Ashok Kumar Gupta

Biomedical Waste Generation and Management in Public Sector Hospital in Shimla City

Biomedical waste disposal is very important due to its infectious nature. Proper management of biomedical waste is necessary for maintaining good human health and environment. Biomedical Waste (Management and Handling) rules 1998 under the Environmental Protection Act, 1986 have been passed by government of India which is to be followed strictly to avoid menace. The purpose of the article is to differentiate between the Biomedical Waste Management practices such as collection, storage, transportation, and disposal along with the generation of biomedical waste undertaken in major public and private sector hospitals in Shimla city. A cross-sectional study and semi-structured interview considering the various biomedical waste management practices and personnel handling of the biomedical waste undertaken in the major public and private sector hospitals in Shimla city through detailed analysis and questionnaire prepared will be used for the purpose of study. The study will quantify the actual values and unveil the difference that lie in management procedures followed by these hospitals in Shimla. The present paper presents some initial findings of the questionnaire analysis carried out in a major public hospital in Shimla.

Indexing method for assessment of pollution potential of leachate from non-engineered landfill sites and its effect on ground water quality

Dumping of solid waste in a non-engineered landfill site often leads to contamination of ground water due to leachate percolation into ground water. The present paper assesses the pollution potential of leachate generated from three non-engineered landfill sites located in the Tricity region (one each in cities of Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula) of Northern India and its possible effects of contamination of groundwater. Analysis of physico-chemical properties of leachate from all the three landfill sites and the surrounding groundwater samples from five different downwind distances from each of the landfill sites were collected and tested to determine the leachate pollution index (LPI) and the water quality index (WQI). The Leachate Pollution Index values of 26.1, 27 and 27.8 respectively for landfill sites of Chandigarh (CHD), Mohali (MOH) and Panchkula (PKL) cities showed that the leachate generated are contaminated. The average pH values of the leachate samples over the sampling period (9.2 for CHD, 8.97 for MOH and 8.9 for PKL) show an alkaline nature indicating that all the three landfill sites could be classified as mature to old stage. The WQI calculated over the different downwind distances from the contamination sites showed that the quality of the groundwater improved with an increase in the downwind distance. Principal component analysis (PCA) carried out established major components mainly from natural and anthropogenic sources with cumulative variance of 88% for Chandigarh, 87.1% for Mohali and 87.8% for Panchkula. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) identifies three distinct cluster types for the groundwater samples. These clusters corresponds to a relatively low pollution, moderate pollution and high pollution regions. It is suggested that all the three non-engineered landfill sites be converted to engineered landfill sites to prevent groundwater contamination and also new sites be considered for construction of these engineered landfill sites as the present dumpsites are nearing the end of their lifespan capacity.

Intriguing structures in iterative maps motivated by N-body problem

Conventional approaches to modeling any system try to incorporate increasingly realistic features into the model, thereby making it more and more complex. An opposite approach seeks to build simpler and simpler conceptual models capable of capturing some observed features of a system. This trend began with Lorenz, who simplified models of the atmosphere to obtain the Lorenz model consisting of a system of only three equations. Despite the simplicity of these equations, this system displayed surprisingly rich properties, and has been used as a conceptual model in diverse disciplines. Poincare maps help study ordinary differential equations from a qualitative perspective. Several investigators like Henon and Feigenbaum followed this simplification approach. Instead of investigating Poincare maps of realistic systems, they, along with several others, investigated simple maps for their own sake. Despite lack of realism, this approach proved to be very fruitful. A map, as simple as the Logistic map, became an important conceptual modeling paradigm. It provided a tool for understanding bifurcation routes to chaos, which were verified experimentally through various experiments in diverse fields. Coupled map lattices (CML) help explore partial differential equations (PDE). Further simplification led to the introduction of Cellular Automata (CA). These fields continue to be explored with vigor and have given rise to a rich body of knowledge, conceptually useful over a wide spectrum of disciplines. In this paper, we follow the simplification approach for modeling the N-body problem. N-body simulations, say in Gravitation, give rise to filamentary structures. Such structures are observed in the actual observed Galactic distribution. The mechanism for creation of such structures is not well understood. We present a simple iterative dynamical model, motivated by the N-body problem, which, though unrealistic, produces such filamentary structures. This model also exhibits a variety of intriguing structures. Attempts to understand these structures may lead to useful insights similar to those provided by investigations in maps, CML, CA etc.