Present status of Gottigere Tank : Indicator of Decision maker’s apathy

Gottigere lake with a water spread area of about 14.98 ha is located in the Bellandur Lake catchment of the South Pennar River basin. In recent years, this lake catchment has been subjected to environmental stress mainly due to the rampant unplanned developmental activities in the catchment. The functional ability of the ecosystem is impaired due to structural changes in the ecosystem. This is evident from poor water quality, breeding of disease vectors, contamination of groundwater in the catchment, frequent flooding in the catchment due to topography alteration, decline in groundwater table, erosion in lake bed, etc. The development plans of the region (current as well as the proposed) ignore the integrated planning approaches considering all components of the ecosystem. Serious threats to the sustainability of the region due to lack of holistic approaches in aquatic resources management are land use changes (removal of vegetation cover, etc.), point and non-point sources of pollution impairing water quality, dumping of solid waste (building waste, etc.). Conservation of lake ecosystem is possible only when the physical and chemical integrity of its catchment is maintained. Alteration in the catchment either due to land use changes (leading to paved surface area from vegetation cover), alteration in topography, construction of roads in the immediate vicinity are detrimental to water yield in the catchment and hence, the sustenance of the lake. Open spaces in the form of lakes and parks aid as kidney and lung in an urban ecosystem, which maintain the health of the people residing in the locality. Identification of core buffer zones and conservation of buffer zones (500 to 1000 m from shore) is to be taken up on priority for conservation and sustainable management of Bangalore lakes. Bangalore is located over a ridge delineating four watersheds, viz. Hebbal, Koramangala, Challaghatta and Vrishabhavathi. Lakes and tanks are an integral part of natural drainage and help in retaining water during rainfall, which otherwise get drained off as flash floods. Each lake harvests rainwater from its catchment and surplus flows downstream spilling into the next lake in the chain. The topography of Bangalore has uniquely supported the creation of a large number of lakes. These lakes form chains, being a series of impoundments across streams. This emphasises the interconnectivity among Bangalore lakes, which has to be retained to prevent Bangalore from flooding or from water scarcity. The main source of replenishment of groundwater is the rainfall. The slope of the terrain allows most of the rainwater to flow as run-off. With the steep gradients available in the major valleys of Bangalore, the rainwater will flow out of the city within four to five hours. Only a small fraction of the rainwater infiltrates into the soil. The infiltration of water into the subsoil has declined with more and more buildings and paved road being constructed in the city. Thus the natural drainage of Bangalore is governed by flows from the central ridge to all lower contours and is connected with various tanks and ponds. There are no major rivers flowing in Bangalore and there is an urgent need to sustain these vital ecosystems through proper conservation and management measures. The proposed peripheral ring road connecting Hosur Road (NH 7) and Mysore Road (SH 17) at Gottigere lake falls within the buffer zone of the lake. This would alter the catchment integrity and hence water yield affecting flora, fauna and local people, and ultimately lead to the disappearance of Gottigere lake. Developmental activities in lake catchments, which has altered lake’s ecological integrity is in violation of the Indian Fisheries Act – 1857, the Indian Forest Act – 1927, Wildlife (Protection) Act – 1972, Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act – 1974, Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act – 1977, Forest (Conservation Act) – 1980, Environmental (Protection) Act – 1986, Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act – 1991 and National Conservation Strategy and Policy Statement on Environment and Development – 1992. Considering 65% decline of waterbodies in Bangalore (during last three decades), decision makers should immediately take preventive measures to ensure that lake ecosystems are not affected. This report discusses the impacts due to the proposed infrastructure developmental activities in the vicinity of Gottigere tank.

An Evaluation of Inventory Management and Performance in Indian Machine Tool SMEs: An Exploratory Study

Inventory Management (IM) plays a decisive role in the enhancement of efficiency and competitiveness of manufacturing enterprises. Therefore, major manufacturing enterprises are following IM practices as a strategy to improve efficiency and achieve competitiveness. However, the spread of IM culture among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is limited due to lack of initiation, expertise and financial limitations in developed countries, leave alone developing countries. With this backdrop, this paper makes an attempt to ascertain the role and importance of IM practices and performance of SMEs in the machine tools industry of Bangalore, India. The relationship between inventory management practices and inventory cost are probed based on primary data gathered from 91 SMEs. The paper brings out that formal IM practices have a positive impact on the inventory performance of SMEs.

Studies of the specific gravity of some Indian coal ashes

One of the major problems faced by coal based thermal power stations is handling and disposal of ash. Among the various uses of fly ash, the major quantity of ash produced is used in geotechnical engineering applications such as construction of embankments, as a backfill material, etc. The generally low specific gravity of fly ash resulting in low unit weight as compared to soils is an attractive property for its use in geotechnical applications. In general, specific gravity of coal ash lies around 2.0 but can vary to a large extent (1.6 to 3.1). The variation of specific gravity of coal ash is due to the combination of various factors like gradation, particle shape, and chemical composition. Since specific gravity is an important physical property, it has been studied in depth for three Indian coal ashes and reported in this paper.

The use of tin and bronze in prehistoric southern Indian metallurgy

The medieval icons of southern India are among the most acclaimed Indian artistic innovations, especially those of the Chola Tamil kingdom (9th–10th centuries), which is best known for the Hindu iconography of the Dance of Siva that captured the imagination of master sculptor Rodin.1 Apart from these prolific images, however, not much was known about southern Indian copperbased metallurgy. Hence, these often spectacular castings have been regarded as a sudden efflorescence, almost without precedent, of skilled metallurgy as contrasted with tin-rich China or southeast Asia, for instance, where a developed copper-bronze tradition has been better appreciated.

Cluster analysis of rainfall stations of the Indian peninsula

Principal component analysis is applied to derive patterns of temporal variation of the rainfall at fifty-three stations in peninsular India. The location of the stations in the coordinate space determined by the amplitudes of the two leading eigenvectors is used to delineate them into eight clusters. The clusters obtained seem to be stable with respect to variations in the grid of stations used. Stations within any cluster occur in geographically contiguous areas.

Adaptive significance of the Indian caste system: an ecological perspective

Indian society is an agglomeration of several thousand endogamous groups or castes each with a restricted geographical range and a hereditarily determine mode of subsistence. These reproductively isolated castes may be compared to biological species, and the society thought of as a biological community with each caste having its specific ecological niche. In this paper we examine the ecological-niche relationships of castes which are directly dependent on natural resources. Evidence is presented to show that castes living together in the same region had so organized their pattern of resource use as to avoid excessive intercaste competition for limiting resources. Furthermore, territorial division of the total range of the caste regulated intra-caste competition. Hence, a particular plant or animal resource in a given locality was used almost exclusively by a given lineage within a caste generation after generation. This favoured the cultural evolution of traditions ensuring sustainable use of natural resources. This must have contributed significantly to the stability of Indian caste society over several thousand years. The collapse of the base of natural resources and increasing monetarization of the economy has, however, destroyed the earlier complementarity between the different castes and led to increasing conflicts between them in recent years.

New species of Ptychozoon (Sauria: Gekkonidae) from the Nicobar Archipelago, Indian Ocean

A new species of Ptychozoon is described from the central portion of the Nicobar Archipelago, Bay of Bengal, India. It has been formerly referred to P. kuhli, a species widely distributed in Sundaland. Ptychozoon nicobarensis sp. nov. reaches an SVL of 100.3 mm, and is diagnosable from congeneric species in showing the following combination of characters: dorsum with a tan vertebral stripe, lacking dark transverse bars; supranasals in contact; cutaneous expansions on sides of head; absence of predigital notch in preantebrachial cutaneous expansion; imbricate parachute support scales; four irregular rows of low, rounded enlarged scales on dorsum; 20-29 scales across widest portion of tail terminus; three indistinct chevrons on dorsum; 7-11 pairs of preanal pores; femoral pores absent; tail with an expanded terminal flap and weak lobe fusion at proximal border of tail terminus. The curious distribution of the new species, centred around the central Nicobars is speculated to be the result of competition with and/or predation by large gekkonid species, to the north (Gekko verreauxi) and south (G. smithii) of the group of islands occupied by the new Ptychozoon from the central Nicobars.

Impact of African orography and the Indian summer monsoon on the low-level Somali jet

The low-level jet (LLJ) over the Indian region, which is most prominent during the monsoon (June-September) season, has been studied with a general circulation model (GCM). The role of African orography in modulating this jet is the focus of this article. The presence o African orography intensifies the cross-equatorial flow. Contrary to previous modelling Studies we find that cross-equatorial flow occurs even in the absence of African orography, though this flow is muc weaker even when the Indian monsoon rainfall is high. However, the location of the meridional jet near the equator in the Somali region is linked to the Indian monsoon rainfall rather than to the land-sea contrast over Somalia. Also, the presence of African orography, and not the strength of the Indian monsoon, controls the vertical extent of the equatorial meridional wind. In an aqua-planet simulation, the cross-equatorial flow occurs about 30 to the west of the rainfall maximum. Thus, the longitudinal location of the equatorial Somali jet depends upon the occurrence of monsoon heating, but the vertical structure of the jet is on account of the western boundary current in the atmosphere due to the East African highlands under the influence of monsoonal heat source.

Visual ecology of Indian carpenter bees II: adaptations of eyes and ocelli to nocturnal and diurnal lifestyles

Most bees are diurnal, with behaviour that is largely visually mediated, but several groups have made evolutionary shifts to nocturnality, despite having apposition compound eyes unsuited to vision in dim light. We compared the anatomy and optics of the apposition eyes and the ocelli of the nocturnal carpenter bee, Xylocopa tranquebarica, with two sympatric species, the strictly diurnal X. leucothorax and the occasionally crepuscular X. tenuiscapa. The ocelli of the nocturnal X. tranquebarica are unusually large (diameter ca. 1 mm) and poorly focussed. Moreover, their apposition eyes show specific visual adaptations for vision in dim light, including large size, large facets and very wide rhabdoms, which together make these eyes 9 times more sensitive than those of X. tenuiscapa and 27 times more sensitive than those of X. leucothorax. These differences in optical sensitivity are surprisingly small considering that X. tranquebarica can fly on moonless nights when background luminance is as low as 10(-5) cd m(-2), implying that this bee must employ additional visual strategies to forage and find its way back to the nest. These strategies may include photoreceptors with longer integration times and higher contrast gains as well as higher neural summation mechanisms for increasing visual reliability in dim light.

Genetic analysis of foot-and-mouth disease virus serotype A of Indian origin and detection of positive selection and recombination in leader protease- and capsid-coding regions

The leader protease (L-pro) and capsid-coding sequences (P1) constitute approximately 3 kb of the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV). We studied the phylogenetic relationship of 46 FMDV serotype A isolates of Indian origin collected during the period 1968-2005 and also eight vaccine strains using the neighbour-joining tree and Bayesian tree methods. The viruses were categorized under three major groups - Asian, Euro-South American and European. The Indian isolates formed a distinct genetic group among the Asian isolates. The Indian isolates were further classified into different genetic subgroups (<5% divergence). Post-1995 isolates were divided into two subgroups while a few isolates which originated in the year 2005 from Andhra Pradesh formed a separate group. These isolates were closely related to the isolates of the 1970s. The FMDV isolates seem to undergo reverse mutation or onvergent evolution wherein sequences identical to the ancestors are present in the isolates in circulation. The eight vaccine strains included in the study were not related to each other and belonged to different genetic groups. Recombination was detected in the L-pro region in one isolate (A IND 20/82) and in the VP1 coding 1D region in another isolate (A RAJ 21/96). Positive selection was identified at aa positions 23 in the L-pro (P<0.05; 0.046*) and at aa 171 in the capsid protein VP1 (P<0.01; 0.003**).

Sensible heat fluxes during the active and break phases of the southwest monsoon over the Indian region

Based on the theory given by Saltzman and Ashe (1976), sensible heat fluxes are calculated for the active and break phases of the southwest monsoon over the Indian region. The conclusion drawn is that the sensible heat flux is generally larger during the break monsoon situation when compared with that for the active monsoon situation. The synoptic heat flux is negligible when compared with mean and diurnal heat fluxes over the Indian region even during the monsoon season.

Indian developments in ultrasonics and acoustic emission methods

Fundamental investigations in ultrasonics in India date back to the early 20th century. But, fundamental and applied research in the field of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) came much later. In the last four decades it has grown steadily in academic institutions, national laboratories and industry. Currently, commensurate with rapid industrial growth and realisation of the benefits of NDE, the activity is becoming much stronger, deeper, broader and very wide spread. Acoustic Emission (AE) is a recent entry into the field of nondestructive evaluation. Pioneering efforts in India in AE were carried out at the Indian Institute of Science in the early 1970s. The nuclear industry was the first to utilise it. Current activity in AE in the country spans materials research, incipient failure detection, integrity evaluation of structures, fracture mechanics studies and rock mechanics. In this paper, we attempt to project the current scenario in ultrasonics and acoustic emission research in India.