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Ever increasing global population necessitates the need to increase availability of affordable foods with high nutritional quality. Chickpea being the second most important grain legume cultivated worldwide has the great potential to alleviate problems of protein malnutrition and hidden hunger. The objective of the present investigation was to characterize a diverse set of 402 germplasm comprising of more than 100 commercial cultivars widely cultivated and utilized by breeders for grain protein in two contrasting environments to explore the magnitude of natural genotypic diversity present in the cultivated chickpea and the scope for enhancing it and its quality through breeding. The cultivars containing more than 25 to 30.44% grain protein have been found in the study and large scale production of such protein rich cultivars is expected to increase availability as well as consumption of high quality chickpea necessary to overcome all forms of malnutrition. Trait specific germplasm containing grain protein up to 33.56% are also identified for their further utilization as potential donors in the chickpea improvement programme. The amino acid profiling of selected high and low protein containing genotypes showed considerably greater average amino acid score for all the essential amino acids than the WHO recommended requirement values and is comparable to those of the ‘complete protein’ sources of food suggesting that chickpea deserves to be considered as a ‘complete protein’ source.

Avian diversity has often been studied in agricultural habitats, but ornithological aspect of cattle sheds has never been studied. This exploratory study was conducted with the objective of studying the potential of cattle sheds for sustaining avian abundance and diversity in rice dominated agricultural areas. The study was done in Rice Field Ecosystem (System I) and Cattle Shed Ecosystem (System II) during 2019 and 2020 monsoon crop season from selected villages, namely, Dangon, Pakhowal and Sarabha (district Ludhiana), Punjab. It was recorded that 26 avian species (mainly of grassland habitat) were present in cattle sheds from a total 34 avian species (wetland, grassland and open countryside inhabiting species) observed in rice fields, which reflected that cattle sheds support a wide proportion of avian fauna and complement rice fields in supporting and preserving avian abundance and diversity. There is immense need to explore and accordingly lay emphasis on boosting dairy as allied sector so that cattle sheds can be exploited in preservation of diverse avian populations and thereby reinforcing approach of sustainable agriculture. Keywords: Avian diversity, Avian feeding guilds, Cattle Shed, Grassland birds, Rice crop

The objective of the study was to assess the heavy metal contamination in excreta of the Baya Weaver Bird (Ploceus philippinus). Samples were collected from nesting colony sites present in three districts viz. Ludhiana (location I), Ropar (location II) and Ferozepur (location III) falling in Central plain zone, Undulating plain zone and Western plain zone of Punjab respectively. In dry excreta samples fifteen elements were detected through ICAP-AES; As, Pb, Cd, Cr were toxic heavy metals and B, Fe, Cu, Ni, Zn, Mn, Mg, Ca, P, S, Na were essential elements. Toxic heavy metals viz. As (1.88-2.10 ppm), Pb (2.70- 5.25 ppm) and Cr (13.30-23.78 ppm) were found above normal range in excreta collected from studied locations. Statistical analysis showed significant difference among heavy metals and locations which signifies the bioaccumulation of different metals at different locations in excreta of Baya Weaver Bird due to different type of contaminations at studied locations.

A new method is proposed to find the fuzzy optimal solution of bounded fully fuzzy linear programs with symmetric trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Comparative study of various existing methods on different cases is presented to validate the proposed method. A problem representing a real world situation is also solved by using the proposed method.

A field experiment was conducted to study the influence of temperature, sunshine hours, day length and phosphorus (P) on phenology of four pigeonpea cultivars (PAU881, AL201, ICPL88039 and MN5) during Kharif seasons of 2014 and 2015 at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. The results of present investigation indicated that accumulation of growing degree days (AGDD), accumulated photo (APTU) and helio thermal unit (AHTU) was more in cultivar AL201 followed by ICPL88039, PAU881 and MN5for all phenophasic stages.Significant positive correlation was found between accumulated photothermal unit at maturity, pods per plant, seed per pod, 100-seed weight and yield. Path coefficient analysis revealed that pods per plant, grain per pod and AGDDM contributed more directly and indirectly to yield so; direct selection of these variables may be beneficial for more seed yield under no added P condition.Cultivars AL201and ICPL88039 were significantly better than MN5 while PAU881 were on par with AL201 for all phenophases stages.

While solving real-life linear programming problems, there may exist the situation of uncertainty and hesitancy due to several factors. To deal with such situations, intuitionistic fuzzy data representation is widely used. Many authors have investigated and proposed methods to find the solution of intuitionistic fuzzy linear programming (IFLP) problems in the last decade. In this paper, the limitations of the existing methods are pointed out and new methods (named as Mehar methods) are proposed to overcome these limitations. Further, the proposed method is illustrated with an example.

Genotypic variation for morpho-physiological parameters, phosphorus (P) content and root acid phosphatase activity was studied in 52 pigeonpea genotypes. Data related to shoot (length, dry weight, number of leaves, and leaf area), root (volume, length, dry weight, area, perimeter, and number of root tips), acid phosphatase activity, and P content (root, stem, and leaf) were recorded at 60 days after sowing (DAS). The P use efficient genotypes showed high root length, root area, root perimeter, root dry weight, P content in leaves, and root to shoot dry weight ratio under the P not added condition. Significant variation was found among genotypes for root- and shoot-associated characteristics under both P treatments. The P use efficient genotypes with improved root morphological phenes have potential to acquire and utilize more P from immobile soil bound P sources may be of additional factor for increasing efficiency of acquisition and utilization of supplied P fertilizer.

Sudhagar and Ganesan (Optim Eng, 2012, doi:10.1007/s11081-012-9202-6) proposed an approach to find the fuzzy optimal solution of such fuzzy transportation problems in which all the parameters are represented by fuzzy numbers. In this note, it is pointed out that the authors have used some mathematical incorrect assumptions in their proposed method.

A critical issue in wireless sensor networks is to extend the network lifetime by preserving the energy of sensor nodes. A sensor node consumes most of its energy during the data transfer phase. The energy consumed for transmission of data is a thousand times higher than sensing and processing the same amount of data. Data aggregation is a promising technique that is used for minimizing the amount of data transfer in a sensor network, which helps in reducing the energy consumption. The existing data aggregation protocols have focused on objectives like minimizing the energy consumption, maximizing the lifetime of the network and reducing the end to end delay. However, these techniques do not consider duty cycling approach to lower energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an Energy Aware Chain Oriented Sensor Network protocol (EA-COSEN). The proposed protocol is an extension of existing COSEN [1] protocol and it uses duty cycling to save the energy of the sensor nodes. Our simulation results confirm that there is 2% to 3% improvement in throughput, residual energy and delay.

A study was carried out to assess the bird composition and diversity in relation to mixed fruit trees in transect I (Fruit Research Farm, Punjab Agricultural University campus, Ludhiana) and transect II (orchard in village Baranhara, Ludhiana) from August 2015 to February 2016. In transect I, 45 bird species were observed belonging to 12 orders and 37 genera. Ciconiiformes order was dominating with 40.31% of relative abundance in transect I and it comprised of carnivorous species, which reflected different prey sizes and its availability. In transect II, 30 bird species were observed belonging to six orders and 29 genera. Out of these, Passeriformes order with 47.20% relative abundance was the most dominating because of the unmanaged understory vegetation and weeds. Twenty two species were common in both the transects. Mixed fruit trees orchard seemed to encourage more number of birds than the two fruit crops orchard. It was inferred that the fruit tree diversity supported more avian richness and is of paramount importance for bird conservation efforts in agricultural landscape.

The drawbacks of the existing methods to obtain the fuzzy optimal solution of such linear programming problems, in which coefficients of the constraints are represented by real numbers and all the other parameters as well as variables are represented by symmetric trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, are pointed out, and to resolve these drawbacks, a new method (named as Mehar method) is proposed for the same linear programming problems. Also, with the help of proposed Mehar method, a new method, much easy as compared to the existing methods, is proposed to deal with the sensitivity analysis of the same type of linear programming problems.