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Food security is closely related to crop yield; if the reduction in the yield continues, it intensifies global food crisis. The area under rice cultivation has been declining rapidly, according to an analysis in Wayanad district from 2004-05 to 2018-19 from the Department of Economics and Statistics, Kerala government. In 1985-86, nearly 30,000 hectare was cultivated; by 2009-10 it declined to 12,995 ha and to 7,760 by 2018-19. The area under cultivation during the winter season steadily decreased 27 per cent from 2013-14 to 2018-19; area under cultivation during summer decreased by 67 per cent in 2018-19 compared to 2013-14. An analysis carried out in  ‘A handbook of transdisciplinary approaches to agro-biodiversity’  talked about a prominent change in Wayanad region from an agrarian economy centred on staple food production to a region of cash crops and plantations. Rainfall variability, along with other factors such as lack of water availability owing to an increase in runo...

Ethics is about moral principles and differentiate right from wrongs.Ethics can be either normative and relative. Normative Ethics: these ethics about what is good and what is wrong as a standard pracice.  Example . Abortion is wrong in certain countries. Relative Ethics: Good or bad actions judged based on the society in which it is practiced. Example :. Abnormal foetus can be aborted. These two type of ethics mainly depend on the time, the society, the circumstances in which these are practiced. Generally killing is wrong as a normative ethics but to protect one's country the soldiers killing infiltrators is justified under relative Ethics. Relation between Normative and Relative : To understand Relative ethics one should first practice normative ethics. Normative and relative ethics are back bone to bring moral ethical changes in a society. Both ethics reinforce each other at a time of practicing and society in which these are practiced. Relevance :  In matured society both...

Philosopher’s Approach Philosophers and ethicists believe in a few ethical standards, which can guide ethical decision making . First, the utilitarian approach   says that when choosing one ethical action over another, we should select the one that does the most good and least harm. For example, if the cashier at the grocery store gives me too much change, I may ask myself, if I keep the change, what harm is caused? If I keep it, is any good created? Perhaps the good created is that I am not able to pay back my friend whom I owe money to, but the harm would be that the cashier could lose his job. In other words, the  utilitarian approach  recognizes that some good and some harm can come out of every situation and looks at balancing the two. In the  rights approach , we look at how our actions will affect the rights of those around us. So rather than looking at good versus harm as in the  utilitarian approach , we are looking at individuals and their rights to ma...

The Department of Defense uses a specific framework to make ethical decisions. Define the problem. State the problem in general terms. State the decisions to be made Identify the goals. State short-term goals. State long-term goals. List appropriate laws or regulations. List the ethical  values  at stake. Name all the stakeholders. Identify persons who are likely to be affected by a decision. List what is at stake for each  stakeholder . Gather additional information. Take time to gather all necessary information. Ask questions. Demand proof when appropriate. Check your assumptions. State all feasible solutions. List solutions that have already surfaced. Produce additional solutions by brainstorming with associates. Note how stakeholders can be affected (loss or gain) by each solution. Eliminate unethical options. Eliminate solutions that are clearly unethical. Eliminate solutions with short-term advantages but long-term problems. Rank the remaining options according to h...

  What is health ethics?What are key ethical issues in public health?What are key ethical issues of health  organizations and systems? Health  ethics is the interdisciplinary field of study and practice that seeks specifically to understand the values undergird-ing decisions and actions in health care, health research and health policy, and to provide guidance for action when these values conflict. Health ethics has a  broad focus, taking in ethical issues  faced by health professionals, health policy-makers and  health researchers, as well as by patients, families, and  communities in a  range of contexts related to health,  including clinical care, health services and systems, public  health, epidemiology, information technology and the use  of animals in research. Health ethics is built on a  sound appreciation of the empirical realities of particular health issues.  For example, if authorities have a limited supply of...

State finances are in dire straits. A reliable indicator of this is the steady rise in state debt after a long hiatus. Total debt of the states has gone up by 4.6 percentage points of the gross domestic product (GDP) over the last six years, as highlighted in the recent report on state finances by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), from a low of 22% of the GDP in 2014–15 to touch a peak level of 26.6% as per the budget estimates of 2020–21. The rapid build-up of the state debt is a sharp reversal of the previous trends when the state debt shrunk by around 10 percentage points of the GDP from a peak level of 31.8% in 2003–04. Moreover, the pace of growth of the debt burden of the states was almost four times faster than that of the central government whose debt levels have only edged up by 1.2 percentage points of the GDP, from a low of 49.4% of the GDP in 2017–18 to 50.6% in the budget estimates for 2020–21. The sharp acceleration of the state debt, as c...

The 20th century and the early part of the 21st century, the traditional boundaries between goods and services have blurred. By virtue of Moore’s law, computing capabilities have surged faster than capabilities in traditional industries. These information-based technologies have been widely adopted across a broad range of industries and products that traditionally have not been perceived as electronic or software based. Information is the new currency powering economies. The expansion of computing power has driven the pace of information gathering and analysis. The new currency drives processes and decision-making across a wide array of products and services, making them more efficient and value accretive for consumers. Data is a new currency Let us look at a traditional good, the automobile. A modern automobile has 40% of its component value from electronic-based products and a modern electric vehicle has close to 100 million lines of code, which is more than that used by a Boeing 78...

Manufacturing contributed in 2017 only about 16% to India’s GDP, stagnating since economic reforms began in 1991. By contrast, in east and south-east Asia, the industry share has exceeded 30-40% while manufacturing is 20-30%.  India status : India’s manufacturing share of GDP has not moved up at all, though between 2004-05 and 2011-12 manufacturing employment growth was reasonable (grew by 6 million, using NSS). However, total manufacturing employment has fallen significantly between 2011-12 and 2015-16 by 10 million in just four years (Annual Survey Labour Bureau data, with a sample size same as NSS), especially in labour-intensive manufactures. Countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, All these countries restructured agriculture after the Second World War, focused their modernisation efforts on manufacturing, and made their financial systems slaves to these two objectives. The result was rapid absorption of surplus agri-labour in labour-intensive manufacturing first, which ...