The coronavirus (COVID-19) is spreading rapidly across the country but testing regime of India is far from the global standards. It is important to identify the states where testing needs expansion and the magnitudes of active COVID cases are higher focusing on current health infrastructure to meet the pandemic. The data on COVID-19 was extracted from the Application Programming Interface. Test positive rate, test per confirmed case, recovery rate, case fatality rate, and percent distribution of active cases were computed. Availability of hospitals, hospital beds, intensive care unit and ventilators per lakh population was also computed by public and private sector. The result revealed that, Maharashtra constitutes more than one-third positive cases in the country. More than a quarter of the active cases in India belonged to the Mumbai district of Maharashtra, followed by the Chennai district (9.4%) and Ahmedabad district (9.1%). Further, about 40 percent of the active cases in India belonged to the 11 districts of Maharashtra. The increased test positive rate in Maharashtra and Gujarat to almost double in last one month is a concern. In order to bring the states and the country in right track, the test positive rate need to be brought down to below 2 percent. The procurement of higher number of high throughput machine, the Cobas 6800 testing machine, is need of the hour. Only few states have adequate health infrastructure. The priority should be the laid on expansion of more laboratories and hospitals, storage of PPE kit, testing kit, and indigenously developed vaccines.

A novel and more comprehensive formulation of the optimal control problem that reflects the operational requirements of a typical industrial fermentation has been proposed in this work. This formulation has been applied to a fed-batch bioreactor with three control variables, i.e., feed rates of carbon source, nitrogen source, and an oxygen source, to result in a 148.7% increase in product formation. Xanthan gum production using Xanthomonas campestris has been used as the model system for this optimization study, and the liquid-phase oxygen supply strategy has been used to supply oxygen to the fermentation. The formulated optimization problem has several constraints associated with it due to the nature of the system. A robust stochastic technique, differential evolution, has been used to solve this challenging optimization problem. The infinite dimensional optimization problem has been approximated to a finite dimensional one by control vector parametrization. The state constraints that are path constraints have been addressed by using penalty functions and by integrating them over the total duration to ensure a feasible solution. End point constraints on final working volume of the reactor and on the final residual concentrations of carbon and nitrogen sources have been included in the problem formulation. Further, the toxicity of the oxygen source, H(2)O(2), has been addressed by imposing a constraint on its maximum usable concentration. In addition, the initial volume of the bioreactor contents and feed concentrations have been handled as decision variables, which has enabled a well-grounded choice for their values from the optimization procedure; adhoc values are normally used in the industry. All results obtained by simulation have been validated experimentally with good agreements between experimental and simulated values.

A multi-objective optimization formulation that reflects the multi-substrate optimization in a multi-product fermentation is proposed in this work. This formulation includes the application of e-constraint to generate the trade-off solution for the enhancement of one selective product in a multi-product fermentation, with simultaneous minimization of the other product within a threshold limit. The formulation has been applied to the fed-batch fermentation of Aspergillus niger that produces a number of enzymes during the course of fermentation, and of these, catalase and protease enzyme expression have been chosen as the enzymes of interest. Also, this proposed formulation has been applied in the environment of three control variables, i.e. the feed rates of sucrose, nitrogen source and oxygen and a set of trade-off solutions have been generated to develop the paretooptimal curve. We have developed and experimentally evaluated the optimal control profiles for multiple substrate feed additions in the fed-batch fermentation of A. niger to maximize catalase expression along with protease expression within a threshold limit and vice versa. An increase of about 70% final catalase and 31% final protease compared to conventional fed-batch cultivation were obtained. Novel methods of oxygen supply through liquid-phase H 2 O 2 addition have been used with a view to overcome limitations of aeration due to high gas-liquid transport resistance. The multi-objective optimization problem involved linearly appearing control variables and the decision space is constrained by state and end point constraints. The proposed multi-objective optimization is solved by differential evolution algorithm, a relatively superior population-based stochastic optimization strategy. List of symbols

Consanguineous marriage is still a preferred option in many societies of southern India. Therefore, this study addresses the state and district wise variation in consanguineous marriages and also attempts to find out the underlying factors of this practice in different marriage cohorts of South India. Drawing data from National Family Health Survey-4, the result revealed that there is a reduction in consanguineous marriages from 32.6% who married before 1985 to 23% during 2010–2014. About 13 districts in Tamil Nadu had the highest prevalence of consanguineous marriages, indicating that recent socio-demographic changes such as delays in age at marriages, lesser age gaps between partners, increase in the level of education, etc., did not explicitly affect the consanguineous marriages.

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