Serial communication between two PCs is made using radio wave technology.
Here a novel circuit IC MAX232, which needs only 5v power supply for level conversion is used.
The communication over short distances of 2 to 3 meters is established using infrared diodes.The range can be increased to 100 meters using laser diode module in place of infrared LEDs.
Assemble two prototypes i.e. laser modules on PCBs or bread and connect them to COM-1(or COM-2) port of each PC. Point the laser the laser beam of one module to fall on the photodiode of the module connected to the other PC, and vice versa.
Load PROCOMM or TELIX serial communication software and set the port parameters to 9600 n 8 1 (here 9600 refers boud rate, n stands for parity-none, 8 represents bits per character and 1 indicates number of stop bits) to establish the communication. File transfer is also possible. The software program for this purpose was written is 'C' language.
CIRCUIT:
Transmitter: Data signals transmitted through pin 3 of 9-pin 'D' connector of RS-232 COM port are sent to pin 8 of MAX 232and it converts these RS-232 compatible levels of +9v or -9v to 0 or 5v TTL levels. The out put pin 9 of MAX-232 IC drives the pnp transistor SK100 and powers the IRLEDs output pin 9 also drives an LED indicator (LED2) during the positive output. At logic '0' output LED2 goes 'off' but drives the pnp transistor through a bias resistor of 1k ohm (R5). The electrical pulses send by COM port are now converted to corresponding modulated pulses of IR light.
Receiver: The IR signals are detected by photodiode (D1). The detected TTL level signals are coupled to pin 10 of MAX-232 IC. These are converted to +9v or -9v levels internally.
A visible LED-1 at pin-7 of MAX-232 IC indicates that signals are deing received. Optical signals received by photodiodes are converted to electrical pulses and both PCs think that there is a null-modem cable connected between them.
Testing: Connect two transceiver modules using 3 core cables, to COM-1 ports of the two PCs. Place them 15 to 20cms apart so that the IR LEDs of each module face the photodiode detector of the other.
Power ‘on’ both the circuits to operate at stabilized 5v DC. Check if MAX-232 IC is working properly by testing pin2 for 9v positive supply and pin6 for -9v supply. Otherwise replace it.
With both PCs and supply to the transceiver modules ‘on’ throw some light with torch on photodiode. Then LED-1 should flicker. This proves that IR signals are being detected by photodiodes and converted to RS-232 compatible levels by MAX-232 and output at pin7 of MAX-232 IC.
To test the transmitter side disconnect the module from COM-1 (or COM-2). Port of PC, and with the device power ‘on’, use a short jumper wire from +5v and touch it at pin8 of MAX-232 IC to simulate a positive pulse. LED-2 should turn ‘off’ and IRLEDs and LED3 should turn ‘on’ if the wiring is correct. IRLEDs would also be glowing, although one can not see them glowing. Remove the link wire from +5v to pin8 of MAX-232 IC and connect back the ‘D’ connector to PC`s COM-1.
Run a simple communication software with the conditions given at starting and send a few characters from keyboard through COM-1 port. We should be able to see LED3 flickering for a few seconds, indicating data transmission.
Monday, March 17, 2008
TAP THE HIDDEN TALENTS, N.Pushpalatha Reddy M.A(Eng) II-Sem
INTRODUCTION:-
“Every person is the Architect of his own fortune”
The basic issue that a percents women for playing full participatory role in nation building is the lack of economic independence. It is the base and bed rock for the empowerment of women. Community Development (CD) is incomplete with out developing the women who constitute about 50 per cent of the population. The CD has social economic and political dimensions. There fore, the role Government or Non Government organizations have realized the same. The key to long term poverty alleviation in developing and under developed countries is empowerment, in its broadest sense of increasing self-reliance of weaker and poor sections of people, particularly rural women.
Women constitute only 670 of the total work force in corporate houses and this percentage decreases in big industrial organizations, while in medium organizations it stands at 18% according to a study conducted by the confederation of Indian industry.
EMPOWERMENT:-
It is a people’s ability and aptitude to organize and influence change based on their access to knowledge as well as to political processes, financial, social and natural resources.
In the present society, empowering women has been the central agenda for both central and state Government and NGOS driven sectoral interventions. The key elements of empowerment are “enabling”, providing and powering and they reinforce each other.
A first and crucial condition for enabling women’s participation is the recognition at all levels making decision and taking collective action to fight. In order to empower women, male must be taken into confidence and with corroborative support.
ROLE OF DRDA:-
District Rural Development Agency has been the chief administrative machinery, which helps in planning, administering and monitoring the several developmental programmers for the rural poor like self-help Groups. This programmer was introduced as a sub-component of the Integrated Rural Development programme in 1982-83.
KEY ELEMENTS FOR EMPOWERMENT:
(A) INDEPENDENCE & SELF –RELIANCE:-
Freedom of action, possession of critical elements to under take desired and designed activity, development of a sense of self potential and vision of the future and absence of undue influence in decision–making.
(B) POSSESSION:-
Right to equitable stake of resource wealth or means of producing wealth in the home, village and society at large.
(C) ACTIVE PARTICIPATION:-
Influencing decision, programme implementation, accepting responsibility and ready to bear the consequences of decision.
(D) BUILD UP CAPAC ITY:
Improving abilities in under taking economic, social cultural and political programmers.
Self-respecting: Independent thinking to make choice to challenge the subordination, to develop self-confidence and assertiveness in attaining the autonomy is ought to be enriched.
(E) ROLE OF SHGS:-
“Do head work before the hand work”. The functions of SHGS are based on cooperation rather than competition. It follows the principle of contribution according to her ability and extract according to her need.
There are over 2.5 million SHGS in India, according to ministry of Rural Development and the NABARD has granted over 800 crores for providing credit through banks to SHGS & Swarna Jayanti Gram Swaraj Yojana. The NABARD’s goal is to credit link around one million SHGS by March 31, 2008.
“Every person is the Architect of his own fortune”
The basic issue that a percents women for playing full participatory role in nation building is the lack of economic independence. It is the base and bed rock for the empowerment of women. Community Development (CD) is incomplete with out developing the women who constitute about 50 per cent of the population. The CD has social economic and political dimensions. There fore, the role Government or Non Government organizations have realized the same. The key to long term poverty alleviation in developing and under developed countries is empowerment, in its broadest sense of increasing self-reliance of weaker and poor sections of people, particularly rural women.
Women constitute only 670 of the total work force in corporate houses and this percentage decreases in big industrial organizations, while in medium organizations it stands at 18% according to a study conducted by the confederation of Indian industry.
EMPOWERMENT:-
It is a people’s ability and aptitude to organize and influence change based on their access to knowledge as well as to political processes, financial, social and natural resources.
In the present society, empowering women has been the central agenda for both central and state Government and NGOS driven sectoral interventions. The key elements of empowerment are “enabling”, providing and powering and they reinforce each other.
A first and crucial condition for enabling women’s participation is the recognition at all levels making decision and taking collective action to fight. In order to empower women, male must be taken into confidence and with corroborative support.
ROLE OF DRDA:-
District Rural Development Agency has been the chief administrative machinery, which helps in planning, administering and monitoring the several developmental programmers for the rural poor like self-help Groups. This programmer was introduced as a sub-component of the Integrated Rural Development programme in 1982-83.
KEY ELEMENTS FOR EMPOWERMENT:
(A) INDEPENDENCE & SELF –RELIANCE:-
Freedom of action, possession of critical elements to under take desired and designed activity, development of a sense of self potential and vision of the future and absence of undue influence in decision–making.
(B) POSSESSION:-
Right to equitable stake of resource wealth or means of producing wealth in the home, village and society at large.
(C) ACTIVE PARTICIPATION:-
Influencing decision, programme implementation, accepting responsibility and ready to bear the consequences of decision.
(D) BUILD UP CAPAC ITY:
Improving abilities in under taking economic, social cultural and political programmers.
Self-respecting: Independent thinking to make choice to challenge the subordination, to develop self-confidence and assertiveness in attaining the autonomy is ought to be enriched.
(E) ROLE OF SHGS:-
“Do head work before the hand work”. The functions of SHGS are based on cooperation rather than competition. It follows the principle of contribution according to her ability and extract according to her need.
There are over 2.5 million SHGS in India, according to ministry of Rural Development and the NABARD has granted over 800 crores for providing credit through banks to SHGS & Swarna Jayanti Gram Swaraj Yojana. The NABARD’s goal is to credit link around one million SHGS by March 31, 2008.
E-RECRUITMENT JUST A CLICK AWAY,G.Nirmala, M.B.A-II Sem
1. What is recruitment?
A. Recruiting is the discovering of potential candidate for the actual or ancipated organizational vacancies or from another prospective it is linking activity bringing together those with jobs to fill and those seeking jobs. It is face to face conversation.
2. What is E-Recruitment?
A. E-Recruitment is nothing but recruiting on the internet. Internet is the way forward for recruiting although still in embryonic stage. Recruiting on the net will undoubtedly grow in acceptance and importance.
Marion Wilson investigates 90% of Europe’s big corporate and virtually all companies have a presence on World Wide Web, the internet is clearly the way forward for recruitment, although it is still very much in the embryonic stages.
Why we need e-recruitment
The following factors determine the need and necessity of e-recruitment.
v Cost-Classified or Expensive
v Minimum Information-Because it is a high cost, the information is provided is minimal and may not appeal to job seekers.
v Search-It is very time consuming to find all relevant available jobs or applicants.
As a result the normal recruitment process is inefficient. So there is a need for
E-recruitment which have a more advantages.
Advantages of E-Recruitment:
1. Lower cost to the organization. Also posting jobs on-line is cheaper than
Advertising in the newspapers.
2. Ability to find the information on a large number of jobs worldwide.
3. Ability to communicate quickly with potential employers.
4. Ability to save on advertisement cost.
5. Ability to find highly skilled employees.
Disadvantages of E-Recruitment:
1. Probably the biggest limitation is a fact that many people do not use the internet. This limitation is even more serious with non technology oriented jobs.
2. Screening and Checking the skill mapping and authenticity of million of resumes is a problem and time consuming exercise for organizations.
3. Security & Privacy may be other limitations.
In India the employers and employees still prefer a face to face interaction rather than sending e-mails.
A. Recruiting is the discovering of potential candidate for the actual or ancipated organizational vacancies or from another prospective it is linking activity bringing together those with jobs to fill and those seeking jobs. It is face to face conversation.
2. What is E-Recruitment?
A. E-Recruitment is nothing but recruiting on the internet. Internet is the way forward for recruiting although still in embryonic stage. Recruiting on the net will undoubtedly grow in acceptance and importance.
Marion Wilson investigates 90% of Europe’s big corporate and virtually all companies have a presence on World Wide Web, the internet is clearly the way forward for recruitment, although it is still very much in the embryonic stages.
Why we need e-recruitment
The following factors determine the need and necessity of e-recruitment.
v Cost-Classified or Expensive
v Minimum Information-Because it is a high cost, the information is provided is minimal and may not appeal to job seekers.
v Search-It is very time consuming to find all relevant available jobs or applicants.
As a result the normal recruitment process is inefficient. So there is a need for
E-recruitment which have a more advantages.
Advantages of E-Recruitment:
1. Lower cost to the organization. Also posting jobs on-line is cheaper than
Advertising in the newspapers.
2. Ability to find the information on a large number of jobs worldwide.
3. Ability to communicate quickly with potential employers.
4. Ability to save on advertisement cost.
5. Ability to find highly skilled employees.
Disadvantages of E-Recruitment:
1. Probably the biggest limitation is a fact that many people do not use the internet. This limitation is even more serious with non technology oriented jobs.
2. Screening and Checking the skill mapping and authenticity of million of resumes is a problem and time consuming exercise for organizations.
3. Security & Privacy may be other limitations.
In India the employers and employees still prefer a face to face interaction rather than sending e-mails.
National Stock Exchange-Biziness--S.Anil Krishna, M.B.A, II-SEM
National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) is India's largest Stock Exchange & World's third largest Stock Exchange in terms of transactions. Located in Mumbai, NSE was promoted by leading Financial Institutions at the behest of the Government of India, and was incorporated in November 1992 as a tax-paying company. In April 1993, NSE was recognized as a Stock exchange under the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act-1956. NSE commenced operations in the Wholesale Debt Market (WDM) segment in June 1994. Capital Market (Equities) segment of the NSE commenced operations in November 1994, while operations in the Derivatives segment commenced in June 2000. NSE has played a catalytic role in reforming Indian securities market in terms of microstructure, market practices and trading volumes. NSE has set up its trading system as a nation-wide, fully automated screen based trading system. It has written for itself the mandate to create World-class Stock Exchange and use it as an instrument of change for the industry as a whole through competitive pressure. NSE is set up on a demutualised model wherein the ownership, management and trading rights are in the hands of three different sets of people. This has completely eliminated any conflict of interest.
NSE was set up with the objectives of:
* Establishing nationwide trading facility for all types of securities
* Ensuring equal access to investors all over the country through an appropriate telecommunication network
* Providing fair, efficient & transparent securities market using electronic trading system
* Enabling shorter settlement cycles and book entry settlements
* Meeting International benchmarks and standards
Within a very short span of time, NSE has been able to achieve its objectives for which it was set up. Indian Capital Markets are a far cry from what they were 12 years back in terms of market practices, infrastructure, technology, risk management, clearing and settlement and investor service. To ensure continuity of business, NSE has built a full fledged BCP site operational for last 7 years.
NSE provides a fully automated screen-based trading system with national reach in the following major market segments:-
* Equity OR Capital Markets {NSE's market share is over 65%}
* Futures & Options OR Derivatives Market {NSE's market share over 99.5%}
* Wholesale Debt Market (WDM)
* Mutual Funds (MF)
* Initial Public Offerings (IPO)
What are the IT initiatives of NSE in the last one year?
NSE believes that technology shall continue to provide necessary impetus for any organization to retain its competitive edge, ensure timeliness & satisfaction in customer service. Being fully dependant on Information Technology, NSE has stressed on innovation and sustained investment in technology on a continual basis to ensure customer satisfaction, improvement in services which automatically helps in sustaining business and remain ahead of competition. As a policy, NSE looks to improve the quality of Services to its customers. Projects are not initiated based on a business model to reap profits but from a strategic perspective of better productivity, Value-adds & features, improving efficiency, reducing operational costs, compliance, operational transparency etc for the customers, investors and to the entire Indian Securities Industry f. Some of the projects taken by NSE last year are as follows:-
1. Trading System Capacity enhancement
2. Re-engineering of Online Position Monitoring (OPMS)
3. Augmentation of Data Warehouse (DWH)
4. STP Central Hub
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation of Trading System Capacity enhancement?
Project Objective
NSE's Capital Market Trading system was operational on two machine split architecture using Fault Tolerant mainframes and geared to handle 3 million trades. However, the CM segment had started to experience trades nearing 3 Million trades which form a threshold. Based on the trends & expected volumes, growth in the medium term is more than thrice the current trading volume, i.e. about 10 Million transactions per day. However with the then existing 2-machine split architecture, it was required to improve the trading system transaction handling capacity. The 3-machine split architecture project was thus taken up to enhance the load handling capacity of the system by introducing a 3-way split Hardware, Application optimization and improving the processes or achieving market volume of around 6 million transactions per day.
Project was completed as per schedule & is currently operational since last 1 year.
Business Benefits
System scaled on 3 machines with distribution of users and securities with complete transparency to market participants.
System witnessed 3 million trades with faster response time to members at significantly lower system resource utilization level.
Scalability to handle higher volumes (3 million to 6 million transactions per day).
Beneficiaries
Trading Members have experienced a faster response time. The trading system is able to handle higher volume of transactions which translates into higher turnover. It therefore directly translates into more opportunities and growth for the Entire Indian Securities market.
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation of re-engineering of Online Position Monitoring (OPMS)?
Project Objective
OPMS is On-line Position Monitoring and Risk Management system for the Capital Market segment of the National Stock Exchange of India Limited. It tracks positions of trading members from Turnover and Exposure limits with a view of identifying and preventing potential settlement related issues. The positions are monitored on an on-line basis and the system provides for auto disablement of the violating member on the trading system. Based on the volumes, it is expected that the current trading levels of about 3 million trades per day may rise to the new heights of 10 million trades per day in the near future. It was therefore necessary to initiate was to reengineer OPMS system without imposing any major cost associated with architectural overhauling. Another key objective was to scale the violation detection mechanism by a mammoth factor from around 300 violation checks per second to handle more than 4000 violations per second.
Business Benefits
Effective and efficient Risk Management- Violation turnover reduced from few seconds to few milliseconds & 99.96% trades processed for Risk Management within a second of occurrence.
Better utilization of Resources- Peak capacity of trades handling capacity enhanced to 10 million trades & Average CPU utilization reduced from 70% to 20%.
Linearly scalable
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation Augmentation of Data Warehouse (DWH)?
Project Objective
NSE has a matured data warehouse application extensively used for analysis, reporting and investigative purposes. The project was to enhance and upgrade existing data warehouse infrastructure in terms of:-
Migrating to a higher capacity server and storage hardware
Migrating database from Oracle 8 to Oracle 9i
Upgrade existing ETL solution consisting of a separate extraction solution and transformation cum loading solution into a complete and unified ETL tool
Business Benefits
Response time & query performance improved dramatically by about 100%.
Extraction and loading time has reduced by almost 8-9 times.
Timely, efficient reporting. Reduced lead time in providing data to regulator.
New features of Oracle 9i like Ranking, enhanced analytic functions have contributed enormously to efficiency aspect of the data warehouse usage.
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation STP Central Hub?
Project Objective
During a typical day at an institutional fund house, details of trade confirmations executed in the day are sent out to the Custodian for effecting trade settlements. The Custodian also receives details of the executed trade from the broker of the fund house, for cross-verification of the trade data. Upon verification, if it is found that the trade details do not match the instruction documents sent across by the fund house and the broker there is a delay in effecting such settlements. This is a global phenomenon that is a concern for all the major financial institutions. Studies have shown that around 15% of global trade failures result from unmatched trade data, which in monetary terms is upwards of Billions of Dollars, a steep price pay for the lack of an efficient processing framework. Straight through Processing (STP) framework seeks to provide seamless data flow both within the enterprise as well as across the market without any manual intervention using ISO 15022 messaging standards.
In India, in spite of SEBI making STP mandatory, market participants were not able to fully adapt the STP framework into their operations as the STP services provided by various providers were not interoperable. This meant that messages destined for market participants registered across the service providers could not be achieved. One of the options was to ensure that each of the STP provider "talked" to other STP providers, but this meant a mathematical explosion in terms of number of interconnects in case of increasing number of service providers.
Recognizing that the success of the STP is crucial to make a move towards T+1 settlement cycle, NSE took up the challenge of setting up a Central Hub to resolve inter-operability amongst various STP Service Providers. After developing the application software, the STP Central Hub was put for operational testing from end of March 2004 to route the messages between Service Providers. STP Central Hub has ensured seamless operations of message processing. After the initial testing and stabilization period, SEBI has mandated use of STP system for all institutional trades. SEBI endeavored to shorten the settlement cycle and has been successful in reducing the same from T+5 to T+2. It has now set a target for achieving T+1 settlement in Indian Securities Market. T+1 settlement cycle has not been achieved anywhere in the world and India is the first country to successfully implement STP effectively for all the market intermediaries.
NSE through its strength in technology innovations has made it possible for the integration of all STP service providers using heterogeneous protocols within their own system so as to provide the necessary impetus to the process
Business Benefits
Improved efficiency, reduction of manual activities leading to higher accuracy of trade execution and settlement. Reduced operational risk by automating the process from execution through to settlement. Reduction in operational cost by sending data electronically. Transparency & improved customer service with detailed reports about delivery and failure of messages are available instantaneously, on an on-line basis. Reduced settlement cycle to facilitate T+1 settlement.
NSE was set up with the objectives of:
* Establishing nationwide trading facility for all types of securities
* Ensuring equal access to investors all over the country through an appropriate telecommunication network
* Providing fair, efficient & transparent securities market using electronic trading system
* Enabling shorter settlement cycles and book entry settlements
* Meeting International benchmarks and standards
Within a very short span of time, NSE has been able to achieve its objectives for which it was set up. Indian Capital Markets are a far cry from what they were 12 years back in terms of market practices, infrastructure, technology, risk management, clearing and settlement and investor service. To ensure continuity of business, NSE has built a full fledged BCP site operational for last 7 years.
NSE provides a fully automated screen-based trading system with national reach in the following major market segments:-
* Equity OR Capital Markets {NSE's market share is over 65%}
* Futures & Options OR Derivatives Market {NSE's market share over 99.5%}
* Wholesale Debt Market (WDM)
* Mutual Funds (MF)
* Initial Public Offerings (IPO)
What are the IT initiatives of NSE in the last one year?
NSE believes that technology shall continue to provide necessary impetus for any organization to retain its competitive edge, ensure timeliness & satisfaction in customer service. Being fully dependant on Information Technology, NSE has stressed on innovation and sustained investment in technology on a continual basis to ensure customer satisfaction, improvement in services which automatically helps in sustaining business and remain ahead of competition. As a policy, NSE looks to improve the quality of Services to its customers. Projects are not initiated based on a business model to reap profits but from a strategic perspective of better productivity, Value-adds & features, improving efficiency, reducing operational costs, compliance, operational transparency etc for the customers, investors and to the entire Indian Securities Industry f. Some of the projects taken by NSE last year are as follows:-
1. Trading System Capacity enhancement
2. Re-engineering of Online Position Monitoring (OPMS)
3. Augmentation of Data Warehouse (DWH)
4. STP Central Hub
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation of Trading System Capacity enhancement?
Project Objective
NSE's Capital Market Trading system was operational on two machine split architecture using Fault Tolerant mainframes and geared to handle 3 million trades. However, the CM segment had started to experience trades nearing 3 Million trades which form a threshold. Based on the trends & expected volumes, growth in the medium term is more than thrice the current trading volume, i.e. about 10 Million transactions per day. However with the then existing 2-machine split architecture, it was required to improve the trading system transaction handling capacity. The 3-machine split architecture project was thus taken up to enhance the load handling capacity of the system by introducing a 3-way split Hardware, Application optimization and improving the processes or achieving market volume of around 6 million transactions per day.
Project was completed as per schedule & is currently operational since last 1 year.
Business Benefits
System scaled on 3 machines with distribution of users and securities with complete transparency to market participants.
System witnessed 3 million trades with faster response time to members at significantly lower system resource utilization level.
Scalability to handle higher volumes (3 million to 6 million transactions per day).
Beneficiaries
Trading Members have experienced a faster response time. The trading system is able to handle higher volume of transactions which translates into higher turnover. It therefore directly translates into more opportunities and growth for the Entire Indian Securities market.
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation of re-engineering of Online Position Monitoring (OPMS)?
Project Objective
OPMS is On-line Position Monitoring and Risk Management system for the Capital Market segment of the National Stock Exchange of India Limited. It tracks positions of trading members from Turnover and Exposure limits with a view of identifying and preventing potential settlement related issues. The positions are monitored on an on-line basis and the system provides for auto disablement of the violating member on the trading system. Based on the volumes, it is expected that the current trading levels of about 3 million trades per day may rise to the new heights of 10 million trades per day in the near future. It was therefore necessary to initiate was to reengineer OPMS system without imposing any major cost associated with architectural overhauling. Another key objective was to scale the violation detection mechanism by a mammoth factor from around 300 violation checks per second to handle more than 4000 violations per second.
Business Benefits
Effective and efficient Risk Management- Violation turnover reduced from few seconds to few milliseconds & 99.96% trades processed for Risk Management within a second of occurrence.
Better utilization of Resources- Peak capacity of trades handling capacity enhanced to 10 million trades & Average CPU utilization reduced from 70% to 20%.
Linearly scalable
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation Augmentation of Data Warehouse (DWH)?
Project Objective
NSE has a matured data warehouse application extensively used for analysis, reporting and investigative purposes. The project was to enhance and upgrade existing data warehouse infrastructure in terms of:-
Migrating to a higher capacity server and storage hardware
Migrating database from Oracle 8 to Oracle 9i
Upgrade existing ETL solution consisting of a separate extraction solution and transformation cum loading solution into a complete and unified ETL tool
Business Benefits
Response time & query performance improved dramatically by about 100%.
Extraction and loading time has reduced by almost 8-9 times.
Timely, efficient reporting. Reduced lead time in providing data to regulator.
New features of Oracle 9i like Ranking, enhanced analytic functions have contributed enormously to efficiency aspect of the data warehouse usage.
What was the objective, business benefits that the company derived and beneficiaries of the implementation STP Central Hub?
Project Objective
During a typical day at an institutional fund house, details of trade confirmations executed in the day are sent out to the Custodian for effecting trade settlements. The Custodian also receives details of the executed trade from the broker of the fund house, for cross-verification of the trade data. Upon verification, if it is found that the trade details do not match the instruction documents sent across by the fund house and the broker there is a delay in effecting such settlements. This is a global phenomenon that is a concern for all the major financial institutions. Studies have shown that around 15% of global trade failures result from unmatched trade data, which in monetary terms is upwards of Billions of Dollars, a steep price pay for the lack of an efficient processing framework. Straight through Processing (STP) framework seeks to provide seamless data flow both within the enterprise as well as across the market without any manual intervention using ISO 15022 messaging standards.
In India, in spite of SEBI making STP mandatory, market participants were not able to fully adapt the STP framework into their operations as the STP services provided by various providers were not interoperable. This meant that messages destined for market participants registered across the service providers could not be achieved. One of the options was to ensure that each of the STP provider "talked" to other STP providers, but this meant a mathematical explosion in terms of number of interconnects in case of increasing number of service providers.
Recognizing that the success of the STP is crucial to make a move towards T+1 settlement cycle, NSE took up the challenge of setting up a Central Hub to resolve inter-operability amongst various STP Service Providers. After developing the application software, the STP Central Hub was put for operational testing from end of March 2004 to route the messages between Service Providers. STP Central Hub has ensured seamless operations of message processing. After the initial testing and stabilization period, SEBI has mandated use of STP system for all institutional trades. SEBI endeavored to shorten the settlement cycle and has been successful in reducing the same from T+5 to T+2. It has now set a target for achieving T+1 settlement in Indian Securities Market. T+1 settlement cycle has not been achieved anywhere in the world and India is the first country to successfully implement STP effectively for all the market intermediaries.
NSE through its strength in technology innovations has made it possible for the integration of all STP service providers using heterogeneous protocols within their own system so as to provide the necessary impetus to the process
Business Benefits
Improved efficiency, reduction of manual activities leading to higher accuracy of trade execution and settlement. Reduced operational risk by automating the process from execution through to settlement. Reduction in operational cost by sending data electronically. Transparency & improved customer service with detailed reports about delivery and failure of messages are available instantaneously, on an on-line basis. Reduced settlement cycle to facilitate T+1 settlement.
Web Data-Mining-Techno Arena--P. Sumalatha, MCA-II SEM
Here’s a ready reckoner on how to mine the riches that the internet throws up. As the Net grows, mining that vast repository of information is getting more daunting. But relax and on, as there’s enough help at hand.
Who needs it?
Almost all of us need information. A lot of information is freely available on the web. Learning a few techniques on how to mine information on the web is a useful skill. Here are some sample usage scenarios.
· You are an entrepreneur who is planning to start a new software business. You hear that Web 2.0 and social applications are hot. You want to do some research to understand the marketplace, and want to prototype a few product ideas.
· You are part of the CTO office of a software company, and are interested in short, medium-, and long-term technology and business trends in your industry. You need this information to build skills in your organization, and to build a few concept prototypes.
· You are part of the CIO office of an organization. You need to balance early adoption of technologies with providing a stable environment for your business; you don’t want to jump at every new technology. In addition to finding new tools and techniques, you also want to understand the risks and the maturity level of these technologies, which ones are being used for building applications, and you also want to track many non-technical factors.
· You are an outsourcing company and want to find customers for your business and track trends in outsourcing. Being a jump ahead of your competition and carving a niche are important differentiators.
· You are part of HR, or a Learning officer, and need to plan for the skill development of your employees. You want to keep your software team happy and so need to know the latest technologies, tools and resources to plan training and skill development.
· You are a development lead, and need to provide the team with the latest information on product releases, and access to product/ technology knowledge bases. You need to know of any problems, including security issues, in the tools or software that you are currently using for your projects.
Broadly, there are several components to finding, suing and sharing information.
· Identifying and discovering information sources.
· Tracking information from various sources and filtering them for their relevance to your needs
· Organizing collected information and sharing it with others
FINDING INFORMATION:-
Information sources can be categorized as :
· News sources
· Company web sites
· Blocks
· Search engines
· Wikis
· Discussion groups
· Social book marking sites
· Social networks
All theses sources are complimentary to each other. Each delivor a slightly differing type of information. We will discuss each one of them in more detail in the rest of this article.
NEWS SOURCES:-
News has traditionally been our major sources of information, but news sources gradually becoming web based and are delivered in several ways .
News web sites are the closest to the printing news papers that we have been accustomed to. Few layout changes are made to accommodate the smaller area for displaying news. But if you New York Times. The wall street journal are the Hindu, you will notice a lot of similarities to traditional newspapers.
News portals are similar to news websites, with some difference-you are allowed customize the news to suit to your tastes. Some of the more popular news delivery is done using news portals. News portals are also popular for delivering custom news specific to an industry or subject area.
News feeds are lists of news items these are also known as web feeds or RSS feeds. Each feed has a title and discussion and contains one or more news items. Each item, in turn, contains a title, description and a link to the original story. RSS feeds a very popular means of delivering multiple news items.
Where do you find these feeds? :-
Several publications (like business week, the wall street journal ) and yahoo news provide news feeds. You can subscribe to these feeds and read them with news reader software. News reader aggregate several feeds of your choice, and present a list of current news items.
One of the benefits of RSS feeds is that they are based on a standard format-you can easily write an applications that filters RSS feeds based on your own specific criteria, an have it present you with only selected items.
Blogs are interesting sources of news-they contain content created by people like you and me, no one has bloggers. In many ways, you could consider blogs to be ‘citizen news’ blubbers pick an item of interest and write a post is like a many news column. Blogs most often carry reference to the original news and commentary by the blogger. A more increasing aspect of blogs is that readers can comment on the news items or the commentary. On popular or controversial blog posts the commentary often provides more information than the original post themselves.
Discussion groups:-
We use the term ‘discussion groups’ to broadly cover mailing lists, company/ product-based discussion groups, and collaborative web products like yahoo groups and Google groups. A lot of information is exchanged and debated in a discussion group. If you are considering a new programming language, web frame work or a new development tool these forums provide valuable information.
Company-based groups are normally run by a company’s support group, are run independently by others outside the company. If you are looking at investing in a certain company’s products, this may be a good place to check them out.
Topic-based groups focus on a certain topic of interest like wireless mobile devices. A typical group of this kind may focus on web frame works are learning software they are not specific to a single company but several companies in the arena may be discussed.
Product –based groups focus on a product or a product family. For example, Django is python-based frame work for building web applications. Members of the Django group on a Google spend a lot of time discussing various approaches and best practices on using Django. They also discuss various issues and work around.
Company websites:-
Company websites are one of the best means of getting information about the company-directly from the source. You can typically get information about the philosophy, mission, team, products, or services-and a lot more. Company sites range from a few pages to a few thousand pages.
You can learn a lot about a company by visiting its websites. Frequent updates to the sites indicate a lot activity. You can look at customer wins, business partnerships, product releases, and job postings. These core activities are reflected in frequent press releases and news coverage.
A few sites like Alexa, Zoom Info and Hoovers not only provide information about a company, but also provide information on competing companies and products.
Search engines
Search engines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are probably the most frequently used resources to find information. Search engines index news sites, company sites, feeds and blogs, to provide answers to your search.
Web search engines in general locate information using a keyword search and some kind of a ranking scheme. Many of these search engines also provide an API (application programming interface) that you can use to create automated searches for example, a search for your own company. Meta search engines submit searches to multiple search engines, and consolidate and group information.
Custom search engines allow you to customize one or more aspects of search. For example, Google Custom Search allows you to specify the sources (websites) to search, and some predefined keywords to include in your search.
Vertical search engines are focused on specific industry or subject area. By focusing on a specific subject area, they can provide more effective search and accurate results.
Blog search engines allow you to look for blogs that cover a certain topic or search area. While you can use regular search engines to find blogs, b log searches focus on indexing and searching only blog posts. Popular blog search engines include Google blog search technorati.
Code search engines let you search for code (programs) of a specific type. This is a great resource for developers. The search is typically done for open source, or other publicly available source code. You can specify certain key words, and select a language or operating environment. Google code search enables you to search based on file paths or names, the license under which the code is released, the programming language used, the name of the package, and more. Each of these accepts regular expressions as the search expression, allowing you to construct powerful and very specific search expressions. Krugle is another code search engine, which was recently purchased by yahoo, and also sports an open source version.
Semantic search is a new type of search engine that is in its infancy.
Instead of just indexing key words and searching for them, semantic search engines allow you search a bit deeper. Some of the semantic search engines also allow humans to validate the results of the search, so that they can be improved.
Social bookmarks:-
Social bookmark services allow people to share their book marks. This is done by saving bookmarks on the internet and making them accessible to every one. To make the access simpler, social book marking systems include descriptions tages with bookmarks. Popular social book marking systems include del.icio.us, furl ,Digg ,Slashdot, Reddit and Stumble upon. Some of them allow users to rank bookmarks, so the more popular ones are listed at the top, further increasing their visibility.
Other facilities provided by social book marking services include an API and RSS feeds to programmatically access book marks. They also tag clouds (where tags are displayed with the more frequently-occurring tags appearing larger).
WIKIS:-
Wikis are a special type of website where contest is created by multiple people –collaborative content development, editing, approver and publication make wikis a very powerful platform for creating content. Probably the most definitive example of a Wiki is Wikipedia, which contains the collective knowledge of hundreds of thousands of people. A collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become the first stop in many people’s search for encyclopedic knowledge on the Net.
DbPedia is community effort to extract structured information WikiPedia and to make this information available on the Web. DbPedia and to link other datasts on the Web to WikiPedia data.
Product wikis are specialized wiki sites that are set up to provide wiki collaborative community for product documentation, support and issues. Many open source projects/product have a product wiki. Even commercial products from major vendors have their own wikis.
Industry wikis cover information about specific industries. You can think of them as the aggregation of knowledge about a particular industry-for example, web 2.0 or AJAX techniques. Industry wikis are normally associated with industry portals, or managed by independent groups. If you are trying to find customers or start a company in a specific industry, you may want to first check whether your industry has its own wiki. A good starting point is wikipdia, which may contain links to other wikis.
Support wikis are knowledge repositories for products and services these are maintained either by the vendor or by the community. If you are in IT or any software development, these can be gold mines of information.
Social networks:-
A discussion about information sources is not complete with out some mentions of social networks. Social networks allow people / groups to share information in a wide variety of ways. The most popular social network today is face book, closely followed by My Space. Linked in is a business social networks. Recently, Google introduced open social, which provides a common set of APIs for social application across multiple websites. With standard java script o n HTML, developers can create applications that access in social networks friends and update feeds.
There are wide verities of information sources, and they seem to increase rapidly. Most of them offer programmatic access through a language-independent API. All you need is a way to track them and be updated when these rich sources of information produce new information.
Who needs it?
Almost all of us need information. A lot of information is freely available on the web. Learning a few techniques on how to mine information on the web is a useful skill. Here are some sample usage scenarios.
· You are an entrepreneur who is planning to start a new software business. You hear that Web 2.0 and social applications are hot. You want to do some research to understand the marketplace, and want to prototype a few product ideas.
· You are part of the CTO office of a software company, and are interested in short, medium-, and long-term technology and business trends in your industry. You need this information to build skills in your organization, and to build a few concept prototypes.
· You are part of the CIO office of an organization. You need to balance early adoption of technologies with providing a stable environment for your business; you don’t want to jump at every new technology. In addition to finding new tools and techniques, you also want to understand the risks and the maturity level of these technologies, which ones are being used for building applications, and you also want to track many non-technical factors.
· You are an outsourcing company and want to find customers for your business and track trends in outsourcing. Being a jump ahead of your competition and carving a niche are important differentiators.
· You are part of HR, or a Learning officer, and need to plan for the skill development of your employees. You want to keep your software team happy and so need to know the latest technologies, tools and resources to plan training and skill development.
· You are a development lead, and need to provide the team with the latest information on product releases, and access to product/ technology knowledge bases. You need to know of any problems, including security issues, in the tools or software that you are currently using for your projects.
Broadly, there are several components to finding, suing and sharing information.
· Identifying and discovering information sources.
· Tracking information from various sources and filtering them for their relevance to your needs
· Organizing collected information and sharing it with others
FINDING INFORMATION:-
Information sources can be categorized as :
· News sources
· Company web sites
· Blocks
· Search engines
· Wikis
· Discussion groups
· Social book marking sites
· Social networks
All theses sources are complimentary to each other. Each delivor a slightly differing type of information. We will discuss each one of them in more detail in the rest of this article.
NEWS SOURCES:-
News has traditionally been our major sources of information, but news sources gradually becoming web based and are delivered in several ways .
News web sites are the closest to the printing news papers that we have been accustomed to. Few layout changes are made to accommodate the smaller area for displaying news. But if you New York Times. The wall street journal are the Hindu, you will notice a lot of similarities to traditional newspapers.
News portals are similar to news websites, with some difference-you are allowed customize the news to suit to your tastes. Some of the more popular news delivery is done using news portals. News portals are also popular for delivering custom news specific to an industry or subject area.
News feeds are lists of news items these are also known as web feeds or RSS feeds. Each feed has a title and discussion and contains one or more news items. Each item, in turn, contains a title, description and a link to the original story. RSS feeds a very popular means of delivering multiple news items.
Where do you find these feeds? :-
Several publications (like business week, the wall street journal ) and yahoo news provide news feeds. You can subscribe to these feeds and read them with news reader software. News reader aggregate several feeds of your choice, and present a list of current news items.
One of the benefits of RSS feeds is that they are based on a standard format-you can easily write an applications that filters RSS feeds based on your own specific criteria, an have it present you with only selected items.
Blogs are interesting sources of news-they contain content created by people like you and me, no one has bloggers. In many ways, you could consider blogs to be ‘citizen news’ blubbers pick an item of interest and write a post is like a many news column. Blogs most often carry reference to the original news and commentary by the blogger. A more increasing aspect of blogs is that readers can comment on the news items or the commentary. On popular or controversial blog posts the commentary often provides more information than the original post themselves.
Discussion groups:-
We use the term ‘discussion groups’ to broadly cover mailing lists, company/ product-based discussion groups, and collaborative web products like yahoo groups and Google groups. A lot of information is exchanged and debated in a discussion group. If you are considering a new programming language, web frame work or a new development tool these forums provide valuable information.
Company-based groups are normally run by a company’s support group, are run independently by others outside the company. If you are looking at investing in a certain company’s products, this may be a good place to check them out.
Topic-based groups focus on a certain topic of interest like wireless mobile devices. A typical group of this kind may focus on web frame works are learning software they are not specific to a single company but several companies in the arena may be discussed.
Product –based groups focus on a product or a product family. For example, Django is python-based frame work for building web applications. Members of the Django group on a Google spend a lot of time discussing various approaches and best practices on using Django. They also discuss various issues and work around.
Company websites:-
Company websites are one of the best means of getting information about the company-directly from the source. You can typically get information about the philosophy, mission, team, products, or services-and a lot more. Company sites range from a few pages to a few thousand pages.
You can learn a lot about a company by visiting its websites. Frequent updates to the sites indicate a lot activity. You can look at customer wins, business partnerships, product releases, and job postings. These core activities are reflected in frequent press releases and news coverage.
A few sites like Alexa, Zoom Info and Hoovers not only provide information about a company, but also provide information on competing companies and products.
Search engines
Search engines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are probably the most frequently used resources to find information. Search engines index news sites, company sites, feeds and blogs, to provide answers to your search.
Web search engines in general locate information using a keyword search and some kind of a ranking scheme. Many of these search engines also provide an API (application programming interface) that you can use to create automated searches for example, a search for your own company. Meta search engines submit searches to multiple search engines, and consolidate and group information.
Custom search engines allow you to customize one or more aspects of search. For example, Google Custom Search allows you to specify the sources (websites) to search, and some predefined keywords to include in your search.
Vertical search engines are focused on specific industry or subject area. By focusing on a specific subject area, they can provide more effective search and accurate results.
Blog search engines allow you to look for blogs that cover a certain topic or search area. While you can use regular search engines to find blogs, b log searches focus on indexing and searching only blog posts. Popular blog search engines include Google blog search technorati.
Code search engines let you search for code (programs) of a specific type. This is a great resource for developers. The search is typically done for open source, or other publicly available source code. You can specify certain key words, and select a language or operating environment. Google code search enables you to search based on file paths or names, the license under which the code is released, the programming language used, the name of the package, and more. Each of these accepts regular expressions as the search expression, allowing you to construct powerful and very specific search expressions. Krugle is another code search engine, which was recently purchased by yahoo, and also sports an open source version.
Semantic search is a new type of search engine that is in its infancy.
Instead of just indexing key words and searching for them, semantic search engines allow you search a bit deeper. Some of the semantic search engines also allow humans to validate the results of the search, so that they can be improved.
Social bookmarks:-
Social bookmark services allow people to share their book marks. This is done by saving bookmarks on the internet and making them accessible to every one. To make the access simpler, social book marking systems include descriptions tages with bookmarks. Popular social book marking systems include del.icio.us, furl ,Digg ,Slashdot, Reddit and Stumble upon. Some of them allow users to rank bookmarks, so the more popular ones are listed at the top, further increasing their visibility.
Other facilities provided by social book marking services include an API and RSS feeds to programmatically access book marks. They also tag clouds (where tags are displayed with the more frequently-occurring tags appearing larger).
WIKIS:-
Wikis are a special type of website where contest is created by multiple people –collaborative content development, editing, approver and publication make wikis a very powerful platform for creating content. Probably the most definitive example of a Wiki is Wikipedia, which contains the collective knowledge of hundreds of thousands of people. A collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become the first stop in many people’s search for encyclopedic knowledge on the Net.
DbPedia is community effort to extract structured information WikiPedia and to make this information available on the Web. DbPedia and to link other datasts on the Web to WikiPedia data.
Product wikis are specialized wiki sites that are set up to provide wiki collaborative community for product documentation, support and issues. Many open source projects/product have a product wiki. Even commercial products from major vendors have their own wikis.
Industry wikis cover information about specific industries. You can think of them as the aggregation of knowledge about a particular industry-for example, web 2.0 or AJAX techniques. Industry wikis are normally associated with industry portals, or managed by independent groups. If you are trying to find customers or start a company in a specific industry, you may want to first check whether your industry has its own wiki. A good starting point is wikipdia, which may contain links to other wikis.
Support wikis are knowledge repositories for products and services these are maintained either by the vendor or by the community. If you are in IT or any software development, these can be gold mines of information.
Social networks:-
A discussion about information sources is not complete with out some mentions of social networks. Social networks allow people / groups to share information in a wide variety of ways. The most popular social network today is face book, closely followed by My Space. Linked in is a business social networks. Recently, Google introduced open social, which provides a common set of APIs for social application across multiple websites. With standard java script o n HTML, developers can create applications that access in social networks friends and update feeds.
There are wide verities of information sources, and they seem to increase rapidly. Most of them offer programmatic access through a language-independent API. All you need is a way to track them and be updated when these rich sources of information produce new information.
Autonomic computing-Techno Arena--S.Malleswari, M.C.A, II Sem
Can Computers Heal Itself?
This article showcases the new trends in self-managed computing systems that configure, heal, protect themselves and adapt to the user’s needs automatically. The idea derives from autonomic nervous systems of the human body that helps controlling the entire system. Building self-managing and self-healing systems towards autonomic computing is a grand challenge of today’s complex computing world. With increased complexity in hardware and software and ease of computing, the need of reliable and self-healing system administration is a call for today. We evaluate the need and focus on the challenges of implanting a system thinker that helps in self-healing the system at least partially if not at all to its entirety.
Genesis:
The idea behind automatic computing derives from the automatic nervous system of the human body wherein the system controls important bodily functions without any conscious intervention. Drawing analogy to this phenomenon, IBM proposed in 2001 to create self-managing computer systems that could automatically configure, heal, optimize and protect on its own. This was followed suit by Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, whose products are leading the development and implementations of automatic computing.
IBM calls this seminal field of research ”A problem that by virtue of its degree of difficulty and the importance of its solution, both from a technical and societal point of view, becomes the focus of interest to a specific scientific community.”
What is Autonomic computing?
Autonomic computing introduces a new buzzword-self-CHOP system that self-configure, self-heal, self-optimize, and self-protect itself without human intervention thereby leveraging the benefits of self-managed systems.
Self-configure:
Let’s try picturing this:
An organization is running an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) application in a clustered environment with failover mechanisms and other distributed and object-oriented features built into it. It includes a set of java EE servers deployed on a cluster of nodes, each tier of the system being replicated for better performance and availability. Daily this application caters to thousands of requests over the internet, and carries out hundreds of transactions per minute across locations in five continents.
Given the complexity and size of this application and its environment, it takes a group of systems administrators to install the system in all the physical locations, configure the application and it’s associated resources such as JMS Queues, Mail Servers, Application Servers, Workflow Servers, and many more. This entire process of installation and configuration consumes a few person days, multiplied by the number of such installations.
Self-Heal
Autonomic computing suggests building software systems with self—healing features that would monitor the application and server logs periodically for system failures, and have intelligence built into it to diagnose the root cause, determine the problem, and finally recover the system from the show-stopper. In a much down-to-earth terms, this would mean first detecting and isolating the failed component, taking it offline, fixing or isolating the failed component, doing an auto-build of the system and redeploying the application without any human intervention. For instance, an autonomic system will encounter a failed database index by re-indexing the files, and subsequently testing and loading them back into production. If the issue lies with storage constraints, the self-healing manager will automatically extend file space and database storage according to previous data on growth and expansion.
Self-Optimize
Autonomic Computing systems are empowered with a self-optimizing workload manager that is capable of logical partitioning and dynamic server clustering extended across multiple heterogeneous systems to provide a single collection of computing resources across the enterprise. Be it issues with storage, databases, networks, and other resources, the workload manager continually monitors and tunes the available resources for optimal usage. Formulation new algorithms for this self-optimizing design pattern is an open area of research that calls upon advanced data management techniques and feedback mechanisms using control theory.
Self-Protect
We live in uncertain times where all possible software and hardware vulnerabilities are utilized with malicious intents. For instance, an unethical hacker might exploit a memory leakage in the printer spooler of a particular unit to overflow the entire LAN and jamming the network. Self-protecting autonomic systems will be able to diagnose the attack, isolate the component in question, and redirect the printer usage to some alternate location without human intervention. Self-protection is also used as an early warning to anticipate and prevent system failures.
Autonomic System Architecture:
White et al have described an architectural approach to achieve the goals of autonomic computing. They suggested making each autonomic computing element be responsible for monitoring its input services and determine whether they are performing According to the agreed upon agreements and contracts covering them. In case of a failure, in partial or its entirety, because of wrong results returned or out of bounds or something else, the requesting autonomic computing may react by cutting off the relationship of the problem creating process and requesting a new or fresh one.
In autonomic computing supporting architecture , a control loop spans over a centralized or may be a distributed horizontally partitioned knowledgebase to sniff problems found through Sensors, thereby monitoring, analyzing, planning, executing the action plan, and finally triggering the Effector for implanting the solution in order to self heal the system. The source of such problems reporting could be in terms of a system log, exceptions occurred but not handled and reported through log files, or through in-memory process or implanted agents on client machines. The knowledge base will have different rules for symptoms of such incidents, possible execution plans. In case solution does not exist, the knowledgebase will be periodically analyzed for possible solutions schemes and action plans which will be used for later occurring cases.
Object oriented Autonomic Computing:
Object-oriented software systems are based on hiding the implementation and exposing the public interface for controlling the behavior and state changes by outside clients. In case an object fails to restore states, or goes to an inconsistent state because of some transaction leading to such situations, the autonomic engine implemented at the object level could bring itself to a consistent state based on a consistency profile check.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a loosely coupled composition of services. With heterogeneous services offerings on varied platforms, web services based on distributed middleware technology using open standards and interoperability through XML, services can be described as exchanging messages in XML. With SOA, in conjunction with web services, application integration with cross-platform interoperability, scalability, availability is achievable. Loose-coupling and asynchronous linkage by messaging are the important aspects of SOA so that incase of a problem creating component , the component can be quarantined and fresh copy of the component can be re-instantiated to serve the same purpose after resuming to the last rolled back consistent state.
In case of a loosely coupled SOA, when an attempt to respond to a request for a designated service fails, the log of failures can be analyzed to detect the cause of t such failures, and corrective action can be taken. For example, in case of a java EE application, if a JDBC connection fails to connect to a designated database, the cause of failure could be detected in terms of the nature of exception. If the exception is caused due to class not found exception, then the class path and the existence of the related driver could be search automatically and depending on the cause of such failure, a proper action plan based on rule based knowledgebase can be taken by the Effector.
Suggested Approach:
We can have multi-agents running on client machines running as daemon processes to work as sniffer of the problems. The agent keeps track of the system and application logs for applications registered for autonomic computing and configured for that. In case of exception coming out of running java based web application and in case of a failure (exception) within a known set of problems, it tries to rectify steps like rectifying the database (may be) or may be running some auto-correct code snippet at the server end by sending a remote procedure call (RPC) or invoke a java based RMI (Remote method invocation) to rectify the problem or prevent the problem from re-occurring.
In case a garbage collector in java based application fails due to PermGenerrors (which is overflow of the heap area), the system could temporarily stall the application initiated by the healing agent and resume the application or automat5ically restart a fresh copy of application after reporting the problems.
We suggest that the problems determination algorithms which are crucial to any autonomic system be designed to be rules-based, with a RBE (Rules Based Engine) implementing fuzzy logic on set of exception that the log tracer/analyzer extracts from a system log after a failure. The RBE can be made easily configurable using XML as the underlying knowledge repository. On encountering multiple causes for a system failure, the self-healing manager can use fuzzy logic to determine the root cause behind it. For instance, if the log analyzer/ tracer reveals a scenario where “Application server can’t connect to the database” but the “Application server can ping database server machine “, the RBE can figure out that the database server is down, and consequently the workload Manager may take appropriate actions to recover from the system crash.
Trends in Autonomic Computing:
The increasing heterogeneity dynamism and interconnectivity in software applications, service and networks led to complex unmanageable and insecure systems. Coping with such a complexity necessitates investigation of this new paradigm for computers to heal itself, and posses to broad areas of research: technologies related to autonomic computing and development of autonomic computing product. Open areas of research Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing as a means towards implementing autonomic systems and designing automatic managers in multi-layer P2P form, so that autonomic behavior and the underlying RBE knowledge base are stored in separated layers.
The scope of autonomic computing involves not only rules- based enterprise-wide application we build, but also the underlying operating, middleware, database systems, server/network systems shared services. This will be evident in the B2B and B2C collaboration.
This article showcases the new trends in self-managed computing systems that configure, heal, protect themselves and adapt to the user’s needs automatically. The idea derives from autonomic nervous systems of the human body that helps controlling the entire system. Building self-managing and self-healing systems towards autonomic computing is a grand challenge of today’s complex computing world. With increased complexity in hardware and software and ease of computing, the need of reliable and self-healing system administration is a call for today. We evaluate the need and focus on the challenges of implanting a system thinker that helps in self-healing the system at least partially if not at all to its entirety.
Genesis:
The idea behind automatic computing derives from the automatic nervous system of the human body wherein the system controls important bodily functions without any conscious intervention. Drawing analogy to this phenomenon, IBM proposed in 2001 to create self-managing computer systems that could automatically configure, heal, optimize and protect on its own. This was followed suit by Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, whose products are leading the development and implementations of automatic computing.
IBM calls this seminal field of research ”A problem that by virtue of its degree of difficulty and the importance of its solution, both from a technical and societal point of view, becomes the focus of interest to a specific scientific community.”
What is Autonomic computing?
Autonomic computing introduces a new buzzword-self-CHOP system that self-configure, self-heal, self-optimize, and self-protect itself without human intervention thereby leveraging the benefits of self-managed systems.
Self-configure:
Let’s try picturing this:
An organization is running an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) application in a clustered environment with failover mechanisms and other distributed and object-oriented features built into it. It includes a set of java EE servers deployed on a cluster of nodes, each tier of the system being replicated for better performance and availability. Daily this application caters to thousands of requests over the internet, and carries out hundreds of transactions per minute across locations in five continents.
Given the complexity and size of this application and its environment, it takes a group of systems administrators to install the system in all the physical locations, configure the application and it’s associated resources such as JMS Queues, Mail Servers, Application Servers, Workflow Servers, and many more. This entire process of installation and configuration consumes a few person days, multiplied by the number of such installations.
Self-Heal
Autonomic computing suggests building software systems with self—healing features that would monitor the application and server logs periodically for system failures, and have intelligence built into it to diagnose the root cause, determine the problem, and finally recover the system from the show-stopper. In a much down-to-earth terms, this would mean first detecting and isolating the failed component, taking it offline, fixing or isolating the failed component, doing an auto-build of the system and redeploying the application without any human intervention. For instance, an autonomic system will encounter a failed database index by re-indexing the files, and subsequently testing and loading them back into production. If the issue lies with storage constraints, the self-healing manager will automatically extend file space and database storage according to previous data on growth and expansion.
Self-Optimize
Autonomic Computing systems are empowered with a self-optimizing workload manager that is capable of logical partitioning and dynamic server clustering extended across multiple heterogeneous systems to provide a single collection of computing resources across the enterprise. Be it issues with storage, databases, networks, and other resources, the workload manager continually monitors and tunes the available resources for optimal usage. Formulation new algorithms for this self-optimizing design pattern is an open area of research that calls upon advanced data management techniques and feedback mechanisms using control theory.
Self-Protect
We live in uncertain times where all possible software and hardware vulnerabilities are utilized with malicious intents. For instance, an unethical hacker might exploit a memory leakage in the printer spooler of a particular unit to overflow the entire LAN and jamming the network. Self-protecting autonomic systems will be able to diagnose the attack, isolate the component in question, and redirect the printer usage to some alternate location without human intervention. Self-protection is also used as an early warning to anticipate and prevent system failures.
Autonomic System Architecture:
White et al have described an architectural approach to achieve the goals of autonomic computing. They suggested making each autonomic computing element be responsible for monitoring its input services and determine whether they are performing According to the agreed upon agreements and contracts covering them. In case of a failure, in partial or its entirety, because of wrong results returned or out of bounds or something else, the requesting autonomic computing may react by cutting off the relationship of the problem creating process and requesting a new or fresh one.
In autonomic computing supporting architecture , a control loop spans over a centralized or may be a distributed horizontally partitioned knowledgebase to sniff problems found through Sensors, thereby monitoring, analyzing, planning, executing the action plan, and finally triggering the Effector for implanting the solution in order to self heal the system. The source of such problems reporting could be in terms of a system log, exceptions occurred but not handled and reported through log files, or through in-memory process or implanted agents on client machines. The knowledge base will have different rules for symptoms of such incidents, possible execution plans. In case solution does not exist, the knowledgebase will be periodically analyzed for possible solutions schemes and action plans which will be used for later occurring cases.
Object oriented Autonomic Computing:
Object-oriented software systems are based on hiding the implementation and exposing the public interface for controlling the behavior and state changes by outside clients. In case an object fails to restore states, or goes to an inconsistent state because of some transaction leading to such situations, the autonomic engine implemented at the object level could bring itself to a consistent state based on a consistency profile check.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a loosely coupled composition of services. With heterogeneous services offerings on varied platforms, web services based on distributed middleware technology using open standards and interoperability through XML, services can be described as exchanging messages in XML. With SOA, in conjunction with web services, application integration with cross-platform interoperability, scalability, availability is achievable. Loose-coupling and asynchronous linkage by messaging are the important aspects of SOA so that incase of a problem creating component , the component can be quarantined and fresh copy of the component can be re-instantiated to serve the same purpose after resuming to the last rolled back consistent state.
In case of a loosely coupled SOA, when an attempt to respond to a request for a designated service fails, the log of failures can be analyzed to detect the cause of t such failures, and corrective action can be taken. For example, in case of a java EE application, if a JDBC connection fails to connect to a designated database, the cause of failure could be detected in terms of the nature of exception. If the exception is caused due to class not found exception, then the class path and the existence of the related driver could be search automatically and depending on the cause of such failure, a proper action plan based on rule based knowledgebase can be taken by the Effector.
Suggested Approach:
We can have multi-agents running on client machines running as daemon processes to work as sniffer of the problems. The agent keeps track of the system and application logs for applications registered for autonomic computing and configured for that. In case of exception coming out of running java based web application and in case of a failure (exception) within a known set of problems, it tries to rectify steps like rectifying the database (may be) or may be running some auto-correct code snippet at the server end by sending a remote procedure call (RPC) or invoke a java based RMI (Remote method invocation) to rectify the problem or prevent the problem from re-occurring.
In case a garbage collector in java based application fails due to PermGenerrors (which is overflow of the heap area), the system could temporarily stall the application initiated by the healing agent and resume the application or automat5ically restart a fresh copy of application after reporting the problems.
We suggest that the problems determination algorithms which are crucial to any autonomic system be designed to be rules-based, with a RBE (Rules Based Engine) implementing fuzzy logic on set of exception that the log tracer/analyzer extracts from a system log after a failure. The RBE can be made easily configurable using XML as the underlying knowledge repository. On encountering multiple causes for a system failure, the self-healing manager can use fuzzy logic to determine the root cause behind it. For instance, if the log analyzer/ tracer reveals a scenario where “Application server can’t connect to the database” but the “Application server can ping database server machine “, the RBE can figure out that the database server is down, and consequently the workload Manager may take appropriate actions to recover from the system crash.
Trends in Autonomic Computing:
The increasing heterogeneity dynamism and interconnectivity in software applications, service and networks led to complex unmanageable and insecure systems. Coping with such a complexity necessitates investigation of this new paradigm for computers to heal itself, and posses to broad areas of research: technologies related to autonomic computing and development of autonomic computing product. Open areas of research Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing as a means towards implementing autonomic systems and designing automatic managers in multi-layer P2P form, so that autonomic behavior and the underlying RBE knowledge base are stored in separated layers.
The scope of autonomic computing involves not only rules- based enterprise-wide application we build, but also the underlying operating, middleware, database systems, server/network systems shared services. This will be evident in the B2B and B2C collaboration.
A Desktop in Your Pocket-Techno Arena--B. JayaKrishna, MCA-II SEM
What Microsoft did for personal computers with Windows, Google- through its recently-announced Android- is planning to do for mobile phones. However, Apple has already stolen a march on Google with its ground-breaking user interface on the iPhone, which has arguably changed the way people interact on mobile phones. Good as it is, it’s still far from taking the desktop experience to mobile phone users. The primary reasons for this are a lack of open standards-interoperable platforms, hardware, software and the control of content by carriers. Google is all set to address just these issues with Android.
Object of attention
The humble mobile platform is today abuzz; it is emerging as probably the single platform with the most potential for innovation, new technologies, new business models and user experiences. Google realized this quite a while ago when it acquired the young start-up, Android, way back in 2005. But it couldn’t build a product and ecosystem around it, and the rumours of a Gphone floated around for quite some time. However, what Google seems to be doing is vision-oriented. It is building a new platform, based on Linux, and supported by the open source community and alliance partners.
What should a platform do? A mobile phone primarily serves four purposes-listening to music, watching video, browsing the internet and taking pictures. The weakest function is Internet accessibility and rich content document manipulation. The limits of what you can do with your mobile phone are dictated by the carriers, and the availability of hardware and software to enable new features. Carriers charge heavily for Internet connectivity, which is further constrained buy a usage cap and low speeds. What’s more, the browser and other applications for mobile phones are not that rich. Here, the iPhone’s Safari browser may set new trends that state how a mobile should look, and perform.
The need of the hour
But what challenges might Google face by coming out with its own platform. Here, we need to understand the complexity of the mobile industry. On the one hand are mobile operators who offer a set of services known as VAS (value-added services). Effectively using these services largely depends on the kind of handsets users have- this is one of the reasons most of the telecom players tie up with hardware manufactures and offer locked handsets. RIM’s Blackberry is a good example of the need for a customized handset to use the full range of services.
On the other hand, the irony with major hardware vendors is that even if they do induct a feature or piece of hardware in their devices, it is rendered moot if the operator doesn’t offer services that use it. Nokia’s N92, which has the capability to run TV programmes, as well as new 3g handsets, are some examples of such helpless handsets.
Google not only understand this, but also wants to in jet its revenue generation machine, advertisements into this lucrative market. Natural, the company wanted to ensure that its platform had support from both hardware manufacturers and carriers. That is why the alliance comprises not only player like HTC and Qualcomm, but also carriers such as Sprint and T-mobile, so that Android’s features would actually be usable by customers.
This may get the two components of the telecom world- carriers and hardware manufacturers- in better sync to deliver the full potential of the device to users. Google also knows that its platform will depend heavily on connectivity or carriers – which are one of the reason why it is also bidding for the wireless spectrum to be auctioned in the US, next year. The spectrum will allow Google to offer services, bundled with its advertisements to customers, and also get other carriers to use its model.
An industry observer, who refuses to be named, feels that Google might even offer almost ‘free’ connectivity and calls, with ad revenues covering costs. It would be more like a ‘free to air channel’, or free e-mail, chat or blog services. Google WiFi, a free wireless Internet service that the company offers to the city of Mountain View, is an example of the city of Mountain View, is an example of what Google is capable of doing. And if that is what Google is planning with mobile phones, Apple’s iPhone is nowhere near being ready to face the competition Google is going to throw at them.
Greatest expectations: User experience
Technologically, Google’s platform is based on a specialized Linux operating system. The company has reportedly worked hard to address all the requirements from hardware to software-device drivers, middleware and applications. Its browser is based on the same web kit that Safari is based on, so it is poised to offer an excellent Web browsing experience. Packet Video is the force behind its music, and video-playback software. Since the applications will be built by the open source community and third parties, the user experience will be much richer than what is available today. The platform will be available for a diverse range of hardware, whether with multitouch screens, QWERTY keyboards or RIM-like devices.
Thus the direct competition would be with the revolutionary iPhone. That gets interesting, as Google’s CEO, Dr Eric Schmidt, is on Apple’s board of directors. One wonders how comfortable Apple and Google will be after this, considering that Apple is not an alliance partner for Android. Microsoft and Nokia are also not part of the alliance-the primary reason being that they already have competing platforms.
Interoperable mobile phones
One big reason Google’s Android may re-write the mobile OS space is that the already available OSs for mobile phones have stagnated. Interoperability is another major issue when it comes to reaping the full benefit of these devices. Every mobile hardware has its own firmware, and supports various file formats, depending on the licence agreements they have. The games or movies that I can run on my Nokia N73 may not run on the N95, leave alone Motorola or Sony handsets. So, what is needed are some open standards for the mobile platform as well. Well, here comes Google! Being an outsider to the mobile industry, Google would definitely think of something that traditional mobile players failed to offer.
Why are mobile Phones bound to replace laptops?
Today, more and more people are using their mobile devices to access the Internet. Executives use the Blackberry far more than their bulky laptops. Google is seemingly trying to optimize the usage of these smart mobile phones and do for mobiles what Microsoft did for desktop PCs. But people still have apprehensions when you say that the mobile phone may replace laptops, since it’s hard to imagine a mobile phone giving you the capability and the flexibility that a laptop offers. Thankfully, this effect is not as dramatic as it could have been had gadgets like the iPhone or iPod Touch not hit the market.
Now, reading PDFs, editing documents and spreadsheets, creating presentations or even using heavy suites like Photoshop or the GIMP on your mobile phones will be an easy task, owing to increasing screen sizes and the interfaces iPhone is offering. You can easily put a 3.5 inch (8.9 cm) small screen in your pocket, given that you’re probably comfortable carrying a wallet of the same size. Interestingly, a recent survey conducted by Panasonic revealed that 70 percent of laptop users feel uncomfortable stowing their laptops in the overhead bins of airplanes. Imagine carrying a mobile device with the same capabilities in your trouser pocket! Come to think of it, you’d no longer need to carry a bulky laptop around, and your lap is now free for more interesting occupants.
Did you say something about bulky applications and processing speed? With the iPod letting you carry 160 GB of data, storage and installation of heavy applications will not be an issue. Intel’s initiative on Mobile Internet Devices may in future, merge with mobile phones and offer desktop-level computing power on these miniature devices.
There’s only one nagging worry, though-isn’t Google a rather late entrant in this domain, with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian already enjoying a huge market share? The windows experience suggests it’s quite hard to replace the present platform. Think what you may, but to a great extent, the most-used platform always becomes a standard. Then again, iPhone’s entry has opened new fronts in the mobile space. So, we’ll need to wait and see whether Google’s Android will be able to put the desktop in our pockets!.
Object of attention
The humble mobile platform is today abuzz; it is emerging as probably the single platform with the most potential for innovation, new technologies, new business models and user experiences. Google realized this quite a while ago when it acquired the young start-up, Android, way back in 2005. But it couldn’t build a product and ecosystem around it, and the rumours of a Gphone floated around for quite some time. However, what Google seems to be doing is vision-oriented. It is building a new platform, based on Linux, and supported by the open source community and alliance partners.
What should a platform do? A mobile phone primarily serves four purposes-listening to music, watching video, browsing the internet and taking pictures. The weakest function is Internet accessibility and rich content document manipulation. The limits of what you can do with your mobile phone are dictated by the carriers, and the availability of hardware and software to enable new features. Carriers charge heavily for Internet connectivity, which is further constrained buy a usage cap and low speeds. What’s more, the browser and other applications for mobile phones are not that rich. Here, the iPhone’s Safari browser may set new trends that state how a mobile should look, and perform.
The need of the hour
But what challenges might Google face by coming out with its own platform. Here, we need to understand the complexity of the mobile industry. On the one hand are mobile operators who offer a set of services known as VAS (value-added services). Effectively using these services largely depends on the kind of handsets users have- this is one of the reasons most of the telecom players tie up with hardware manufactures and offer locked handsets. RIM’s Blackberry is a good example of the need for a customized handset to use the full range of services.
On the other hand, the irony with major hardware vendors is that even if they do induct a feature or piece of hardware in their devices, it is rendered moot if the operator doesn’t offer services that use it. Nokia’s N92, which has the capability to run TV programmes, as well as new 3g handsets, are some examples of such helpless handsets.
Google not only understand this, but also wants to in jet its revenue generation machine, advertisements into this lucrative market. Natural, the company wanted to ensure that its platform had support from both hardware manufacturers and carriers. That is why the alliance comprises not only player like HTC and Qualcomm, but also carriers such as Sprint and T-mobile, so that Android’s features would actually be usable by customers.
This may get the two components of the telecom world- carriers and hardware manufacturers- in better sync to deliver the full potential of the device to users. Google also knows that its platform will depend heavily on connectivity or carriers – which are one of the reason why it is also bidding for the wireless spectrum to be auctioned in the US, next year. The spectrum will allow Google to offer services, bundled with its advertisements to customers, and also get other carriers to use its model.
An industry observer, who refuses to be named, feels that Google might even offer almost ‘free’ connectivity and calls, with ad revenues covering costs. It would be more like a ‘free to air channel’, or free e-mail, chat or blog services. Google WiFi, a free wireless Internet service that the company offers to the city of Mountain View, is an example of the city of Mountain View, is an example of what Google is capable of doing. And if that is what Google is planning with mobile phones, Apple’s iPhone is nowhere near being ready to face the competition Google is going to throw at them.
Greatest expectations: User experience
Technologically, Google’s platform is based on a specialized Linux operating system. The company has reportedly worked hard to address all the requirements from hardware to software-device drivers, middleware and applications. Its browser is based on the same web kit that Safari is based on, so it is poised to offer an excellent Web browsing experience. Packet Video is the force behind its music, and video-playback software. Since the applications will be built by the open source community and third parties, the user experience will be much richer than what is available today. The platform will be available for a diverse range of hardware, whether with multitouch screens, QWERTY keyboards or RIM-like devices.
Thus the direct competition would be with the revolutionary iPhone. That gets interesting, as Google’s CEO, Dr Eric Schmidt, is on Apple’s board of directors. One wonders how comfortable Apple and Google will be after this, considering that Apple is not an alliance partner for Android. Microsoft and Nokia are also not part of the alliance-the primary reason being that they already have competing platforms.
Interoperable mobile phones
One big reason Google’s Android may re-write the mobile OS space is that the already available OSs for mobile phones have stagnated. Interoperability is another major issue when it comes to reaping the full benefit of these devices. Every mobile hardware has its own firmware, and supports various file formats, depending on the licence agreements they have. The games or movies that I can run on my Nokia N73 may not run on the N95, leave alone Motorola or Sony handsets. So, what is needed are some open standards for the mobile platform as well. Well, here comes Google! Being an outsider to the mobile industry, Google would definitely think of something that traditional mobile players failed to offer.
Why are mobile Phones bound to replace laptops?
Today, more and more people are using their mobile devices to access the Internet. Executives use the Blackberry far more than their bulky laptops. Google is seemingly trying to optimize the usage of these smart mobile phones and do for mobiles what Microsoft did for desktop PCs. But people still have apprehensions when you say that the mobile phone may replace laptops, since it’s hard to imagine a mobile phone giving you the capability and the flexibility that a laptop offers. Thankfully, this effect is not as dramatic as it could have been had gadgets like the iPhone or iPod Touch not hit the market.
Now, reading PDFs, editing documents and spreadsheets, creating presentations or even using heavy suites like Photoshop or the GIMP on your mobile phones will be an easy task, owing to increasing screen sizes and the interfaces iPhone is offering. You can easily put a 3.5 inch (8.9 cm) small screen in your pocket, given that you’re probably comfortable carrying a wallet of the same size. Interestingly, a recent survey conducted by Panasonic revealed that 70 percent of laptop users feel uncomfortable stowing their laptops in the overhead bins of airplanes. Imagine carrying a mobile device with the same capabilities in your trouser pocket! Come to think of it, you’d no longer need to carry a bulky laptop around, and your lap is now free for more interesting occupants.
Did you say something about bulky applications and processing speed? With the iPod letting you carry 160 GB of data, storage and installation of heavy applications will not be an issue. Intel’s initiative on Mobile Internet Devices may in future, merge with mobile phones and offer desktop-level computing power on these miniature devices.
There’s only one nagging worry, though-isn’t Google a rather late entrant in this domain, with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian already enjoying a huge market share? The windows experience suggests it’s quite hard to replace the present platform. Think what you may, but to a great extent, the most-used platform always becomes a standard. Then again, iPhone’s entry has opened new fronts in the mobile space. So, we’ll need to wait and see whether Google’s Android will be able to put the desktop in our pockets!.
INDIA'S RURAL POOR-WHY HOUSING ISN'T ENOUGHT TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE- OUR PRINCIPAL DR.G.RAMAKRISHNA REDDY GARU
India's Rural Poor: Why Housing Isn't Enough to Create
Sustainable Communities
India's desire to become the world's next big economic power is as real as the enormous challenges it faces in raising the social and economic well being of its rural populations. According to Abraham George, founder of The George Foundation, an NGO focused on poverty alleviation in South India, "The issue of adequate housing is integral to poverty reduction and social justice" in India. In this opinion piece, George describes the living conditions of the rural poor and argues that government resettlement programs are inefficient and perpetuate caste-driven schisms. Instead of simply supplying shelter for the inhabitants of rural villages, he says, these programs need to work towards a larger goal of building "healthy and sustainable communities.”
Mahatma Gandhi is often quoted as having said, "India lives in the villages." That statement is as true today as it was more than 60 years ago. Nearly 70% of India's 1.1 billion-plus population still lives in 600,000 or so villages. If India is to be truly understood, it is the lives of these people that really count.
Most "outsiders" or urbanites have a nostalgic view of rural India. They think of villages as peaceful havens where people live simple lives, where the air is pure and the land is green as far as the eye can see. Some of those images are indeed true, but the realities of day-to-day life for a great majority of rural people are nothing short of cruel. A living story of economic deprivation, social injustice and hopelessness has prevailed for centuries. The real story of rural India must be told with more than five hundred million characters that live on less than a dollar a day, most of them in terrible living conditions.
Statistics Mask Reality
Many of the rural poor work the fields in agriculture and are employed by the few landowners who reside in their villages. Several others pursue caste-associated occupations -- priests, carpenters, blacksmiths, barbers, weavers, potters, oil-pressers, leatherworkers, sweepers and so on. Lately, with increased economic activity in nearby towns, many commute outside their villages every day to work as drivers, construction laborers, packers and in other industrial jobs. Some migrate to cities for months, leaving their families behind. But despite the increasing demand in cities for labor met by rural migration, and the income generated by such employment, the living conditions for most rural people remain far from what can be called "acceptable.”
According to the Indian government and the World Bank, less than 30% of the nation is poor, and 70% of the poor (225 million) live in the villages. These official statistics are based on a per capita consumption expenditure of Rs.356 ($8.70) per month, or Rs.11.70 ($0.28) per day. This low yardstick grossly undercounts the number of poor people in rural India, and certainly
does not reflect the living conditions for most of them.
For example, The George Foundation's recent survey of nine villages in Hosur taluk in Tamilnadu state showed that more than 80% of the people live on a daily income of less than one dollar, the internationally accepted definition for poverty. Given the proximity of the surveyed villages to the rapidly growing city of Bangalore, this estimate reflects a more prosperous picture than what is true for most of rural India.
Development of countries is often judged by certain economic and social statistics compiled by national governments and major international agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations. By these aggregate measures, India has made significant progress in recent years, especially since liberalization measures were introduced in 1991. For example, the GDP growth rate now stands at 9.4% per year, much better than the less than 4% experienced during the 1990s. Life expectancy at birth has now improved to 64 years from 56 years 20 years ago; infant mortality has fallen to 5.6% from 8.1%; primary school attendance has risen to 74% from 65%, and the adult literacy rate is 61 % as compared to 50%, all during the same period.
There is no arguing that there has been improvement, but these statistics mask many realities that paint a far poorer picture of the country, especially in rural India. For example, consider the following: The rural economic growth rate has been stagnant -- at around 2% to 2.5% a year -during the past decade, mainly because of the weak performance of the agricultural sector. This marginal expansion barely keeps up with the 1.75% annual increase in rural population, thus offering very little improvement in income and living standards for most people in the villages.
More than half of all children in the country under the age of four suffer from malnutrition; this statistic is far higher for rural children. The government has built a vast system of more than 170,000 primary health centers and sub-centers throughout the country, and more are added each year, yet most of them are either dysfunctional or do not regularly provide even the minimal level of basic health care.
Though primary school enrollment is exceptionally good, the education students receive in most rural schools is unacceptably bad, and less than 10% among them graduate from high school. While government statistics on national literacy have steadily improved for years, several independent studies have shown that less than 20% of the rural population can read or write beyond their own names, and an even smaller percentage can do simple arithmetic.
Our foundation's survey of 17 villages in Hosur Taluk showed that less than 15% of the "lower caste" people who comprise over 70% of the population could write the number corresponding to their age. Given these and other realities, one has to wonder what meaningful progress has been achieved in many important areas, especially among the rural population.
Rural Living Conditions
National indicators regularly published by governments and international agencies do not include any statistics on the living conditions as exemplified by the type of housing available. Nor are there any published statistics on the average space available -- or density -- for each person in a house.
Housing is one of the top priorities for most people, regardless of their income levels. In my
Interviews with many poor village women, practically everyone listed housing as their most important need -- above food, health care and education for their children. Without the security and comfort of a home, there is no escaping the difficulties resulting from poverty. Poor people do not have the financial means to buy or construct houses with their savings, and therefore they live in their ancestral huts, those rented from landlords (with ensuing obligations), or government-supplied houses.
Poverty levels measured by monetary expenditures toward food do not adequately capture the quality of life that is greatly affected by the type of available housing. Adequate housing is considered by many to be a fundamental human right regardless of income level -- a basic necessity for all that cannot be denied in a fair and equitable society. It is interrelated with other aspects of life such as health and education. For example, children cannot study in a poorly lit house. Respiratory disorders among rural population in India are often the result of unfavorable housing and poor living conditions. Asthma and bronchitis are caused by pollen grains, dust mites, animal waste and several environmental factors related to bad housing conditions. Poor sanitation and hygiene, inadequate ventilation and smoke inhalation are all associated aspects of poor housing that affect health and social development.
According to the National Family Health Survey, concluded in 2000 by the Indian government, only 19% of the rural population lives in pucca (strong) houses, while the remaining live in kaccha (weak) and semi-pucca houses with mud walls and thatched roofs. Eighty-seven percent of homes in the villages do not have toilet facilities. Cooking is usually done inside the house under inadequate ventilation with biomass such as dried cow-dung, fire wood, dry weeds or crop residue, exacerbating the risk of tuberculosis.
The 2001 Indian Census estimated that 40% of rural houses do not have separate kitchens. When cooking is done inside the house, it is usually on the floor in the corner of a room, sometimes separated by a half-wall. Smoke fills the entire house during cooking, but occupants usually prefer to remain inside. Coughing and spitting are the resulting outcome, symptomatic of what finally leads to chronic illnesses.
Focus on Community
The housing program as currently implemented will hardly improve the living standards of the poor, nor will it contribute to social justice. Before more funds are expended toward public housing, the government is well advised to reconsider its approach to the problem. In arriving
at a new strategy for housing, planners must not lose sight of other, interrelated goals such as offering basic amenities, preventing diseases and assuring social integration. The approach must shift from the current focus on offering shelter to developing healthy and integrated communities. That might imply a departure from a caste-based approach to assistance based on income levels.
While a great majority of the poor belong to lower castes at the present time, and therefore would be eligible for assistance under this approach, those belonging to higher castes should not be denied assistance if they deserve it for reasons of low income. Only then would it be possible to bring about social integration between different castes. This will also permit upward mobility for lower caste families who are able to afford better and bigger homes. Mixed-income housing programs have been successfully implemented in countries like the U.S. to bring about integration across race and class, and India should not shy away from taking similar approaches to achieving social equality among all its citizens.
Instead of replacing huts with cemented houses at the same location, a better strategy might be to develop new communities at another location close by. That would offer considerable flexibility in properly laying out the entire housing complex. These new developments may incorporate facilities for sharing water, sewage processing and bio-gas production, as well as fruit and vegetable gardens and small shops. When resources are shared instead of wasted, and everyone lives in healthy conditions, overall productivity will increase considerably.
Community development will certainly call for larger initial investment than what is required for building shelters. However, the long-term benefits associated with creating healthy and sustainable communities are likely to be far greater than the short term savings from building low-cost housing.
It is possible to recover some of the additional costs associated with community development through innovative financing schemes that require extended repayments by beneficiaries commensurate with their increasing income levels. An appropriate partnership between government, donors, investors and financial institutions can pave the way for financial solutions that make it possible for beneficiaries to carry some of the burden.
The issue of adequate housing is integral to poverty reduction and social justice. It must not be viewed in isolation, but as part of an effort to develop harmonious and healthy communities. In all these issues, the real solution lies in good public governance, building strong human foundations through education and health care, creating economic opportunity, and ensuring social justice for all.
Sustainable Communities
India's desire to become the world's next big economic power is as real as the enormous challenges it faces in raising the social and economic well being of its rural populations. According to Abraham George, founder of The George Foundation, an NGO focused on poverty alleviation in South India, "The issue of adequate housing is integral to poverty reduction and social justice" in India. In this opinion piece, George describes the living conditions of the rural poor and argues that government resettlement programs are inefficient and perpetuate caste-driven schisms. Instead of simply supplying shelter for the inhabitants of rural villages, he says, these programs need to work towards a larger goal of building "healthy and sustainable communities.”
Mahatma Gandhi is often quoted as having said, "India lives in the villages." That statement is as true today as it was more than 60 years ago. Nearly 70% of India's 1.1 billion-plus population still lives in 600,000 or so villages. If India is to be truly understood, it is the lives of these people that really count.
Most "outsiders" or urbanites have a nostalgic view of rural India. They think of villages as peaceful havens where people live simple lives, where the air is pure and the land is green as far as the eye can see. Some of those images are indeed true, but the realities of day-to-day life for a great majority of rural people are nothing short of cruel. A living story of economic deprivation, social injustice and hopelessness has prevailed for centuries. The real story of rural India must be told with more than five hundred million characters that live on less than a dollar a day, most of them in terrible living conditions.
Statistics Mask Reality
Many of the rural poor work the fields in agriculture and are employed by the few landowners who reside in their villages. Several others pursue caste-associated occupations -- priests, carpenters, blacksmiths, barbers, weavers, potters, oil-pressers, leatherworkers, sweepers and so on. Lately, with increased economic activity in nearby towns, many commute outside their villages every day to work as drivers, construction laborers, packers and in other industrial jobs. Some migrate to cities for months, leaving their families behind. But despite the increasing demand in cities for labor met by rural migration, and the income generated by such employment, the living conditions for most rural people remain far from what can be called "acceptable.”
According to the Indian government and the World Bank, less than 30% of the nation is poor, and 70% of the poor (225 million) live in the villages. These official statistics are based on a per capita consumption expenditure of Rs.356 ($8.70) per month, or Rs.11.70 ($0.28) per day. This low yardstick grossly undercounts the number of poor people in rural India, and certainly
does not reflect the living conditions for most of them.
For example, The George Foundation's recent survey of nine villages in Hosur taluk in Tamilnadu state showed that more than 80% of the people live on a daily income of less than one dollar, the internationally accepted definition for poverty. Given the proximity of the surveyed villages to the rapidly growing city of Bangalore, this estimate reflects a more prosperous picture than what is true for most of rural India.
Development of countries is often judged by certain economic and social statistics compiled by national governments and major international agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations. By these aggregate measures, India has made significant progress in recent years, especially since liberalization measures were introduced in 1991. For example, the GDP growth rate now stands at 9.4% per year, much better than the less than 4% experienced during the 1990s. Life expectancy at birth has now improved to 64 years from 56 years 20 years ago; infant mortality has fallen to 5.6% from 8.1%; primary school attendance has risen to 74% from 65%, and the adult literacy rate is 61 % as compared to 50%, all during the same period.
There is no arguing that there has been improvement, but these statistics mask many realities that paint a far poorer picture of the country, especially in rural India. For example, consider the following: The rural economic growth rate has been stagnant -- at around 2% to 2.5% a year -during the past decade, mainly because of the weak performance of the agricultural sector. This marginal expansion barely keeps up with the 1.75% annual increase in rural population, thus offering very little improvement in income and living standards for most people in the villages.
More than half of all children in the country under the age of four suffer from malnutrition; this statistic is far higher for rural children. The government has built a vast system of more than 170,000 primary health centers and sub-centers throughout the country, and more are added each year, yet most of them are either dysfunctional or do not regularly provide even the minimal level of basic health care.
Though primary school enrollment is exceptionally good, the education students receive in most rural schools is unacceptably bad, and less than 10% among them graduate from high school. While government statistics on national literacy have steadily improved for years, several independent studies have shown that less than 20% of the rural population can read or write beyond their own names, and an even smaller percentage can do simple arithmetic.
Our foundation's survey of 17 villages in Hosur Taluk showed that less than 15% of the "lower caste" people who comprise over 70% of the population could write the number corresponding to their age. Given these and other realities, one has to wonder what meaningful progress has been achieved in many important areas, especially among the rural population.
Rural Living Conditions
National indicators regularly published by governments and international agencies do not include any statistics on the living conditions as exemplified by the type of housing available. Nor are there any published statistics on the average space available -- or density -- for each person in a house.
Housing is one of the top priorities for most people, regardless of their income levels. In my
Interviews with many poor village women, practically everyone listed housing as their most important need -- above food, health care and education for their children. Without the security and comfort of a home, there is no escaping the difficulties resulting from poverty. Poor people do not have the financial means to buy or construct houses with their savings, and therefore they live in their ancestral huts, those rented from landlords (with ensuing obligations), or government-supplied houses.
Poverty levels measured by monetary expenditures toward food do not adequately capture the quality of life that is greatly affected by the type of available housing. Adequate housing is considered by many to be a fundamental human right regardless of income level -- a basic necessity for all that cannot be denied in a fair and equitable society. It is interrelated with other aspects of life such as health and education. For example, children cannot study in a poorly lit house. Respiratory disorders among rural population in India are often the result of unfavorable housing and poor living conditions. Asthma and bronchitis are caused by pollen grains, dust mites, animal waste and several environmental factors related to bad housing conditions. Poor sanitation and hygiene, inadequate ventilation and smoke inhalation are all associated aspects of poor housing that affect health and social development.
According to the National Family Health Survey, concluded in 2000 by the Indian government, only 19% of the rural population lives in pucca (strong) houses, while the remaining live in kaccha (weak) and semi-pucca houses with mud walls and thatched roofs. Eighty-seven percent of homes in the villages do not have toilet facilities. Cooking is usually done inside the house under inadequate ventilation with biomass such as dried cow-dung, fire wood, dry weeds or crop residue, exacerbating the risk of tuberculosis.
The 2001 Indian Census estimated that 40% of rural houses do not have separate kitchens. When cooking is done inside the house, it is usually on the floor in the corner of a room, sometimes separated by a half-wall. Smoke fills the entire house during cooking, but occupants usually prefer to remain inside. Coughing and spitting are the resulting outcome, symptomatic of what finally leads to chronic illnesses.
Focus on Community
The housing program as currently implemented will hardly improve the living standards of the poor, nor will it contribute to social justice. Before more funds are expended toward public housing, the government is well advised to reconsider its approach to the problem. In arriving
at a new strategy for housing, planners must not lose sight of other, interrelated goals such as offering basic amenities, preventing diseases and assuring social integration. The approach must shift from the current focus on offering shelter to developing healthy and integrated communities. That might imply a departure from a caste-based approach to assistance based on income levels.
While a great majority of the poor belong to lower castes at the present time, and therefore would be eligible for assistance under this approach, those belonging to higher castes should not be denied assistance if they deserve it for reasons of low income. Only then would it be possible to bring about social integration between different castes. This will also permit upward mobility for lower caste families who are able to afford better and bigger homes. Mixed-income housing programs have been successfully implemented in countries like the U.S. to bring about integration across race and class, and India should not shy away from taking similar approaches to achieving social equality among all its citizens.
Instead of replacing huts with cemented houses at the same location, a better strategy might be to develop new communities at another location close by. That would offer considerable flexibility in properly laying out the entire housing complex. These new developments may incorporate facilities for sharing water, sewage processing and bio-gas production, as well as fruit and vegetable gardens and small shops. When resources are shared instead of wasted, and everyone lives in healthy conditions, overall productivity will increase considerably.
Community development will certainly call for larger initial investment than what is required for building shelters. However, the long-term benefits associated with creating healthy and sustainable communities are likely to be far greater than the short term savings from building low-cost housing.
It is possible to recover some of the additional costs associated with community development through innovative financing schemes that require extended repayments by beneficiaries commensurate with their increasing income levels. An appropriate partnership between government, donors, investors and financial institutions can pave the way for financial solutions that make it possible for beneficiaries to carry some of the burden.
The issue of adequate housing is integral to poverty reduction and social justice. It must not be viewed in isolation, but as part of an effort to develop harmonious and healthy communities. In all these issues, the real solution lies in good public governance, building strong human foundations through education and health care, creating economic opportunity, and ensuring social justice for all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
