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A child's early years (0-8 y) are the critical development years, as this is when the foundation for learning is laid. A strong learning foundation yields better school performance and increases the likelihood of attaining higher education, resulting in major social and economic gains for society. The early childhood care and education of nearly 80 million Indian children, below the age of six, is covered by Integrated Child Development Services through 1.37 million Anganwadi centers (AWCs). Sixty percent of these children are from rural areas. Preschool education, immunization, health check-ups, referrals, dietary supplements, growth monitoring, and education on health and nutrition are provided at the AWCs. Forty-two percent of these rural children receive pre-school education at the AWCs, and the majority are from disadvantaged families. In this study for evaluating the status of early childhood education programs at rural AWCs, quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 71 AWCs across 25 villages in Haryana, to assess their physical setup, availability of learning resources, and administration and Anganwadi workers' knowledge, attitudes, and skills regarding early childhood education. The findings suggest that most of the AWCs do not have proper infrastructure, are not adequately safe, and compromise on health and hygiene. Further, learning resources are scarce and the Anganwadi workers are not trained well enough to impart knowledge and skills to children in a sustained manner. Many of them do not understand the importance of partnering with parents for children's holistic development. Although this study is limited to 71 AWCs in Mewat, the literature review indicates that these issues and challenges are common to rural villages, which is a serious concern for equity in preschool education. Thus, there is a need for several prompt reforms in early childhood education programs in rural areas of India to bring equity into preschool education. [For the full proceedings, see ED654100.]

Purpose-The main objective of the paper is to study the covid-19 impact on the ESG mutual funds. Approach-based on the review of literature, the current study deals with the recently added ESG centric mutual funds and its performance in covid-19 situations, and this study tries to finds out the comparative study on Equity mutual funds with ESG mutual funds, using the portfolio performance measures, Findings-the study finds that the measured (like Sharpe, Jenson's alpha, Treynor ratio's) portfolio performance of both ESG and Equity mutual funds which is having a risk-free rate and adjusted returns compared to equity mutual funds. Originality-the study finds that comparative study between equity and ESG mutual funds has identified that there is an impact of covid-19 on Equity funds is more than ESG funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statistical pattern recognition algorithms are complex and are time consuming for an image processing application and therefore a novel method is proposed in this paper which uses structural pattern recognition using the analysis of the geometry of the shape to be classified. The application chosen here is a vision system for small scaled wheeled mobile robot facing the challenge of constrained memory and space. In this paper, the algorithm is used in processing image of a sign board from real time video for deciding the direction of motion of small scaled Wheeled Mobile Robot (WMR). It is shown that the speed of computation is 3.5ms with no additional external memory for video buffering. The proposed method is verified by implementing on a Spartan 6 LX-9 FPGA board, one of the commonly available low-cost Field Programming Gate Array (FPGA), which is a Application-specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), for image processing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bandpass filters play an impotent role in RF wireless systems picking the required band by rejecting others. In this work, an Inter-digital Bandpass Filter (IDF) was proposed, designed, simulated, and printed on an FR4 dielectric substrate having a thickness of 0.16 cm. Seven resonators with dual vias at the end of each resonator were made to get the IDF structure. Four dumbbell-shaped defects in the ground sheet (DGS) were provided to improve the bandwidth. The final model's dimensions are 0.31λ X 0.14λ mm2 at a 2.4 GHz operating frequency. The proposed filter maximum return loss (S11) and transmission losses (S12) are-17dB and-3dB, respectively. The measured bandwidth is 900 MHz from 2GKz to 2.9 GHz, which covers the lower band in S-band. The proposed filter could be used in ISM 2.4 GHz band applications, home applications, Bluetooth, and other mobile applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compaction of clayey soil with the admixtures is the mechanical process whereby improvement of soil strength, minimizing the effects of compressibility and control of volume changes is possible in a desired level to suit the requirements of the intended construction activity such as land fill, road and embankment. This paper presents the dry density-water content curves for high plasticity clay soils A (Amalapuram), B (Bhimavaram) and W (Warangal) treated with fly ash (FA), stone dust (SD), Lime, FA+4%Lime, FA+SD and SD+4%Lime. Optimum moisture content (OMC) and maximum dry density (MDD) are the geotechnical parameters of soils which can be derived from dry density-water content curves of laboratory compaction test. From these curves, it is possible for the geotechnical engineers to understand the moisture levels and corresponding dry density variations at optimum as well as dry of optimum and wet of optimum of high plastic clays which are stabilised with solid wastes. The combination of FA and SD equal proportions 25%+25% when added to the high plasticity clay soils has shown effectiveness in the improvement of dry density and reduced OMC. It is further noticed that 4% lime addition to the proportions of SD ranging from 5 to 25%, the change in OMC observed is marginal and is varying from 24% to 26%. This combination of admixture is felt quite encouraging in terms of improvement of MDD. The 4% lime and 25% SD can be treated as an effective admixture combination in the clayey soil stabilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]