COVID-19, Government Transfer Payments, and Investment Decisions in Farming Business: Evidence from Northern India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in about a 24% decline in India's GDP during the April-June 2020 quarter, the nation's agricultural sector, somewhat surprisingly, seems to have done remarkably well. This paper examines whether the public transfer program (PMGKY), announced immediately after the lockdown, benefited farmers in dealing with the COVID shock. Overall, 95% of the smallholders received support from at least one of PMGKY's four components.

India's COVID-19 social assistance package and its impact on the agriculture sector.

Context: CVOID-19 induced significant economic and social disruptions in India. Rural households, including smallholders, were affected by loss in migrant income, livelihood and farm and non-farm incomes. During this lockdown, the Indian government enacted several emergency legislations to provide direct and indirect relief to workers and households.

Impact of COVID-19 on agricultural markets: assessing the roles of commodity characteristics, disease caseload and market reforms.

This paper assesses the impact of the spread of COVID-19 and the lockdown on wholesale prices and quantities traded in agricultural markets. We compare whether these impacts differ across non-perishable (wheat) and perishable commodities (tomato and onion), and the extent to which any adverse impacts are mitigated by the adoption of a greater number of agricultural market reform measures. We use a granular data set comprising daily observations for 3 months from nearly 1000 markets across five states and use a double- and triple- difference estimation strategy.

Ultrananocrystalline diamond-decorated silicon nanowire field emitters.

Silicon nanowires (SiNWs) were uniformly decorated with ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD) by a novel route using paraffin wax as the seeding source, which is more efficient in the creation of diamond nuclei than traditional methods. These one-dimensional ultrananocrystalline diamond-decorated SiNWs (UNCD/SiNWs) exhibit uniform diameters ranging from 100 to 200 nm with a bulbous catalytic tip of ∼250 nm in diameter and an UNCD grain size of ∼5 nm. UNCD/SiNW nanostructures demonstrated enhanced electron field emission (EFE) properties with a turn-on field of about 3.

Single-step route to diamond-nanotube composite.

Candle wax was used as a precursor for the production of a diamond-nanotube composite in a single step. The composite films were fabricated by sulfur-assisted hot-filament chemical vapor deposition technique. The morphology of the composite films was analyzed by scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy.

Fabrication and field emission study of novel rod-shaped diamond-like carbon nanostructures.

Novel sp(3) rich diamond-like carbon nanorod films were fabricated by a hot filament chemical vapour deposition technique. The results are indicative of a bottom-up synthesis process, which results in a hierarchical structure that consists of microscale papillae comprising numerous nanorods. The papillae have diameters ranging from 2 to 4 microm and the nanorods have diameters in the 35-45 nm range.