Urban development policy in India with special reference to Himachal Pradesh

This paper addresses the following questions: 1) What have been the government policies, programs, and perceptions dominating the urban development scenario in India? 2) What has been the outcome of these policies and programs of urban development? 3) What should be the strategy of future urban development with reference to the Indian hill state of Himachal Pradesh? The paper critically evaluates the Indian ethos pertaining to the urbanization process, urban development policies pursued in the Five Year Plans, the current thinking on urbanization, and the main issues in urban development. It has been observed that not only is the urbanization level in Himachal Pradesh quite low, but also that the urban development here suffers from a number of serious problems. Acute shortage of building space, limited capacity to mobilize resources from their own sources, overcrowding, and slum dwelling are some such problems. Unfortunately, urbanization has not been visualized as generative of economic growth and employment opportunities both at the state and national government levels. Therefore, the major thrust of Plan policies has been to arrest rural-urban migration. However, recently there has been a desire to manage urban affairs through a new policy seeking production efficiency and cost effectiveness.     

Characteristics of spectral aerosol optical depths over India during ICARB

Spectral aerosol optical depth (AOD) measurements, carried out regularly from a network of observatories spread over the Indian mainland and adjoining islands in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea, are used to examine the spatio-temporal and spectral variations during the period of ICARB (March to May 2006). The AODs and the derived Ångström parameters showed considerable variations across India during the above period. While at the southern peninsular stations the AODs decreased towards May after a peak in April, in the north Indian regions they increased continuously from March to May. The Ångström coefficients suggested enhanced coarse mode loading in the north Indian regions, compared to southern India. Nevertheless, as months progressed from March to May, the dominance of coarse mode aerosols increased in the columnar aerosol size spectrum over the entire Indian mainland, maintaining the regional distinctiveness. Compared to the above, the island stations showed considerably low AODs, so too the northeastern station Dibrugarh, indicating the prevalence of cleaner environment. Long-range transport of aerosols from tshe adjoining regions leads to remarkable changes in the magnitude of the AODs and their wavelength dependencies during March to May. HYSPLIT back-trajectory analysis shows that enhanced long-range transport of aerosols, particularly from the west Asia and northwest coastal India, contributed significantly to the enhancement of AOD and in the flattening of the spectra over entire regions; if it is the peninsular regions and the island Minicoy are more impacted in April, the north Indian regions including the Indo Gangetic Plain get affected the most during May, with the AODs soaring as high as 1.0 at 500 nm. Over the islands, the Ångström exponent (α) remained significantly lower (～1) over the Arabian Sea compared to Bay of Bengal (BoB) (～1.4) as revealed by the data respectively from Minicoy and Port Blair. Occurrences of higher values of α, showing dominance of accumulation mode aerosols, over BoB are associated well with the advection, above the boundary layer, of fine particles from the east Asian region during March and April. The change in the airmass to marine in May results in a rapid decrease in α over the BoB.     

Plane-symmetric mesonic viscous fluid cosmological model

Exact nonstatic solutions to Einstein field equations are obtained for the plane symmetric spacetime filled with viscous perfect fluid in the presence of attractive scalar fields. Some physical and geometrical properties of the model are studied. The solutions characterize strong interaction of elementary particles.     

LRS Bianchi type V vacuum cosmological solution in Brans-Dicke theory

In this note a new solution of the BD field equations, for a Bianchi type V space-time, is obtained. The solution has its general relativistic analogue. Some properties of the solution are also discussed.     

Exact Bianchi type VI0 cosmological solutions with matter in Brans-Dicke theory

We present an exact solution of the Brans-Dicke equations for cosmological models of Bianchi type VI₀ with stiff matter. The solution represents anisotropic universe which has its analogy in Einstein's theory. The corresponding result for a plane symmetry Bianchi type I model is obtained as a special case.     

Reconstructing missing hourly real-time precipitation data using a novel intermittent sliding window period technique for automatic weather station data

Precipitation is the most discontinuous atmospheric parameter because of its temporal and spatial variability. Precipitation observations at automatic weather stations (AWSs) show different patterns over different time periods. This paper aims to reconstruct missing data by finding the time periods when precipitation patterns are similar, with a method called the intermittent sliding window period (ISWP) technique—a novel approach to reconstructing the majority of non-continuous missing real-time precipitation data. The ISWP technique is applied to a 1-yr precipitation dataset (January 2015 to January 2016), with a temporal resolution of 1 h, collected at 11 AWSs run by the Indian Meteorological Department in the capital region of Delhi. The acquired dataset has missing precipitation data amounting to 13.66%, of which 90.6% are reconstructed successfully. Furthermore, some traditional estimation algorithms are applied to the reconstructed dataset to estimate the remaining missing values on an hourly basis. The results show that the interpolation of the reconstructed dataset using the ISWP technique exhibits high quality compared with interpolation of the raw dataset. By adopting the ISWP technique, the root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) in the estimation of missing rainfall data—based on the arithmetic mean, multiple linear regression, linear regression, and moving average methods—are reduced by 4.2%, 55.47%, 19.44%, and 9.64%, respectively. However, adopting the ISWP technique with the inverse distance weighted method increases the RMSE by 0.07%, due to the fact that the reconstructed data add a more diverse relation to its neighboring AWSs.     

Early Cosmological Models with Bulk Viscosity in Brans-Dicke Theory

The effect of time dependent bulk viscosity on the evolution of Friedmann models with zero curvature in Brans-Dicke theory is studied. The solutions of the field equations with ‘gamma-law’ equation of state p = (γ-1) ρ, where γ varies continuously as the Universe expands, are obtained by using the power-law relation φ = bR ⁿ , which lead to models with constant deceleration parameter. We obtain solutions for the inflationary period and radiation dominated era of the universe. The physical properties of cosmological solutions are also discussed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.