Role of village-level workers in the process of political decentralisation

India, the second-largest democratic country in the world with about 1.21 billion people, among which all most half of the total population lives in the villages, and to the welfare of our nation, it is essential to improve the conditions of the villages. Therefore, rural development has become the first and foremost necessity for our country to develop. In India for all-round development of the rural areas the village level worker is responsible. They are recruited by a district-level selection committee chaired by the district collector. Usually, there are ten village-level workers in a development block. They must have passed the matriculation examination and the age limit is 24. They must belong to a rural area. From planning to implementing various policies for the rural people, from making aware the rural poor to ensuring their participation in them are the primary duties of the village level workers.

Socio Economic Factors Responsible for Groundwater Consumption in Purba Bardhaman District of West Bengal

Groundwater is the biggest freshwater reservoir in the world. More than 95% of the unfrozen water comes from groundwater. Factors responsible for groundwater consumption by rice growers have been included in the study. For the study, Purba Barddhaman district was selected purposively considering the pattern of agriculture and extent groundwater use in the state. One community development block from the district has selected based on crop diversity, type of irrigation, amount of water extraction for irrigation purposes. From the selected block a big parcel of cultivating land (Math) were again selected randomly keeping the consideration of homogeneity in lad type, soil type, type of crops, variety and seasons. Farmers’ knowledge level, farmers’ attitude towards irrigation, economic motivation, improved water extraction mechanism and method of irrigation are the major contributing factors in predicting the amount of groundwater consumption when crop and land situation are constant.

Job satisfaction of the accredited social health activists in Amdang community development block of North 24 Parganas district, West Bengal

Background: Job satisfaction is a positive emotional state towards one’s job which influences efficiency in performance. Job satisfaction of accredited social health activist (ASHA) under national health mission, is not documented in many areas of the country. The present study was done to assess job satisfaction of ASHA in Amdanga community development block of North 24 Parganas district, West Bengal.Methods: A cross sectional study was done during August–November 2019 among all the 114 ASHAs in Amdanga block. Interviews were conducted using a questionnaire developed based on measures of job satisfaction (MJS) tool. Questionnaire contained 7 facets and 42 items in individual facets of satisfaction such as personal component, workload, professional support, training, incentive and care providing. Responses were recorded in 3-point Likert’s scale for each item, total score ranging from 42–126. Item median scores are calculated for each subscale. Scores falling at median and above were categorized as satisfied and scores falling below median score were categorized as dissatisfied. Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test were applied to determine associated factors.Results: Overall 62.3% ASHAs were satisfied with their work. However, 33.3% ASHAs were dissatisfied about their incentive and 37.7% were dissatisfied with their workload. Overall satisfaction was significantly associated with age, socio-economic status, service duration of ASHA (p<0.05).Conclusions: Overall satisfaction level among ASHAs in the area though high, individual aspects like incentives, workload needs to be looked into to take necessary strategies.

Disaster Management Based on IoT Enable Monitoring Technique

The disasters can be either natural or man-made. Control and management of disaster of any kind is possible in effective and robust way by the implementation of IoT in the system. The objective of implementing IoT into the disaster management system is the quick and effective recovery from the disaster. The various methods that can be deployed after the disaster is outlined through utilization of IoT. This paper gives an insight on the various methods that can be effectively used after the disaster using IoT. The existing techniques are very well monitored and has the ability to react to the situation as per needs, this paper significantly provides the contribution in analyzing these techniques for appropriate disaster management development block.

Back to the past: the historical roots of labor-saving automation

This paper, relying on a still relatively unexplored long-term dataset on U.S. patenting activity, provides empirical evidence on the history of labor-saving innovations back to early nineteenth century. The identification of mechanization/automation heuristics, retrieved via textual content analysis on current robotic technologies by Montobbio et al. (Robots and the origin of their labour-saving impact, LEM Working Paper Series 2020/03), allows to focus on a limited set of CPC codes where mechanization and automation technologies are more prevalent. We track their time evolution, clustering, eventual emergence of wavy behavior, and their comovements with long-term GDP growth. Our results challenge both the general-purpose technology approach and the strict 50-year Kondratiev cycle, while they provide evidence of the emergence of erratic constellations of heterogeneous technological artefacts, in line with the development-block approach enabled by autocatalytic systems.

Agricultural Practices in Lawngtlai Rural Development Block of Mizoram

Agriculture constitutes one of the major sources of income among the people of Mizoram. The areas used for cultivation in Mizoram are usually slashed and burnt down to ashes and are abandoned for years, the land is used and the same plot is re-use after 3-5 years. More than half of the total population is either directly or indirectly involved in agriculture. However, the income from agriculture is less than 5% of the State Gross Domestic Product (State Economic Report, 2015). In the last few decades Mizoram witnessed several changes in agriculture pattern as many farmers have been shifting from cultivation to small- scale agricultural farming. This paper highlights the transformation of agricultural practices and the major factors affecting agricultural production and attempt is made to examine the prevailing socio- economic aspects associated with farmers with special reference to Lawngtlai Rural Development Block and a questionnaire method was used for collecting relevant information for the purpose. The research found that there exist major transformations of agricultural practices in the last couple of decades. The cycle of shifting agriculture period has been shortened drastically. It is also revealed that farmers are gradually adopting settled farming from shifting agriculture and that government intervention and assistance has been increasing more and more in this field. It is suggested that agricultural practice be transformed from jhuming to settled farming and from cultivating the traditional crops to cash crops with governmental and institutional support for shifting to higher income in agricultural and horticultural crops.