Search

Aim: The aim was to examine the outcomes of pregnant women admitted to intensive care unit with coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) infection during the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in India. The primary outcome of the study was maternal mortality at day 30. The secondary outcomes were the intensive care unit (ICU) and hospital length of stay, fetal mortality and preterm delivery. Materials and methods: This was a retrospective multicentric cohort study. Ethical clearance was obtained. All pregnant women of the 15--45- year age admitted to ICUs with SARS-CoV-2 infection during 1st March 2020 to 31st October, 2021 were included. Results: Data were collected from nine centers and for 211 obstetric patients admitted to the ICU with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19. They were divided in to two groups as per their SpO2 (saturation of peripheral oxygen) level at admission on room air, that is, normal SpO2 group (SpO2 > 90%) and low SpO2 group (SpO2 < 90%). The mean age was (30.06 ± 4.25) years and the gestational age was 36 ± 8 weeks. The maternal mortality rate was10.53%. The rate of fetal death and preterm delivery was 7.17 and 28.22%, respectively. The average ICU and hospital length of stay (LOS) were 6.35 ± 8.56 and 6.78 ± 6.04 days, respectively. The maternal mortality (6.21 vs 43.48%, p < 0.001), preterm delivery (26.55 vs 52.17%, p = 0.011) and fetal death (5.08 vs 26.09%, p = 0.003) were significantly higher in the low SpO2 group. Conclusion: The overall maternal mortality among critically ill pregnant women affected with COVID-19 infection was 10.53%. The rate of preterm birth and fetal death were 28.22 and 7.17%, respectively. These adverse maternal and fetal outcomes were significantly higher in those admitted with low SpO2 (<90%) at admission compared with those with normal SpO2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overgrowth of weeds growing along with the primary crop in the fields reduces crop production. Conventional solutions like hand weeding are labor-intensive, costly, and time-consuming; farmers have used herbicides. The application of herbicide is effective but causes environmental and health concerns. Hence, Precision Agriculture (PA) suggests the variable spraying of herbicides so that herbicide chemicals do not affect the primary plants. Motivated by the gap above, we proposed a Deep Learning (DL) based model for detecting Eggplant (Brinjal) weed in this paper. The key objective of this study is to detect plant and non-plant (weed) parts from crop images. With the help of object detection, the precise location of weeds from images can be achieved. The dataset is collected manually from a private farm in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. The combined approach of classification and object detection is applied in the proposed model. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is used to classify weed and non-weed images; further DL models are applied for object detection. We have compared DL models based on accuracy, memory usage, and Intersection over Union (IoU). ResNet-18, YOLOv3, CenterNet, and Faster RCNN are used in the proposed work. CenterNet outperforms all other models in terms of accuracy, i.e., 88%. Compared to other models, YOLOv3 is the least memory-intensive, utilizing 4.78 GB to evaluate the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To assess the prevalence of post-COVID symptoms in patients with recovered COVID-19 (nasopharyngeal RT PCR negative) who were discharged from an acute COVID care facility at a tertiary care teaching hospital in North India. Methods: This study was an observational study with retrospective data collection, conducted in the COVID follow-up clinic, a combined clinic of medicine and endocrinology. Patients discharged from the acute COVID care facility were recruited after 14 days of discharge if they fulfilled inclusion and exclusion criteria. The retrospective data was collected from the hospital records/EMR and analysed by the SPSSv23. Results: Fifty patients, who fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria, were included in the study. The Mean age of patients was 53.4± 13.8 years (range 28– 77). Seventy six percent were male, and 38% had type 2 diabetes. Fever (94%), cough (78%) and breathlessness (68%), were the most common symptoms at presentation to acute care facility. Oxygen saturation at presentation had a negative correlation with D-Dimer, age, and C reactive protein. When patients were evaluated clinically, after 14 days (range 15 to 50 days) of the discharge, 82% of patients had at least one persistent symptom. Fatigue (74%) was the most common symptoms in follow-up followed by breathlessness (44%), and muscle weakness (36%). Two patients had persistent fever, even after negative RT PCR status. Conclusion: Patients discharged from the acute COVID care facility had a high prevalence of post-COVID symptoms even after 14 days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the victory of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the elections in May 2014 and mentions that under his leadership political party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the first party to win a parliamentary majority since 1984 after political party Congress. Topics discussed include the weaknesses of the Congress-led political party United Progressive Alliance, mobilization of the social coalition by BJP, Modi's monthly radio address, Mann Ki Baat, and Modi's Make in India campaign which aims raise the share of manufacturing from 16 percent to 25 percent of the gross domestic product.

This article examines the politics of development during the first year of the new Modi government. In particular, it explores the meaning of its guiding maxim, ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’, by analysing specific reforms and broader changes in state–society relations. First, the Modi government has imposed greater discipline in public administration through a personalistic, centralised and technocratic style of rule. But it has bolstered executive power by limiting political transparency, parliamentary government and social dissent. Second, the new government has promoted urbanisation, manufacturing and infrastructure through greater economic liberalisation, public investment and institutional reform. Yet it has weakened many labour protocols, environmental regulations and participatory mechanisms regarding land acquisition and forest conservation. Lastly, the Modi administration has introduced new insurance schemes and championed digitally-enabled cash transfers to deliver social entitlements. However, it has reduced public spending on primary education and basic health, and undercut many rights-based welfare acts introduced by the previous administration, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). These three trends have narrowed the spaces of power and contestation in contemporary Indian democracy, frustrating the promise of ‘maximum governance’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2004, India has introduced a series of progressive national bills that enact a right to new civic entitlements, ranging from information, work and education to forest conservation, food and basic public services. What explains the emergence of these laws? How are the rights conceived by these acts conceptualized, operationalized and pursued? What are the promises, challenges and risks—legal, political and economic—of enshrining socioeconomic entitlements as formal statutory rights? This paper engages these questions. In part 1, I argue that three slow-burning processes since the 1980s, distinct yet related, catalyzed India's new rights agenda: high socio-legal activism, rapid uneven development and the expanding popular foundations of its federal parliamentary democracy. Significantly, all three processes exposed the growing nexus between political corruption and socioeconomic inequality. Equally, however, each raised popular expectations for greater socialjustice that were only partly met. Part 2 of the paper evaluates India's new rights agenda. ]he promise of these new laws is threefold: they breach the traditional division of civil, politica' and socioeconomic rights, devise innovative governance mechanisms that enable citizens to see the state and provide fresh incentives for new political coalitions to emerge across state and fociety. Several risks exist, however. Official political resistance from above and below, the limited capacities of judicial actors, state bureaucracies and social forces and the relatively narrow base of many of these new movements endanger the potential of these reforms. The paper concludes by considering several imperatives that India's evolving rights movement must confront to realize its ambition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinctive morphology of human skeleton and its clear sexual dimorphism make it of interests from anatomical, forensic, obstetrical, radiological and anthropological point of view. 100 known sex normal dry human hip bones obtained from Medical College Bhavnagar, 168 known sex normal dry human hip bones from BJ Medical College, Ahmedabad and Smt. NHL Municipal Medical College, Ahmedabad were studied the year of 2005-06. The posterior segment of Greater Sciatic Notch, Genoves' sciatic notch index and posterior angle are found to be significant by t test (P < 0.001). The posterior angle of greater sciatic notch was found to be highly significant for determination of sex of hip bone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mandibular canines exhibit the greatest sexual dimorphism amongst all teeth. The present study was performed on 368 healthy MBBS students of Medical College, Bhavnagar (216 males, 152 females) of 18 - 24 years with the aim to investigate whether any correlation existed between odontometric measures including mandibular canine index, and sex determination in the year of 2006. Mean value of intercanine distance was higher in males than females and the difference was statistically highly significant (p value<0.01). Comparison of mean values of left and right mandibular canine widths exhibited lesser values in females. The variation in right and left mandibular canine width between males and females was highly significant (p value<0.01). The right and left mandibular canine index (MCI) among genders showed significant difference. Our study conclusively establishes the existence of a definite statistically significant sexual dimorphism in mandibular canines and MCI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a significant puzzle: the persistence of modern representative democracy in post-independent India. It demonstrates how a politics of recognition, based on identities of caste, language, and religion, is crucial for understanding the origins, character, and trajectory of modern Indian democracy. These politics suffer various infirmities. Yet liberal, Marxist, and republican critiques of the politics of recognition in India, while offering valid theoretical alternatives and powerful moral visions, also suffer their own limitations. Perhaps more importantly, they evade questions of historical possibility, political efficacy, and practical reason that confront every political theory. The relative historical predominance of the politics of recognition in post-independent India, in contrast, reflects its capacity to engage powerful social imaginaries that enabled the realization of democratic norms, institutions, and practices. The general argument put forward develops several key themes that distinguish Charles Taylor’s philosophical vision of alternative modernities—the power of social imaginaries, nature of explanation in the human sciences, and vicissitudes of culture, politics, and history—to explain the trajectory of modern Indian democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Marxist historian Perry Anderson's "The Indian Ideology" where he interrogated the prevailing national discourse in India, attacked the myth of historic subcontinental unity and castigated Mahatma Gandhi for infusing Hindu religiosity into the national imaginary during anti-colonial movement. Topics discussed include the responses to "The Indian Ideology" by prominent voices in India including Arundhati Roy who praised the book and Prabhat Patnaik who criticized the book.