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The Himalayan mountain system has many depressions of regional dimensions, which are found oriented mostly E-W to NE-SW, mainly to the north of the main boundary fault (MBF). The Karewa Basin in the Kashmir Himalaya has sediments belonging to late Neogene to Quaternary formations, which represent an almost 1,300-m-thick succession of sand, mud and gravels exposed in the river valleys and the plateau margins of the entire Kashmir Valley. Sandbox analogue experiments show a great variety of wedge shapes showing significant changes in the taper angles due to the change in basal friction. Between two pop-ups or depressions (pop-down) of significant dimensions develop along the strike of the growing wedge. In order to maintain the critical angle, these depressions initially receive material from the hinterland, and later on, from the foreland end of the wedge. The depressions have developed due to the change in the surface slope of the wedge, and receive the eroded material only from the adjacent upheaved portions of the wedge. On continuation of the experiments (in cases where the wedge is highly unstable), these depressions are coupled with the wedge along with their sand-fills. The depositional history of the Karewa sediments indicates a sequential evolutionary pattern of the basin and thus represents a natural analogue of the sandbox experiments.

The Government of India implemented MGNREGA in 2005–06 to provide social security cum wage employment on demand, initially in 200 districts and was later extended to all of India. The programme expenditure has now ballooned to over 60,000 crore per year in 2018–19, for creating about 267.95 crore man-days of employment. The programme has been beset with a host of issues since its inception, raising serious doubts about its impact in achieving designed objectives. The programme was designed with host of objectives starting from social security to providing livelihood security to wage employment on demand to arresting migration to deep rooting democracy. All prior research looked at specific objectives in a particular geographic area. This article examines the programme achievement data and examines the same against programme objectives and argues that the programme may be flawed in design objectives and inadequate programme architecture. Contrasting the programme data with census raises further issues about reliability.

SUMMARYThe point matching numerical method and its generalization, the method of boundary point least squares, have been successfully applied to numerous boundary value and eigenvalue problems. The present paper demonstrates the application of these techniques to problems in the micromechanics of fibrous composite materials, i.e. determination of elastic moduli and stress concentrations for parallelfibre materials which are loaded transversely with respect to the fibres. The solution technique utilizes exact solutions of the governing equations of plane elasticity for each component fibre and its surrounding matrix material in a typical repeating section of the composite material. The continuity conditions for stresses and displacements between fibre and matrix and the repeatability conditions at the boundary of the repeating section are satisfied approximately in a pointwise manner. Some special numerical techniques which were found to be particularly useful in applying the point matching method to these problems are delineated. The method is demonstrated for composite materials having circular, elliptical and square fibres in regular, staggered arrays. Numerical results are given which show the accuracy of the method as well as stress concentration and composite elastic moduli data.

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