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Grape is one among the most delicious, refreshing and nourishing fruits of the world. It is one of the earliest fruits grown by man. The berries are a good source of sugars and minerals like Ca, Mg, Fe, and vitamins like B1, B2, and C. Grape has so many uses and is so unique that no fruit can challenge their superiority. Crop load is the most important factor affecting yield and cluster quality as well as vine vigor of both seeded and seedless varieties. Hence, an optimum canopy size and bunch number per vine are to be maintained for achieving better fruit Quality which warrants proper balancing between vigour and capacity. The pruning requirement of different varieties differs as per their growth behaviour. Therefore, variety-specific standardization of pruning is essential for any grape cultivars for harnessing potential yield and quality. In this view, it is essential to get scientific information on the pruning requirement of grapes. Pruning all the matured canes to fruit bud level, as adopted by local grape growers results in more exploitation of reserved food material leading to loss of vigour, quality and early setting of senility in vines. Heavy bearing of vines results in poor quality fruits with low TSS and high fruit acidity.

Background: Nutritional assessment in children is very important to prevent nutritional disorders and to decrease the morbidity and mortality. The present study was undertaken to assess the prevalence and determinants of malnutrition among children aged 0-5 years in a tribal community of Coimbatore district. Anaikatty and Palamalai tribal areas of Perianaikenpalayam block (population=347062) was selected for our study.Methods: A total of 206 children aged 0-5 years were included in the study after implementing the exclusion criteria.Results: Overall prevalence of malnutrition found to be 51%. These 51% (105) malnourished children consisted of 41.3% underweight, of which 11.2% were severely underweight. Prevalence of stunting was 32.5%, of which 6.3% were severely stunted. About 21.8% children were wasted and 6.8% were severely wasted among them. Socio-demographic factors like total number of family members exceeding four, mother’s educational status, father’s educational status, mother’s occupational status, socio-economic status, alcohol usage by any family member, and mother’s nutritional status were found to be significantly associated with malnutrition on univariate analysis.Conclusions: The problems of low standard of living, hunger, starvation, malnutrition, agricultural illiteracy, poor antenatal care, disease, poor sanitary and housing facilities, etc. has to be improved totally by implementation of policy that already exists.

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For medium range temperature applications, focusing type collectors like Compound Parabolic Concentrator (CPC) are most commonly used. Considerable research work has been carried out to improve the performance of the twodimensional compound parabolic concentrator (2D CPC). The three-dimensional compound parabolic concentrator (3D CPC) was found to be more efficient than 2D CPC because of the higher concentration ratio. In the present work a 3D CPC was fabricated with a half acceptance angle of 4 • for a spherical absorber of radius 100 mm. UV stabilized aluminized polyester foil having high reflectivity (0·85) was pasted on the reflector for a total height of 441 mm and an aperture width of 540 mm. The optical efficiency was estimated theoretically and compared with the experimental value. Experimentally determined values of optical and thermal efficiencies were in good agreement with theoretically predicted value. The experimental results shown that the optical efficiency obtained from the 3D CPC (0·626) was significantly higher than that of the 2D CPC (0·570) of similar dimensions. Since the optical efficiency of the 3D CPC was increased, the thermal efficiency of the collector was also increased. In addition to that, time constant of the concentrator was also calculated. The time constant of the 3D CPC (431 s) was fairly high when compared with the 2D CPC (110 s). An attempt was made to generate low pressure steam using 3D CPC in the in situ steam generation mode. The efficiency of the steam generation was about 38%, which was one of the possible applications of 3D CPC module.