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Abstract

‘Women Empowerment’ has been now an important phrase of discussion for the social scientists. The concept of ‘Empowerment’ was firstly highlighted by the Political Scientists. Undoubtedly, effective utilization of human potentials and realization of knowledge about him/herself are believed to be the most critical capabilities of individuals. Probably this is the root of ‘Empowerment’. The term ‘Women Empowerment’ symbolizes women’s realization about their potentials. On the other hand, SHG approach intends to highlight towards unfolding the potentials of women through group approach, enabling them to help themselves by their own capacity. In spite of this, the condition of women SHGs is in doldrums. This might be quite difficult to generalize the whole scenario. The study is a modest endeavor to revisit women SHGs (developed by NGOs) of East Singhbhum districts of Jharkhand. Of the various factors attributed to tribal socio-economic lives of family based farmers, gender role is considered as the important factor. Tribal women in almost all walks of life are sharing responsibilities in domestic as well as economic sector.The study is based on Ex- post facto research design. The methods of data collection were quantitative and qualitative in nature and were aimed to seek answers to certain research questions. Participatory Rural Appraisal and FGD are being the dominant methods.

The current systems of journal rating and evaluation have long been criticized for their emphasis on narrow metrics, such as the journal impact factor (JIF), which often fail to reflect the broader contributions of academic work. Despite their widespread use, these systems frequently reinforce inequities within academia, marginalize underrepresented voices, and fail to prioritize the societal impacts of research (Fig. 13.1).
This chapter consolidates recommendations for reforming journal rating systems, emphasizing fairness, inclusivity, and societal impact. Drawing on existing literature and expert recommendations, we outline a comprehensive framework for designing a rating system that balances academic rigor with accessibility and relevance.
13.1. Revising Evaluation Metrics
The reliance on metrics such as JIF has perpetuated a cycle of prioritizing high-citation fields and well resourced institutions. Garfield (2006), the founder of the JIF, himself noted that it was never intended to serve as the singular measure of research quality, yet its dominance in academia persists. Critics argue that the JIF favors fields with inherently higher citation rates, sidelining disciplines such as the humanities, social sciences, and regional studies (Moher et al., 2018). Moreover, the JIF incentivizes salacious or sensational findings that attract citations, often at the expense of methodological rigor (Brembs et al., 2013). To address these issues, scholars have proposed alternative evaluation metrics that prioritize broader dimensions of impact. For example, the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al., 2015) outlines ten principles for responsible research evaluation,

It is now a fait accompli that for enhancement of the economic condition of the farmers, just growing of the variety of crops is not sufficient. Along with the crop husbandry, it is the need of the time that farmers must integrate other enterprises with traditional crop production practices. Integration of various farm enterprises in a farm ensures growth and stability in overall productivity and profitability. It also ensures recycling of residues, optimization of resources, reduction of risk and generation of employment. Various enterprises that could be included in farming system are agronomical crops, vegetables, fruits, flower cultivation, dairy, poultry, fishery, goat keeping, piggery, sericulture, mushroom cultivation, agro forestry, bee keeping, silviculture, agro-based industries and food processing. A judicious mix of enterprises complementary to crops and suited to the given farm situations and farmer’s preference would bring overall prosperity.
 
The Integrated Farming System (IFS)  is a complex inter-related matrix of soil, plant, animals, implements, power, labour, capital and other inputs controlled in part by farm families and influenced by varying degrees of political, economic, institutional and social forces that operate at many levels. Under farming system, the farm is viewed in a holistic manner. Farmers are subjected to many socio-economic, bio-physical, institutional, administrative and technological constraints. Integrated farming system conceptually is a set of elements or components that are inter-related with each other and which are interact among themselves.

Introduction

Agriculture has always been. India’s most important economic sector. To improve this agriculture betterment, it needs principally two important sectors, one is public sector and another one is private sector. In India, generally, Ministry of agriculture and co-operation, State department of agriculture, State agricultural universities, ICAR and its transfer of technology projects are the major public extension service providers

The contribution of public extension in attaining self-reliance in food production is very well recognized. But in this changing time of globalization, public extension alone is not sufficient to address the multi-faceted problems faced by farmers. Also the performance of public sector extension is under scrutiny. Rivera et al (2000) reported that the public extension system is now seen as outdated, top-down, paternalistic, inflexible, subject to bureaucratic inefficiencies and therefore unable to cope with the dynamic demands of modern agriculture.

1. Introduction

Library enhances socioeconomic development by creating a knowledgeable society, empowering marginalized people, and promoting economic activity, skill learning, cultural identity enrichment, and decision-making participation. These services are supported by infrastructure, ICT, media. Libraries are responsible for knowledge, acquisition, management, fostering mutual relationships between librarians, the publics, and stakeholders. Its role as a storehouse of resources worldwide, including acquiring, organizing, preserving, storing, and making information available. Public libraries are important for public infrastructure, community health, and supporting social development goals. The contributions of the various types of libraries are discussed below:

1.1. National Library

A country's reference library is called its national library. It is the resource that all kinds of libraries utilize since it has a collection of all books published by Academic Library nationals in every subject area, as well as writings about the nation written by both nationals and non-citizens and by people in need of materials made in the nation. As a result, it is responsible for maintaining the country's cultural legacy and making the national bibliography available each year.

ABSTRACT

Indian farming community is facing a multitude of problems to maximize crop productivity. In spite of successful research on new agricultural practices concerning crop cultivation, the majority of farmers is not getting upper-bound yield due to several reasons. One of the reasons is that expert/scientific advice regarding crop cultivation is not reaching farming community in a timely manner. It is true that India possesses a valuable agricultural knowledge and expertise. However, a wide information gap exists between the research level and practice. Indian farmers need timely expert advice to make them more productive and competitive. In this paper, we made an effort to present a solution to bridge the information gap by exploiting advances in Information Technology (IT). We propose a framework of a cost-effective agricultural information dissemination system (AgrIDS) to disseminate expert agriculture knowledge to the farming community to improve the crop productivity. Some of the crucial benefits of AgrIDS are as follows. It is a scalable system which can be incrementally developed and extended to cover all the farmers (crops) of India in a cost effective manner. It enables the farmer to cultivate a crop with expertise, as that of an agricultural expert, by disseminating both crop and location specific expert advice in a personalized and timely manner. With AgrIDS, the lag period between research effort to practice can be reduced significantly. Finally, the proposed system assumes a great importance due to the trend of globalization, as it aims to provide expert advice which is crucial to for the Indian farmer to harvest different kinds of crop varieties based on the demand in the world market.

Abstract

Last few decades have witnessed an immense technological advancement in the education sector in India. With an advancement of technology, new gadgets are flooding the Indian market continuously bringing an immense opportunity for the education sector to improve upon the course delivery system. Higher education sector in India is adopting such new technologies in course delivery at a slow pace; however, there remains still a far way to traverse for the Indian education sector in order to achieve a perceptible and effective technology-infusion in the academic delivery arena. This paper is devoted to present an expository review on the usefulness of new gadgets, like smart phones, e-book reader as well as tablet PC, in both class-room education-delivery segments as well as in distance education sector in India.

Introduction

India is an agriculture-based country and it contributes most to the economy of the country. Different types of crops are cultivated in a wide range in different ecological regions based on different seasons. So, crop residue is also generated in an extended way by cultivation (Devi et. al 2017). Crop residue is the left over part of the crop after harvesting. In India, crop residue generates around 600 Mt and from which cereals are 70%, fibres 13%, oilseeds 6%, pulses 3%, sugarcane 2%, and others 6% (Jain et al., 2014). Corn production has increased more than 15 times from 1950-51 to 2016-2017. Rice, wheat, millet, barley, and maize are important cereal crops in Uttar Pradesh (Roy and Ahmad, 2015). Traditionally, Crop residue was used as cattle feed, animal bedding, cooking fuel, organic manure, etc. and some residues were used in making handicraft products by rural women. but still, a huge amount of residue is left without management and farmers have no option left except to burn it. About 90 to 140 Mt of crop residue burning in the field or households as fuels (Jain et al., 2014). In the process of harvesting and threshing, residues are left behind in the f ield. Farmers need to clear their fields early for the planting of the next crop so they do have not enough time and it is tough to clear the field at that time. Therefore, the farmers opt for the burning of residue in harvested fields due to a lack of access to user-friendly, cost- and time-effective options. The burning of crop residue creates many issues and effects on the environment and health badly. In a report of NAAS in 2017, it was estimated that in November 2016 at the period of rice residue burning, the NASA satellite images showed the intensity of rice residue burning in Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand was very high. It is doing an additional job of increasing air pollution with vehicles, chimneys, industries, etc. Crop residues release many gases by burning them and these gases are contributing to global warming.

8.1 Introduction

The objective of this chapter is to develop a smart control for site-specific management of fixed irrigation system with Blynk app. Mobile app is designed to control the water management in field. The complete system comprises of two sections field device and mobile app. Field device comprises of Arduino, Node MCU, Power supply, LCD, Relay board, soil moisture sensor, temperature & humidity sensor, water level sensor, motor1, motor2. The system is designed to establish control and communication with specific agricultural field to take sensory data from the sensors and control the PUMP IN motor and PUMP OUT motor with the help of mobile app. Fig.8.1 shows a block diagram for a system.

Introduction

Pulse production in India has fluctuated widely with no long-term trend, leading to a steady decline in per capita availability per day, i.e. from 60.7 grams to 33.40 grams during 1951 to 2001, while its average requirement is about 65 gram per day per head. The pulses used to serve a low cost food to meet the protein requirement of a large sector of people in India. But, the pulses are becoming out of reach for the common people of country because of its continuing shoring prices. A Technology Mission on Pulse production was launched by Government of India in 1986-87 as a special drive to increase the pulse production in the country. The vision of Technology Mission of Pulse is attaining self reliance in pulses for household nutritional security and sustainability of the production system. The mission statement was to increase Pulse production from existing (IX plan) 131.4 lakh tonnes to 162 lakh tonnes; Productivity from 594 kg/ha to 702 kg/ha and per capita availability of pulses from 35 g to 40 g per day at affordable price. Unfortunately, the country has not been able to achieve self-sufficiency in the pulse production. During the last 40 years, the acreage under pulse crops and its production remained almost between 21-24 million hectares and 10-15 million tonnes, respectively. Consequently, the country has had to depend on import of pulses every year to meet the part of its shortage. The National Commission of Agriculture had estimated that the country should plan to produce about 25 million tonnes of pulses by the end of 2000, but we could achieve only about 14 million tonnes. Presently, the area and the production of pulse crops account for about 18.50 and 7.20 per cent (2003-04) of total area under foodgrains and total food grains production in the country, respectively.

ABSTRACT

The present study was carried out to assess the knowledge level of dairy Entrepreneurs of Patna District and to find the co-relation between the socioeconomic variables and the training needs. This study was conducted by personally interviewing 100 dairy farmers, sent for training at B.V.C. Patna by different Agencies. Majority of the respondents (58.20%) had medium level of knowledge flowed by 26% respondents with high level of knowledge, while some of the respondents (15.80%) had low level of knowledge about dairy entrepreneurship. The study of co-relation between socio-economic variables and training need of the respondents showed that variables like education (0.469), social participation (0.500) and the knowledge (0.734) were significantly and positively co-related with the training need. Whereas variables like age (0.063) family size (0.193) and land holding (0.072) were found to be positively but non-significantly co-related with the training needs while, the caste (-0.093) was found to be negatively and non-significantly co-related with the training needs at 0.05% level of probability. Therefore it is imperative on the part of change agency to utilize the variables gainfully so as to give needed push to knowledge level in the area of Dairy entrepreneurship development.

Distribution channels are behind every product and service that consumers and business buyers purchase everywhere. Product distribution is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. Usually, combination on institutions specializing in manufacturing, wholesaling, retailing and many other areas join force in Distribution channels. A Distribution channels are a set of inter-dependent organization involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption. Distribution channels decisions play a role of Strategic importance in the overall presence and success a company enjoys in the market palace.

1. Introduction

Sustainability embodies an ecological vision aimed at fostering enduring human coexistence on Earth. Over time, its definition has evolved in literature and context, generating ongoing debate. Generally, experts frame sustainability around three pillars: social, economic, and environmental. While environmental concerns often dominate discussions, sustainability encompasses broader challenges like pollution, land degradation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and ecosystem service decline. This concept influences decision-making globally, politically, and personally.

Sustainable development, often used interchangeably with sustainability, is distinguished by UNESCO as a long-term objective versus the diverse processes and pathways to achieve it. Within the economic dimension, the tension between welfare and environmental preservation is explored through concepts like “weak and strong sustainability,” acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs. Ideal policies would aim to decouple environmental degradation from economic growth.

Abstract

Agricultural development in India provides support to a large section of farmers who operate on small holdings and have very limited risk bearing capacity. Farmers are often exposed to natural vagaries, which adversely affect their agricultural production and farm income. Moreover, there is huge financial exclusion in rural sector of the nation. If there is a crop failure, farmers are crushed under the burden of debt. Farmers seek to avoid risk in terms of various managerial and institutional mechanisms. But it is widely believed that ‘Crop Insurance’ is the only institutional mechanism available against production risk in farming. Unfortunately, penetration of crop insurance schemes in India has been low in terms of the area of land insured and the number of farmers covered. There are the problems of low risk awareness and lack of insurance culture among the farmers. In this backdrop, the paper documents the findings of a survey of 140 farmers, which was taken up in some selected villages of North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal. The study shows that likelihood of this awareness increases with increase in landholding size, education level, borrowing history and social participation of the farmers, whereas it decreases with the non-farm income and livestock of the farmers. The author proposes measures to promote and spread awareness of crop insurance among the farmers as a risk mitigation tool in farming, which will increase farm production and stabilize the fluctuation in farm income. The study provides valuable policy measures to the government in better designing of their crop insurance products and will also help the private agro-insurance business, which is recently taking off in the country.

Fish has a vital role to play in mitigating the protein deficiency in developing countries. Fish has been described as the meat of the third world, and fish contributes significantly in developing and developed countries as a source of employment, income generation and foreign exchange earnings. The minimum per capita consumption of fish of an average Indian should be 11 kg per annum, as recommended by the ICMR. However, the per-capita consumption of fish in India is only 5 kg per annum, whereas, per capita consumption of fish in Japan was 62.6 kg, China - 30 kg and Bangladesh - 35 kg (Goswami et al., 2012).

Introduction

In the modern corporate landscape, the Glass Ceiling remains an enduring challenge, obstructing the path to leadership positions for qualified individuals based on gender. This study embarks on a comprehensive analysis of the persistent gender discrimination inherent in leadership roles within corporations.

With a primary focus on measurement, analysis, and assessment, the study seeks to quantify the current prevalence of the Glass Ceiling, elucidate the strategies adopted by large corporations in addressing bias, and evaluate the influence of personal factors in accelerating this phenomenon.

Grounded in empirical data and a commitment to factual precision, this research aims to contribute substantially to the ongoing discourse on gender equality in leadership. By revisiting the Glass Ceiling, this paper endeavours to not only shed light on the existing disparities but also provide nuanced insights that can inform corporate policies and societal endeavours to dismantle barriers obstructing the equitable progression of individuals within the professional realm.

The Revised ATMA Scheme provides for dedicated specialist and functionary support to take up training and extension initiatives at State, District and Block level. Besides this, improvement in extension outreach right down to the village level is expected to be achieved through Farmer Friend. The study mainly focused on farmer friend under ATMA scheme. The FF served as a vital link between extension system and farmers at village level (one for every two villages). The FF should be available in the village to advise on agriculture and allied activities. The FF  mobilized farmers’ groups and facilitate dissemination of information to such groups, individual farmers and farm women directly through one to one interaction individually or in groups and also by accessing information / services  on behalf of farmers as per need through Common Service Centres (CSC) / Kisan Call Centres (KCC). (Government of India, 2010).

Introduction

Fisheries sector, a sunrise sector in India, has recorded a faster growth than that of crop and livestock sectors (Kumar et al., 2006). The sector contributes to the livelihood of a large section of economically-underprivileged population of the country. It has been recognized as a powerful income and employment generator as it stimulates growth of a number of subsidiary industries and is a source of cheap and nutritious food besides being a foreign exchange earner (Ayyappan and Krishnan, 2004).

With the changing composition pattern, emerging market forces and technological developments, it has assumed added importance in India. It is undergoing rapid transformation and the policy support, production strategies, public investment in infrastructure, and research and extension for fisheries have significantly contributed to the increased fish production. Particularly, after the mid-1980s, the development of carp polyculture technology has completely transformed the tradition backyard activity into a booming commercial enterprise. The aquaculture in the East Godavari delta region prospered with good yields and export driven demand. The paddy belt of the area rapidly converted into aquaculture hotspot owing to high economic benefits. But in recent years the dwindling of aquaculture and frequent losses caused and forced the farmers to withdraw from the once profit driven occupation. Apart from economic analysis, the motive behind this investigation is to find the efficiency of the farmers and the determinants. This will be useful in finding the lacunae in existing system of culture and will address necessities for shifting to new alternative.

1. Introduction

Sustainability embodies an ecological vision aimed at fostering enduring human coexistence on Earth. Over time, its definition has evolved in literature and context, generating ongoing debate. Generally, experts frame sustainability around three pillars: social, economic, and environmental. While environmental concerns often dominate discussions, sustainability encompasses broader challenges like pollution, land degradation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and ecosystem service decline. This concept influences decision-making globally, politically, and personally.

Sustainable development, often used interchangeably with sustainability, is distinguished by UNESCO as a long-term objective versus the diverse processes and pathways to achieve it. Within the economic dimension, the tension between welfare and environmental preservation is explored through concepts like “weak and strong sustainability,” acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs. Ideal policies would aim to decouple environmental degradation from economic growth.

Environmental sustainability is pursued through various means such as ecosystem preservation, collaborative resource management, reducing food waste, advocating plant-based diets, managing fertility rates to curb population growth, and transitioning away from fossil fuels towards clean energy and innovative green technologies.