Coastal regulation zone rules in coastal panchayats (villages) of Kerala, India vis-a` -vis socio-economic impacts from the recently introduced peoples’ participatory program for local self-governance and sustainable development

Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification was issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forest of Government of India in February 1991 as a part of the Environmental Protection Act of 1986 to protect the coast from eroding and to preserve its natural resources. The initial notification did not distinguish the variability and diversity of various coastal states before enforcing it on the various states and Union Territories. Impact assessments were not carried out to assess its impact on socio-economic life of the coastal population. For the very same reason, it was unnoticed or rather ignored till 1994 when the Supreme Court of India made a land mark judgment on the fate of the coastal aquaculture which by then had established as an economically successful industry in many South Indian States. Coastal aquaculture in its modern form was a prohibited activity within CRZ. Lately, only various stakeholders of the coast realized the real impact of the CRZ rules on their property rights andbusiness. To overcome the initial drawbacks several amendments were made in the regulation to suit regional needs. In 1995, another great transformation took place in the State of Kerala as a part of the reorganization of the local self government institutions into a decentralized three tier system called ‘‘Panchayathi Raj System’’. In 1997, the state government also decided to transfer the power with the required budget outlay to the grass root level panchayats (villages) and municipalities to plan and implement the various projects in their localities with the full participation of the local people by constituting Grama Sabhas (Peoples’ Forum). It is called the ‘‘Peoples’ Planning Campaign’’(Peoples’ Participatory Programme—PPP for Local Level Self-Governance). The management of all the resources including the local natural resources was largely decentralized to the level of local communities and villages. Integrated, sustainable coastal zone management has become the concern of the local population. The paper assesses the socio-economic impact of the centrally enforced CRZ and the state sponsored PPP on the coastal community in Kerala and suggests measures to improve the system and living standards of the coastal people within the framework of CRZ.

Study of the Oceanic Heat Budget Components over the Arabian Sea during the Formation and Evolution of Super Cyclone, Gonu

Oceans play a vital role in the global climate system. They absorb the incoming solar energy and redistribute the energy through horizontal and vertical transports. In this context it is important to investigate the variation of heat budget components during the formation of a low-pressure system. In 2007, the monsoon onset was on 28th May. A well- marked low-pressure area was formed in the eastern Arabian Sea after the onset and it further developed into a cyclone. We have analysed the heat budget components during different stages of the cyclone. The data used for the computation of heat budget components is Objectively Analyzed air-sea flux data obtained from WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) project. Its horizontal resolution is 1° × 1°. Over the low-pressure area, the latent heat flux was 180 Wm−2. It increased to a maximum value of 210 Wm−2 on 1st June 2007, on which the system was intensified into a cyclone (Gonu) with latent heat flux values ranging from 200 to 250 Wm−2. It sharply decreased after the passage of cyclone. The high value of latent heat flux is attributed to the latent heat release due to the cyclone by the formation of clouds. Long wave radiation flux is decreased sharply from 100 Wm−2 to 30 Wm−2 when the low-pressure system intensified into a cyclone. The decrease in long wave radiation flux is due to the presence of clouds. Net heat flux also decreases sharply to −200 Wm−2 on 1st June 2007. After the passage, the flux value increased to normal value (150 Wm−2) within one day. A sharp increase in the sensible heat flux value (20 Wm−2) is observed on 1st June 2007 and it decreased there- after. Short wave radiation flux decreased from 300 Wm−2 to 90 Wm−2 during the intensification on 1st June 2007. Over this region, short wave radiation flux sharply increased to higher value soon after the passage of the cyclone.

A Classification of Sandhi Rules for Suffix Separation in Malayalam

Suffix separation plays a vital role in improving the quality of training in the Statistical Machine Translation from English into Malayalam. The morphological richness and the agglutinative nature of Malayalam make it necessary to retrieve the root word from its inflected form in the training process. The suffix separation process accomplishes this task by scrutinizing the Malayalam words and by applying sandhi rules. In this paper, various handcrafted rules designed for the suffix separation process in the English Malayalam SMT are presented. A classification of these rules is done based on the Malayalam syllable preceding the suffix in the inflected form of the word (check_letter). The suffixes beginning with the vowel sounds like ആല, ഉെെ, ഇല etc are mainly considered in this process. By examining the check_letter in a word, the suffix separation rules can be directly applied to extract the root words. The quick look up table provided in this paper can be used as a guideline in implementing suffix separation in Malayalam language

Strongly distance-balanced graphs and graph products

A graph G is strongly distance-balanced if for every edge uv of G and every i 0 the number of vertices x with d.x; u/ D d.x; v/ 1 D i equals the number of vertices y with d.y; v/ D d.y; u/ 1 D i. It is proved that the strong product of graphs is strongly distance-balanced if and only if both factors are strongly distance-balanced. It is also proved that connected components of the direct product of two bipartite graphs are strongly distancebalanced if and only if both factors are strongly distance-balanced. Additionally, a new characterization of distance-balanced graphs and an algorithm of time complexity O.mn/ for their recognition, wheremis the number of edges and n the number of vertices of the graph in question, are given

Equal opportunity networks, distance-balanced graphs, and Wiener game

Given a graph G and a set X ⊆ V(G), the relative Wiener index of X in G is defined as WX (G) = {u,v}∈X 2  dG(u, v) . The graphs G (of even order) in which for every partition V(G) = V1 +V2 of the vertex set V(G) such that |V1| = |V2| we haveWV1 (G) = WV2 (G) are called equal opportunity graphs. In this note we prove that a graph G of even order is an equal opportunity graph if and only if it is a distance-balanced graph. The latter graphs are known by several characteristic properties, for instance, they are precisely the graphs G in which all vertices u ∈ V(G) have the same total distance DG(u) = v∈V(G) dG(u, v). Some related problems are posed along the way, and the so-called Wiener game is introduced.