Introduction: “No matter where a newborn takes his or her first breath, the desire to give that baby the best start in life is universal.” The best gift a mother can give her baby is the gift of health. The gift of health can be given to the baby through early and adequate breastfeeding. Globally, only 2 out of 5 newborns are put to the breast within the first hour of life. Therefore, initiating breastfeeding is an evidence-based intervention for improving neonatal survival. Methods: We aimed to improve the first-hour breastfeeding initiation rate from the existing 12%–80% over 3 months through a quality improvement (QI) process. The setting was antenatal, perinatal, and postnatal wards of the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences And Research Hospital. The participants were postpartum mothers with stable newborns 35 weeks and older of gestation born by normal vaginal delivery. Procedure for QI: A team of nurses and obstetricians was formed; we analyzed possible reasons for delayed initiation of breastfeeding by process cycle matrix chart and Fishbone analysis. Various change ideas were tested through sequential Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles. The outcome measure is the proportion of eligible babies breastfed within 1 hour of delivery. Results: After 3 months, the first-hour initiation of breastfeeding increased from 12% to 80%, without additional resources. Conclusions: A QI approach achieved an improvement in first-hour breastfeeding rates after normal vaginal delivery.

In one stage of mankind's struggle to keep pace with ever increasing demand of food due to accelerating world population, chemical fertilizers contributed enormously to produce sufficient food products. However, a stagnation in the crop productivity along with decreasing soil fertility status and environmental pollution due to continuous, excessive, and imbalanced use of chemical fertilizers. In this scenario, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) become a natural choice as an alternative to the fertilizer to alleviate excessive consumption of fertilizers because PGPR not only promote nutrient availability to plants as biofertilizers but also performin several ways to stimulate plant growth and hence their productivity. In this review, an attempt has been made to highlight the main activities of PGPR in soil and plants, and to analyse their mode of actions from chemistry point of view.

The study was conducted to evaluate the effect of stocking density influencing the growth of Hybrid Tilapia (Red strain) in cages for culture period of 120 days. The experiment is conducted in Thanjavur Center for sustainable Aquaculture, Sorrokottai, Tamil Nadu, India. Hybrid Tilapia fingerling ABW of (3.3+0.01 g) were stocked at 20/m3 (T1), 30/m3 (T2) and 40/m3 (T3) and fed 3 times daily (9:00, 12:00 and 17:00 H) with a commercial food 40% protein gradually reduce to 35 to 30% protein and stock was sampled fortnight. Among three stocking densities, 20 fish/m3 was found to be the best for the growth in cages, while the FCR and net biomass production were found higher in high stocking densities fishes (30, 40 fish/m3). The best FCR was 1.08 +0.06 from T1 (20 fish/m3) with 92.5+0.04% of FCE. The highest net biomass production was 19 kg (3.16 kg/m3) from T2 (30 fish/m3). Present study reveal that stocking density has negative effect on bio-growth parameters but biomass production has positive effect with stocking density.

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