Scaling up Participatory Watershed Development in India

‘Participation’ is widely accepted as a prerequisite to successful watershed development in India, but there is no shared understanding of its meaning, nor of how to make it operational. Meaningful participation, in which communities work collectively, help make decisions and share costs, is limited primarily to projects implemented by non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). Participation in government projects is more superficial because staff lack the skills and incentive to engage in meaningful participation. Strategies to scale up meaningful participation require a large number of NGOs. However, the number of NGOs with the necessary skills and values is limited, so a realistic strategy must seek to improve the capabilities and incentives of government agencies. Their performance may improve by making them accountable through transparent processes and participatory monitoring and evaluation. NGO‐facilitated access to information for communities can potentially change power relations and initiate political processes that make both community leaders and government agencies more accountable to communities.     

Neural Network-Based Damage Detection from Transfer Function Changes

This article puts forth the work on a neural network-based approach to determine the degree of damaged floors of the building considering changes in the transfer function. The transfer function is considered for that part of forced vibration in which system vibrates linearly after the structure has been damaged considering the building is instrumented during the earthquake. The results showed that accuracy of degree of damage detected increased with the increase in the number of combination of damages. The instrumentation of the first floor is expected to give best results for damage detection based on the transfer function-based approach.