Diversification In Employment Structure And Status Of Rural Women Workers In Ernakulam District

The basic objective of the present study has been to observe the process and pattern of employment diversification among the rural women workers in Ernakulam district. The evidences are that the women workers in the rural areas of the state are being increasingly diversified into the tertiary sector. The clear cut evidence for the fact that in Kerala non-agricultural employment of rural women is increasing with more and more of them getting diversified into the tertiary sector. The women get more self esteem and recognition in terms of the work being done by them. In the urban areas of the state as a poverty eradicating measure the Kerala government has already introduced a new scheme under the banner of Kudumbasree. Another fact noticed in the study that the sectoral shift of women workers has posed a grave problem to the agricultural sector. The reluctance of workers to do manual jobs on land and the prevalence of high wages among the agricultural labours has left many a cultivable area fallow or has induced farmers to shift to less labour –intensive crops. The situation is expected to worsen in future as even the high wages fail to attract the young generation to this sector. To conclude the study has fulfilled all its objectives, viz; highlighting the rural employment structure in Kerala, examining the process, pattern, determinants and consequences of diversification among rural women workers in the sample villages. Being the first of its kind at the micro level in the state it contributes to the available literature in the area enriching the database that is crucially lacking for devising projects at the village and block-level. There exists ample scope for future research of similar nature in an urban background where the secondary data-sources are hinding towards a reversal of trends from non-agriculture to agriculture.

Regional Development in Kerala A Study of Malappuram District

The study makes an attempt to examine the inter regional variations in Kerala in economic development with respect to the important indicators of development over the period 1971 to 2001. The study takes districts as the unit of analysis because this is an attempt to find out the status of districts in Kerala.The study proved that there exists inter district disparities in economic development measured in terms of different indices used for analysis.. statistical estimation of variation proves that there is high degree of variation in industrial sector followed by social and economic infrastructure. The composite index of industrial development shows that the highest index is 1.395 which is five times greater than that of the lowest index 0.273. More or less the same pattern of differences are noticed in most of the indicators of the development. A ranking of the district on the basis of the overall development indicators shows that Malappuram is the least developed district in Kerala. In case of almost all indicators of development Malappuram is lagging behind all other districts.

Classification of Handwritten Characters: Definition, Identification and Utilisation of Regional Characteristics for Lower Case English Characters

A new procedure for the classification of lower case English language characters is presented in this work . The character image is binarised and the binary image is further grouped into sixteen smaller areas ,called Cells . Each cell is assigned a name depending upon the contour present in the cell and occupancy of the image contour in the cell. A data reduction procedure called Filtering is adopted to eliminate undesirable redundant information for reducing complexity during further processing steps . The filtered data is fed into a primitive extractor where extraction of primitives is done . Syntactic methods are employed for the classification of the character . A decision tree is used for the interaction of the various components in the scheme . 1ike the primitive extraction and character recognition. A character is recognized by the primitive by primitive construction of its description . Openended inventories are used for including variants of the characters and also adding new members to the general class . Computer implementation of the proposal is discussed at the end using handwritten character samples . Results are analyzed and suggestions for future studies are made. The advantages of the proposal are discussed in detail .

A Study on the Transport and Distribution of Atmospheric Aerosols and its Influence on Regional Meteorological Parameters over the Indian Subcontinent

This doctoral thesis addresses the growing concern about the significant changes in the climatic and weather patterns due to the aerosol loading that have taken place in the Indo Gangetic Plain(IGP)which includes most of the Northern Indian region. The study region comprises of major industrial cities in India (New Delhi, Kanpur, Allahabad, Jamshedpur and Kolkata). Northern and central parts of India are one of the most thickly populated areas in the world and have the most intensely farmed areas. Rapid increase in population and urbanization has resulted in an abrupt increase in aerosol concentrations in recent years. The IGP has a major source of coal; therefore most of the industries including numerous thermal power plants that run on coal are located around this region. They inject copious amount of aerosols into the atmosphere. Moreover, the transport of dust aerosols from arid locations is prevalent during the dry months which increase the aerosol loading in theatmosphere. The topography of the place is also ideal for the congregation of aerosols. It is bounded by the Himalayas in the north, Thar Desert in the west, the Vindhyan range in the south and Brahmaputra ridge in the east. During the non‐monsoon months (October to May) the weather in the location is dry with very little rainfall. Surface winds are weak during most of the time in this dry season. The aerosols that reach the location by means of long distance transport and from regional sources get accumulated under these favourable conditions. The increase in aerosol concentration due to the complex combination of aerosol transport and anthropogenic factors mixed with the contribution from the natural sources alters the optical properties and the life time of clouds in the region. The associated perturbations in radiative balance have a significant impact on the meteorological parameters and this in turn determines the precipitation forming process. Therefore, any change in weather which disturbs the normal hydrological pattern is alarming in the socio‐economic point of view. Hence, the main focus of this work is to determine the variation in transport and distribution of aerosols in the region and to understand the interaction of these aerosols with meteorological parameters and cloud properties.

India's Engineering Exports: Growth, Concentration and Diversification

The unprecedented increase in competition as well as protectionism in world markets makes it imperative for a country like India to get much more energetically involved in the export business and make the dictum "export and flourish" a really true proposition, as against a somewhat passive "export and perish" approach followed during the last three and a half decades. At present, India needs to evolve new export strategies to cope with the changing international scenario and to ensure a steady improvement in the otherwise sagging export performance. A search for such strategic measures becomes all the more important in view of the all-out efforts of the government for expanding the country's exports to tide over the crippling balance of payment deficits and to generate necessary foreign exchange to meet the import requirements for accelerating the tempo of economic development. The present study is an endeavour in this direction. Taking engineering exports as an example, the study demonstrates alternative ways of understanding indepth export performance analysis and learning lessons for better performance in future

Regional climate model applications on sub-regional scales over the Indian monsoon region: The role of domain size on downscaling uncertainty

Regional climate models are becoming increasingly popular to provide high resolution climate change information for impacts assessments to inform adaptation options. Many countries and provinces requiring these assessments are as small as 200,000 km2 in size, significantly smaller than an ideal domain needed for successful applications of one-way nested regional climate models. Therefore assessments on sub-regional scales (e.g., river basins) are generally carried out using climate change simulations performed for relatively larger regions. Here we show that the seasonal mean hydrological cycle and the day-to-day precipitation variations of a sub-region within the model domain are sensitive to the domain size, even though the large scale circulation features over the region are largely insensitive. On seasonal timescales, the relatively smaller domains intensify the hydrological cycle by increasing the net transport of moisture into the study region and thereby enhancing the precipitation and local recycling of moisture. On daily timescales, the simulations run over smaller domains produce higher number of moderate precipitation days in the sub-region relative to the corresponding larger domain simulations. An assessment of daily variations of water vapor and the vertical velocity within the sub-region indicates that the smaller domains may favor more frequent moderate uplifting and subsequent precipitation in the region. The results remained largely insensitive to the horizontal resolution of the model, indicating the robustness of the domain size influence on the regional model solutions. These domain size dependent precipitation characteristics have the potential to add one more level of uncertainty to the downscaled projections.

From Market Concentration to Market Diversification: WTO and the Marine Products Exports from Kerala- Using ARIMA

Marine product export does something pivotal in the fish export economy of Kerala. The post WTO period has witnessed a strengthening of food safety and quality standards applied on food products in the developed countries. In the case of the primary importers, like the EU, the US and Japan, market actions will have far reaching reverberations and implications for the marine product exports from developing nations. The article focuses on Kerala’s marine product exports that had been targeting the markets of the EU, the US and Japan, and the concomitant shift in markets owing to the stringent stipulations under the WTO regime. Despite the overwhelming importance of the EU in the marine product exports of the state, the pronounced influence of irregular components on the quantity and value of marine product exports to the EU in the post WTO period raises concern. However, the tendencies of market diversification validated by the forecast generated for the emerging markets of the SEA, the MEA and others, to an extent, allay the pressures on the marine product export sector of the state which had hitherto relied heavily on the markets of the EU, the US and Japan

Regional Workshop on Plagiarism

Regional Workshop conducted by University Library in collaboration with UGC INFLIBNET and Cochin University of Science & Technology, on 9th Feb 2015