Microfinance institutions are considered as an effective tool for achieving the objective of financial inclusion. To achieve this objective it is necessitate that MFIs should be sustainable while reaching the poorest of poor. After the Andhra Pradesh Microfinance Crisis, 2010 sustainability and outreach of MFIs in India is doubtful and questionable. Present paper attempts to look into various d...

We classify characters in Tamil, a south Indian language, using convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) into 35 different classes. ConvNets are biologically inspired neural networks. Unlike other vision learning approaches where features are hand designed, ConvNets can automatically learn a unique set of features in a hierarchical manner. We augment the ConvNetJS library for learning features ...

In this paper, recognition system for totally unconstrained handwritten characters for south Indian language of Kannada is proposed. The proposed feature extraction technique is based on Fourier Transform and well known Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The system trains the appropriate frequency band images followed by PCA feature extraction scheme. For subsequent classification technique, P...

This paper describes an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for printed text documents in Kannada, a South Indian language. The proposed OCR system for the recognition of printed Kannada text, which can handle all types of Kannada characters. The system first extracts image of Kannada scripts, then from the image to line segmentation then segments the words into sub-character level piece...

Ischaemic heart disease and stroke are among the most common causes of death and disability in the world. The Indian subcontinent (including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) has among the highest rates of cardiovascular disease (CVD) globally. Previous reports have highlighted the high CVD rates among South Asian immigrants living in Western countries, but the enormous CVD bur...

PEFR is a simple and reliable way of following patients with bronchial asthma and other obstructive airway diseases. Normal data is available for Caucasian and North Indian children but not for ethnic South Indian children. We, therefore, measured Peak Expiratory Flow Rate (PEFR) in 345 healthy South Indian children aged 4-15 years, using the Wright mini peak flow meter. A nomogram was construc...

In this paper, a diphone based Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for the Telugu language is presented. Telugu is one of the main south-Indian languages spoken by more than 100 million people. Speech output is generated using the Festival Speech Synthesis System and the MBROLA synthesis engine. The design and collection of diphones and voice building process are described. Our text analysis module, th...

During November and December 1983, two anticyclonic eddies were observed west of the Agulhas Retroflection, apparently spawned at the retroflection. The western eddy, centered 300 kilometers southwest of Cape Town, has a winter cooled core encircled by warm Indian Ocean water. Between Cape Town and the "Cape Town Eddy" is a net geostrophic transport of Indian Ocean thermocline water (14 x 10(6)...

meena alexander, a contemporary indian-american writer and a professor of english literature and women’s studies. the criticism of dr. alexander’s poetry and prose brings in many issues that draws upon poststructuralism and postcolonialism. to mention a few, the negotiation of fragmented identity, the problem of belonging, and the challenge of living in a female body are among her concerns. wha...

The aim of present study was to determine the chronology of third molar root mineralization and to establish south Indian reference data. Therefore, a cross-sectional study was undertaken by evaluating 192 intraoral periapical radiographs in order to assess the root mineralization status of the mandibular third molar of south Indian individuals (101 males and 91 females) between the age of 13 a...