University of Delhi

Ecotourism has garnered substantial scholarly and public interest as an environmentally conscious and sustainable variant of tourism with the primary objectives of fostering conservation efforts, facilitating community advancement, and safeguarding cultural heritage. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the impacts of ecotourism on sustainable development, specifically focusing on the environment, economy, and society. The results reveal that ecotourism can have both positive and negative impacts on these three dimensions of sustainability. Positive impacts include environmental conservation, local economic development, and community involvement, while negative impacts include environmental degradation, economic leakage, and social disruption The study emphasizes the importance of carefully planning and managing ecotourism activities to reduce negative effects and enhance positive outcomes. Community involvement, environmental education, and long-term monitoring and evaluation are identified as key strategies for enhancing the sustainability of ecotourism projects. The study also identifies areas for future research, including the long-term impacts of ecotourism, social and cultural dynamics, and the integration of technology into ecotourism activities. Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of the complex relationships between ecotourism and sustainable development and provides insights for policymakers and practitioners to develop and manage ecotourism projects in a way that maximizes their potential to contribute to sustainable development. The significance of ecotourism stems from its capacity to facilitate sustainable development through the concurrent pursuit of biodiversity conservation, education, awareness enhancement, community empowerment, cultural heritage preservation, adoption of sustainable methodologies, provision of alternative livelihoods, allocation of resources for conservation initiatives, and cultivation of global consciousness. Through a comprehensive evaluation of both environmental and socioeconomic impacts, ecotourism assumes a pivotal role in the attainment of a more sustainable future. It is imperative for ecotourism endeavors to encompass a comprehensive approach that acknowledges the intricate facets elucidated in the present discourse, thus enabling the establishment of sustainable paradigms that can advantageous to local populations, environmental integrity, and economic viability. Given ecotourism's prominence, assessing its effectiveness for sustainable development and refining practices and legislation is imperative. While not a universal solution, it’s potential to foster sustainability merits careful attention.

This research looks at the economic well-being of households across social categories in India before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly all households saw significant spending reductions during the pandemic, resulting in a leftward shift in the distribution of monthly per capita household expenditure (MPCHE) in 2020 compared to that in 2017. We document that even prior to the epidemic, the percentage change in the MPCHE slowed down, leaving the Indian economy more vulnerable. This slowdown was more pronounced particularly among urban families, who had seen a drop in spending prior to the pandemic. The economic shock that came in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic further compounded this problem. Indeed in 2020, the MPCHE fell by 27% in urban households and 20% in rural households, while poverty rose by 19 and 14 percentage points in urban and rural households, respectively. In this paper, we focus on the urban households, which were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, and evaluate the impact by two social groups—caste and religion. Our findings show that the socially disadvantaged groups, who were already at the bottom of the economic ladder in the pre-pandemic period, have been significantly impacted. SC/STs, Muslims, and Hindu-SC/STs had the highest increase in poverty rates as compared to Hindu-UCs, Sikhs, and Christians. Our results indicate that the pandemic has deepened already-existing economic disparities between socio-economic groups.

Dichanthium annulatum is a popular halophyte C 4 perennial forage crop of semi-arid tropics that reproduces apomictically. In vitro plant regeneration in apomictic species helps in producing new germplasm that can supplement existing breeding program. Field-collected seeds and in vitro shoot apices were tested for response to 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP) for initiation of somatic embryogenesis (SE) and direct shoot organogenesis (DSO). Explants produced callus on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium with varying level of 2,4-D and 0.5 mgL-1 BAP. After 4th sub-culture, yellowish brown turns into white nodular callus tissue with a friable appearance, which exhibited the highest percentage of embryogenic callus induction on MS medium with 3.0 mgL-1 2,4-D and 0.5 mgL-1 BAP, was transferred to MS with BAP or kinetin and 0.125 mgL-1 2,4-D to promote somatic embryo germination into plantlet. The developmental stages of SE were identified using scanning electron microscopy and histology. Multiple shoots were observed with the combinations of BAP or kinetin with 2,4-D. The highest number of shoots (27) occurred on MS medium comprising 4.0 mgL-1 BAP and 0.125 mgL-1 2,4-D. In vitro plantlet was rooted on MS medium with 0.4% charcoal. The rooted 80% plants could be acclimatized and established in soil, as they showed healthy growth and fertility.

The linkage between elevation and precipitation in the mountainous regions across the world including the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) is very complex. Various meteorological parameters, viz., albedo, shortwave and longwave radiations, humidity, and mass-energy balance, play a major role in the physical processes occurring in these places. The present study examines the changes in precipitation across the IHR. The precipitation patterns act differently from east to west, and north to south due to the varying elevation. The study employed high-resolution observational gridded precipitation analyses (CHELSA) for the period 1980–2018 and the GTOPO 30 DEM for the analyses. The two major precipitating seasons over the IHR such as the monsoon (JJAS) and winter (DJF) precipitation are considered. Characteristics of the precipitation with altitude over subregions of IHR such as Shivalik’s IHR (SH), Lesser IHR (LH) and Higher IHR (HH) are presented. In addition, longitudinal variations over western IHR (WH), central IHR (CH) and eastern IHR (EH) are presented. Further, a non-parametric Mann–Kendall method has been used for trend analysis of precipitation, while the Pettitt test is used for change point detection. A positive precipitation trend is observed over HH and the western part of SH whereas a negative trend is found over the eastern part of SH. In most of the regions in SH, change in mean precipitation is observed during the recent time (1999–2018). However, HH located in the east of CH and west of EH shows a change in mean precipitation quite early (1979–1998).

In soliton theory and nonlinear waves, this research proposes a new Painlevé integrable generalized (3+1)-D evolution equation. It demonstrates the Painlevé test that claims the integrability of the proposed equation and employs Cole–Hopf transformations to generate the trilinear equation in an auxiliary function that governs the higher-order rogue wave and dispersive-soliton solutions via the symbolic computation approach and dispersive-soliton assumption, respectively. Center-controlled parameters in rogue waves show the different dynamical structures with several other parameters. We obtain solutions for rogue waves up to third-order using direct symbolic analysis with appropriate center parameters and other parameters using a generalized procedure for rogue waves. We assume the dispersive-soliton solution, inspired by Hirota’s direct techniques to create dispersive-soliton solutions up to the third order. By applying the symbolic software Mathematica, we demonstrate the dynamical structures for rogue waves with diverse center parameters and dispersive solitons using dispersion relation to showcase the interaction behavior of the solitons. Dispersive solitons and rogue waves are fascinating phenomena that appear in diverse areas of physics, such as optical fibers, nonlinear waves, dusty plasma physics, nonlinear dynamics, and other engineering and sciences.

act Plants being sessile need to rapidly adapt to the constantly changing environment through modifcations in their internal clock, metabolism, and gene expression. They have evolved an intricate system to perceive and transfer the signals from the primary environmental factors namely light, temperature and water to regulate their growth development and survival. Over past few decades rigorous research using molecular genetics approaches, especially in model plant Arabidopsis, has resulted in substantial progress in discovering various photoreceptor systems and light signaling components.

Background Agricultural activities in 2020 have resulted in 5.5 billion tons of CO 2 equivalent globally, which is expected to rise because the food system would have to grow 70% more food for the population in 2050. Research suggests that agricultural productivity in South Asian countries, will increase food security; however, the role of their food crops and livestock products in environmental imprints is uncertain. This review aimed to assess the environmental impacts resulting from pre‐ and post‐production agricultural activities related to edible food crops and livestock products consumed in eight South Asian countries. Methods Studies were retrieved using three databases (PubMed, Google Scholar and Science Direct) from 2011 to 2022. The protocol for this scoping review was not registered. Results Twenty‐seven studies met the inclusion criteria. Most studies were conducted in India. Twenty‐four articles assessed greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, followed by water footprints ( n = 5), nitrogen and phosphorus (N&P) emissions ( n = 4), and land requirements ( n = 4). The production of rice and wheat was identified as a significant contributor to GHG emissions. In India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the production of livestock (meat/bovine/shrimp and milk) was reported to be harmful to the environment. Inconclusive data were retrieved for other environment variables. Conclusions Diversification in food production and cultivating additional coarse cereals (millets) offer opportunities for GHG reduction. Nevertheless, more comprehensive and longitudinal studies for South Asian countries are essential to make precise conclusions and validate the present review.

Finding an appropriate title that comprehends readers clearly about the research is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a tool TiGen to generate suitable titles for their scholarly literature after parsing its abstract as input. We used GPT-2, a deep natural language processing transformer model to generate title suggestions. It is an auto-regressive pre-trained model with masked self-attention. The model has been trained with arXiv dataset which is scraped off selectively to keep the fields of the obtained dataset limited only to “Natural Language Processing”. TiGen is fed with a research abstract as input via a transformer architecture of neural networks corresponding to the decoder segment, for generating a list of titles. The results are evaluated using ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L scores and validated against the state-of-the-art research work in this domain. To prove the usability of our work, the title of this paper is also auto-generated by TiGen.

Dyslipidemia in children with chronic kidney disease (CKD) is identified based on lipid profile parameters; however, changes in lipoprotein quality precede quantitative changes. A cross-sectional study was done from January to October 2021; overweight, obese children, known cases of diabetes mellitus, hypothyroidism or on steroid therapy, or lipid lowering drugs were excluded. Clinical details were elicited and examinations done. Besides hemogram, kidney function tests, liver function tests, total cholesterol, low density lipoproteins (LDL), triglycerides, high density lipoproteins (HDL), and apolipoproteins A-1 and B were estimated to identify dyslipidemia. Relevant tests of significance were applied, and ROC curves were drawn for apoA-1, apoB, and apoB/apoA-1 ratios. A total of 76 (61 M:15 F) children with median (IQR) age 7 (3.25–11) years were enrolled; cause of CKD was CAKUT in 82.3% patients. Dyslipidemia (alteration of 1 or more lipid parameters) was seen in 78.9% with a prevalence of 71.7% in early and 95.7% in later stages of CKD (P = 0.02); most had elevated serum triglyceride levels. The median (IQR) values of apoB, apoA-1, and apoB/apoA-1 ratio were 78 (58–110) mg/dl, 80 (63–96.75) mg/dl, and 0.88 (0.68–1.41), respectively; apoB, apoA-1, and apoB/apoA-1 ratio had a sensitivity of 26.67%, 86.67%, and 70%, respectively, and specificity of 87.5%, 62.5%, and 62.5%, respectively, for diagnosis of dyslipidemia. The ROC for apoB, apoA-1, and apoB/apoA-1 ratio showed AUC of 0.66, 0.68, and 0.74 (P = 0.4, 0.02, < 0.01), respectively. The prevalence (78.9%) of dyslipidemia was high in patients with CKD especially in those with later stages. The ratio of apoB/apoA-1 was altered early and appears to be promising for early detection. A higher resolution version of the Graphical abstract is available as Supplementary information

The primary objective of this article is to estimate how the spike in oil prices has impacted Saudi Arabia’s output and other macroeconomic indicators. To address this question, the study utilizes a simple VAR estimation and VAR estimation with sign restrictions, specifically an oil demand shock and an oil supply shock, to determine the influence of oil price shocks. The study’s findings are consistent with conventional wisdom and current research from oil-exporting countries. Consistent with all model specifications for both periods (monthly 2010q1 to 2020q2 and quarterly 1996q1 to 2020q2), the study finds that an oil price shock benefits the Saudi Arabian economy. The results indicate that a 10% increase in oil prices leads to a 2% increase in output, a 0.15 percentage point increase in the consumer price index, a 6% increase in export value, and a 3% increase in import value. The study highlights the importance of considering both oil supply and demand shocks in analyzing the impact of oil price fluctuations and concludes that the demand shock is more influential than the supply shock.

The relativistic calculations of total photoionization (PI) cross sections of Cr VIII in the ground 3s23p5(2Po3/2) and the first two excited states 3s23p5(2Po1/2), 3s13p6(2Se1/2) have been performed by taking the lowest 41 target states of sulphur-like Cr IX in Breit–Pauli R-matrix method for the first time, to our knowledge. The target states and their energies are calculated using a very accurate configuration interaction technique. Our theoretical energy levels of the lowest 41 target states of Cr IX agree with the experimental NIST data results. We have discussed photoionization cross-section variation, analysed resonance structures, determined resonance positions, effective quantum number, and width of nd Rydberg series of Cr VIII using Quigley and Berrington’s approach. We have identified nd resonant series below the first threshold in the photon energy range 13.82–14.00 Ryd. We believe that our photoionization study of Cr VIII will be useful in astrophysical plasmas’ modelling and their diagnostics.

We study the dynamics of a set of coupled nonlinear pendula suspended from a movable beam. The lengths of the pendula are random, and each is constrained to move in a plane; together they constitute an example of a heterogeneous ensemble of coupled oscillators. If all the pendula are identical there are two possible synchronization patterns: either all pendula oscillate in phase or there are two groups of them that oscillate exactly out of phase with one another. A system of coupled pendula with random lengths (and therefore distinct frequencies of oscillations) dynamically separates into clusters or groups that have identical (or nearly identical) dynamics. There is considerable difference between the dynamics of different groups, and the number of such clusters depends on the variance in the distribution of natural frequencies of the pendula, as well as the nature and strength of the coupling. Such clustering patterns can be expected to emerge quite naturally in ensembles of diverse interacting oscillators.

Monomelic Amyotrophy (MMA) is a rare neurological disorder restricted to one upper limb, predominantly affecting young males with an unknown aetiopathogenesis. We report a familial case of father-son duo affected by MMA. Whole exome sequencing identified genetic variations in SLIT1, RYR3 and ARPP21 involved in axon guidance, calcium homeostasis and regulation of calmodulin signaling respectively. This is the first attempt to define genetic modifiers associated with MMA from India and advocates to extend genetic screening to a larger cohort. Deciphering the functional consequences of variations in these genes will be crucial for unravelling the pathogenesis of MMA.

This chapter focuses on cultural and legal interpretations of elder abuse in India and discusses how prevention strategies could be implemented across states, including encouraging the media to create greater awareness of the problem. We begin by describing three case studies and tease out how elder abuse is perceived in a social context; and how public policies support these cultural expectations.

Finding myself having to look after a mother grown old and infirm, the dilemmas in the practice of care as a moral value have been sharply foregrounded—for this is a mother with whom I have clashed my entire life. Though typically taken for granted at the time, there is no denying the enduring effect of the care provided by a dedicated mother. But, over the years, this has become fissured by an acute sense of dismay, with the gradual realization that her solicitude formed part of an earnestly held, conservative, moralized gender position, which I grew to reject. Her dependence on and recognition of me as a daughter arouse intense emotions, but equally intense are the anger and resentment arising out of her stubborn refusal to even consider the difference between her and my conceptions of woman. Though agitated and alienated by this obstinacy, I find myself, nevertheless, bound to this unfreedom of geriatric care.

The adoption of 5G mobile technology has the potential of revolutionary enhancement in connectivity and communication that will revolutionize many sectors and improve user experiences. A large demand for smart electronic devices and GHz range communication have led to the technical advancements in this field, however, this is affecting the environment by causing electromagnetic interference (EMI) or electromagnetic (EM) pollution. To prevent from electromagnetic pollution, in the present study, composites of polystyrene were synthesized using a solution mixing process with the inclusion of aluminum metal dust, graphite, and carbon nanofibers. The efficiency of composite shielding was evaluated in the X-band (8.2–12.4 GHz) frequency range using a vector network analyzer (VNA). At 12.3 GHz, the overall shielding efficiency of polystyrene–aluminum metal dust and carbon nanofibers was measured to be − 23.53 dB, whereas at 8.2 GHz, it was observed to be − 6.64 dB for polystyrene–aluminum composites and − 14.43 dB for polystyrene–aluminum–graphite composites. Thickness for all the samples was taken as 2 mm. Synthetic composites were characterized by XRD, SEM, and TGA. D-shore hardness tester was employed to gauge the hardness. The fabricated composites are supposed to be a good alternative for applications requiring EM pollution supression or radar absorption.

Design and development of novel eco-friendly materials with outstanding antimicrobial properties have transpired to impede and regulate the growth of pathogenic microorganisms. Bionanocomposites are the propitious aspirant to circumvent the global warming emanates and proliferation in pollution attributed to biocompatibility, degradability, and environmental benign primacy. Undoubtedly, silver nanoparticles are the magic bullet that has efficient antimicrobial properties against various bacterial strains. The synchronous existence of chitosan and Ag nanoparticles are the two crucial protruding antibacterial agents that divulged imperious antibacterial properties against gram-positive strains in comparison to gram-negative strains. This indagation will shed light on the experimentation and analysis of chitosan/PVA biohybrid grafted with graphene and silver nanoparticles for screening of antibacterial efficiency. The tensile strength of 15% GO/CS/Ag/PVA was found to be 81.99 MPa as compared to pristine chitosan which was 36 MPa. The active resultant bio-nano hybrid fabricated via a biomimetic approach evinced magnificently thermostable, mechanically robust, and antibacterial properties which make it a potential candidate for packaging applications. The results revealed that the inhibition is relatively dependent upon concentration. It has been noticed that a better antibacterial effect was shown by gram-positive bacteria contrary to gram-negative strains for GO-reinforced CS films owing to the presence of silver nanoparticles.

Innovations in aligning investment with sustainability led to impact investing, enabling investors to achieve conventional financial returns and measurable social and environmental returns. Since its inception in 2007, it has grown manifolds, with significant efforts being made to create a global ecosystem. However, due to limited academic literature, the theme is yet to garner the scholarly interest it deserves. In this study, we analyse and visualise a knowledge map of the impact investment research field through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis by employing a research corpus of 421 studies sourced from Web of Science and Scopus. We identify the growth trajectory, geographical concentration, productive and influential authors, journals and significant articles and examine the inter‐disciplinarity of the field. The major research themes interlinked with impact investing included; social entrepreneurship, social innovation, social finance, impact investment market, innovative financial instruments, financialisation of essential services and impact reporting. To drive the field forward, future research needs to develop an impact investment ecosystem, address behavioural issues, stakeholder management and institutional context in impact investment theme, develop and diffuse innovative financial instruments, develop a framework for standardised accounting and reporting practices to measure financial and non‐financial dimensions, tackle impact washing by fund managers, address lack of financial access to the third sector and develop the legal and regulatory framework for third sector organisations.