The Kosi River is infamous in India for its rapid and recurrent changes of course and the widespread flood damages it causes almost annually. But, the flood of 18th August, 2008 was the most devastating down the memory lane of the survival. The destruction was of such a magnitude that state government of Bihar had to seek World Bank (Project ID: P122096) assistance. Keeping this in view, an earnest effort was made to study the perceived constraints of distressed farmers and strategies for its amelioration. To materialize pretested closed structured interview schedule the application of the principle axis factoring vis-à-vis exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was done among 60 respondents from the non-sample. EFA extracted 4 latent broad constraints having Eigen value >1 that was rechristened as: environmental, pecuniary, policy and miscellaneous constraints. Finally, 20 specific constraints under 4 broad constraints were used to collect data from 160 respondents in the sample area. Garret methodology was used to rank the specific constraints under broad constraints. Friedman two-way ANOVA by ranks test deciphered that severity order of broad constraints was environmental, pecuniary, miscellaneous and policy constraints respectively. Since, the World Bank project is running in full swing in the calamity stricken region and so the four broad constraints as well as the 20 specific constraints identified and suggestion to ameliorate these can be vital for policy formulation and its implementation. The authors also suggest that in case of dearth of fund the most severe environmental constraints should be given due weightage followed by severity of other broad constraints.

Agriculture is the backbone of India as it provides employment to half of its populace. But in present scenario, it is facing numerous challenges, viz., unfair and non-remunerative price of the produce, unstructured market and supply chain, crop failure etc. But one of the alarming trend shows that farmers in our country wants to quit agriculture in mass extent and are committing suicide; that is a threat to our sustainable development. In this direction, the research was designed with the objective of developing a scale to measure resilience in relation to farmers' life (RFL-Scale) in order to know the suicidal tendencies among the farmers. Therefore, the present study made an attempt to quantify the exact level of resilience, with the specific objective to develop and standardize a scale to measure resilience level of the farmers' towards their life in national calamity hit region of India. The process started with selection of 54 statements and finally lists of 33 statements indicating the positive or negative resilience level were retained for scale development. The statements were edited in the light of the informal criteria suggested by Edwards. The total individual score of judges was calculated by summing up the weights given by judges to the individual statement. In order to find out the discriminating index for each item,'t' value was calculated using the formula and procedure given by Edwards. The scale so developed finally consisted of 18 statements. The scale can be used world-wide by research scholars, policy makers, governmental organizations, NGOs, scientists and civil societies to know the suicidal tendencies with suitable time, location and profession specific modifications.

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"In the current study, an effort has been conferred to estimate the comparative return value per one-rupee investment for jute cultivation with traditional and improved practices. The research was carried out in four villages of two selected blocks of Murshidabad district in West Bengal and cost concepts were used for the estimation of the return on investment. In this inquiry, all calculations were done as per the land unit of acre (1 acre = 0.406 ha or 3.03 bigha). There were 35.85% savings in case of hired labour costs, while following improved practices over traditional practices. The Cost C2 for improved practices was almost 20% less than the Cost C2 incurred for traditional practices. Both the probability metric, B:C ratio and return on investment had been calculated in this manuscript. The benefit-cost (B:C) ratio over Cost C2 (includes all the production costs) and Cost B1 (total cost excluding the rental value of owned land and imputed value of family labour) for improved practices were 40.16% and 49.62% higher than that of traditional practices, respectively. The return on investment over both the Cost C2 and Cost B1 for improved practices were almost 100% than the traditional practices. That’s why the inclusion of improved technologies like multi-row seed drill, CRIJAF nail weeder, high-quality seeds like JRO 204, talc-based microbial consortium ‘CRIJAF SONA’, etc. are indispensable for jute production. So, it was evident that there was much more profitability in case of jute cultivation with improved practices for the marginal land-holding farmers."

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