direction.Climate change, Indian Agriculture, Environmental Valuation, Spatial Econometrics, Adaptation

International Migration, Remittances and its Macroeconomic Impact on Indian Economy

This paper tried to study the impact of remittances on various macroeconomic and developmental aspects for the Indian economy. For this, the data regarding remittances and some of the macroeconomic variables like GDP, PFCE, GDFC, savings, FDI, FII, export, import and balance of trade deficit etc have been analyzed for the period 1971-2008. The study shows that remittances have been consistently increasing at very fast rate for the last 15 years which have significant implications on the above mentioned macroeconomic variables. Through this study, the importance of remittances as a source of external development finance has been discussed. At last, some of the regulatory frameworks governing the flow of remittances have also been discussed.

Vulnerability to Globalization in India: Relative Rankings of States Using Fuzzy Models

globalization, vulnerability, fuzzy inference systems, India

Assessment of the status of soil organic carbon stocks under natural forest and plantation ecosystems in southern Karnataka

A study was conducted to assess the status of soil organic carbon stocks under selected plantation and altered and natural ecosystems in southern Karnataka. Seven locations were identified for the study following the agro-climatic variability. The sites identified were Brahmavara in Udupi (coastal zone), Balehonnur in Chikkamagalur (hilly zone), Madnur and Salegrama in Hassan (northern and southern transitional zone), Alburu in Tumkur (eastern and southern dry zone), Babbur and Javagamatur in Chitradurga (central dry zone). In each of these zones, natural forest ecosystems were assessed in comparison to the plantation-based ecosystems to understand the changes in soil development with emphasis to soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks. The SOC stocks at the surface varied from 1.24 to 6.44 kg m-3 in forests and from 1.53 to 6.51 kg m-3 in different plantation ecosystems. It was found from the study that SOC stocks followed the order hilly zone (per-humid climate) > coastal zone (hot humid climate) > eastern and southern dry zone (moist semi-arid climate) > northern and southern transitional zone (dry sub-humid climate) > central dry zone (dry semi-arid climate). The soils belonged to the order Ultisols and Alfisols. The major taxa of the soils identified at sub-group level of soil taxonomy are Rhodic Kandiustults, Typic Plinthohumults, Ustic Haplohumults, Typic Rhodustalfs, Rhodic Paleustalfs, Kandic Paleustalfs and Typic Haplustalfs

Model Based Distributed Testing of Object Oriented Programs

AbstractIn recent times the software systems have evolved in size and complexity. This has resulted in usage of object oriented programming in the development of such systems. Though object oriented programs are helpful in programming large systems, testing of such systems requires much more effort and time. For this the program is analyzed to create a model based on System Dependence Graph(SDG) which is then used to find locations within the program where the state of the program can be freezed and reused while executing other test cases

Coconut-growing soils in southern Karnataka: Characterization and classification

A study was carried out to characterize and classify major coconut-growing soils of southern Karnataka and to evaluate the suitability of these soils for coconut cultivation. Seven locations were selected on the map of coconut-growing areas in southern Karnataka and delineated based on the variability of agro-climate with the help of land resource map and report of Karnataka state, generated at 2,50,000 scale by ICAR-NBSSLUP. The regions included Hosadurga (central dry zone), Gubbi and Turuvekere (eastern dry zone), Krishnarajapet (southern dry zone), Arasikere (southern transition zone), Belthangadi and Brahmavara (coastal zone) representing the density of coconut-growing areas in different agro-climatic zones. Soil profiles were studied at these selected sites. The coconut growing soils of southern Karnataka are generally deep, gravelly and well drained, sandy clay loam to clayey in texture with good structure. Soils of high rainfall areas of Belthangadi and Brahmavara were strongly acidic and rich in soil organic carbon, whereas other locations of sub-humid to semi-arid were near neutral to moderately alkaline soils with medium organic carbon content. Cation Exchange Capacity and base saturation were very low in coastal red and lateritic coconut soils and ranged from medium to high in other areas. The major taxa of the soils identified at sub-group level of soil taxonomy are Rhodic Kanhaplustults, Ustic Kandihumults, Rhodic Paleustalfs, Typic Rhodustalfs and Vertic Haplustepts

Tapping Twitter Data for Analyzing and Visualizing Public Sentiments on Censorship

The main objective of this research study is to analyse and visualize Twitter data with tags “#Censorship”. A connection was established with twitter using Twitter API, and receiving the tweets on Google Spreadsheets. Data visualization was performed using various tools such as Voyant Tools, Tableau, Google Spreadsheet and Orange in order to generate different visualizations based upon, language, geographical areas, retweets etc. The sentiment analysis was performed for the sentiments that were attached to the given set of data by the public in their respective tweets. The 23680 tweets were retrieved during the data collection time and there were 13,771 retweets out of these tweets. The most popular application for using twitter by the users was Twitter Web Client which constituted of the 33.67% (7972 tweets); the second most popular app was Android with 23.61% (5592 Tweets) and Twitter for iPhone stayed at third place with a share of 20.07% (4753 Tweets). The most frequent used Hashtags (#) in the tweets were #Twitter, #Facebook, #Google, #YouTube etc. Results show that negative tweets are enormously higher than the neutral sentiments

Vulnerability to Poverty and Vulnerability to Climate Change : Conceptual Framework, Measurement and Synergies in Policy

This paper attempts to compare the concepts and metrics related to vulnerability notion as used in the poverty literature with those in the filed of climate change. Such comparison could shed light on the understanding of the perceived and real differences between the two fields and also help to identify possible policy synergies between the climate change and poverty communities. The analysis shows that while vulnerability concepts in both the disciplines are defendable, broader policy relevant statements about vulnerability could be made if the analysis clearly identifies three primitives introduced in Ionescu et al. (2006) namely, the entity that is vulnerable, the stimulus due to which the entity is vulnerable, and the preference criteria on the outcome of concern. The analysis shows significant similarities between the two fields in terms of vulnerability measurement. The link between the vulnerability metrics in the two fields can be established through the introduction of sensitivity notion. The analysis also shows that the vulnerability metrics in both fields demand a stricter restriction (namely, complete reorder) on preference criteria on the outcome(s) of concern. The analysis identifies two issues that, if addressed, could create synergies between vulnerability assessments in the climate change and the poverty communities. First, the climate change community could benefit from exploring a notion analogous to that of poverty. In development policy, the notion of poverty enables one to recognise that there is a need to focus not only on people who are likely to become poor due to some exogenous input, but also on those who already are poor (and may become even poorer). Second, it would be interesting to explore the analogous concepts of mitigation and adaptive capacity in poverty research. Similar to their use in climate research and policy, the analysis of these concepts could lead to the more explicit consideration of the multidimensional nature of both causes and outcomes of poverty, as well as of the multiple time scales on which these occur.vulnerability, poverty, Climate change, Adaptation