The paper looks at some macro data on the availability of infrastructure, economic growth, density of population and the availability of formal financial services to examine if any of these factors explain the growth of microfinance in certain regions, while the other regions lag behind. For the...

Small size of holdings of a large proportion of farmers is considered a major bottleneck in increasing the income of the people in rural areas. In India the proportion of small holders is increasing over time. Previous studies have suggested policies oriented towards non-prince factors such as...

This paper studies the developments in Air Deccan, a start up in the Indian aviation industry and discusses the linkages among the aspirations of the entrepreneur, enterprise strategy and its sustenance in a competitive environment. It argues that the entrepreneur fails to sustain his/her...

Commitment, competencies and skills of people working in the health sector has significant impact on sector performance and its reform process. The current paper is a part of broader multi state studies carried out by the authors in India. The paper attempts to analyse the commitment of state...

There seems to be some amount of confusion in the finance text books regarding the conditions under which an individual’s preferences can be represented by a utility function. Fama and Miller, for example, assert that two axioms (comparability and transitivity) are sufficient to establish the...

A casual, discrete, dynamic mathematical model to describe the growth of tractors in India has been proposed. It is able to describe the past pattern of growth quite closely, and yields results that are much better than possible from methods available in literature. Therefore, it has been used...

In recent years there has been growing recognition among the development community of the role of small scale commercial poultry production in accelerating the pace of poverty reduction and reaching out to the poorest of the poor. There is also growing evidence to demonstrate the role of small...

We look at scaling a nonlinear optimization problem for iterative solvers that use at least first derivatives. These derivatives are either computed analytically or by differncing. We ignore iterative methods that are based on function evaluations only and that do not use any derivative...

Participatory approaches for watershed management are now considered essential for sustainable natural resources management and yet there is very little opportunity for intellectual participation by the people. This requires understanding of the local knowledge systems and their institutional...

In this study we explore causes of the widespread food insecurity that prevails in India. It has been observed that even though the proportion of the malnourished fell by about 1 percent (FAO, 2002) through the nineties in India, their absolute number increased by about 18 million. Thus the...