The Micro and Small Scale Enterprises (MSMEs) in Handicrafts form an important part of the Indian economy. Yet, in the post liberalization era since 1991, MSMEs have fallen considerably behind the national growth rate. Besides the economic threats from opening up the economy to competing global MNCs, and the government’s withdrawal of subsidies, several socio-cultural factors have also stymied the growth of these enterprises. Notable among them are the gradual westernization of culture, rural education, urban immigration and the changing gender and generational relations in artisan families. This paper focuses on one such micro scale handicraft industry in rural North East India (Assam), namely, the Kuhila craft industry and studies the challenges that this industry is facing in economic, social and cultural fronts. It also investigates the effects of environmental changes and its ability to pose as a potential threat to this industry in future.

Accurate prediction of the highly-mixed flow in the near field of a surface ship is a challenging and active research topic in Computational Ship Hydrodynamics. The disparity in the time and length scales and the scales of entrainment dictates the use of bubble source and mixed-phase flow models in which the current state of the art models are ad hoc. This paper presents the air entrainment characteristics and multiphase turbulence modeling of the near-field flow of a canonical stern with the inclusion of simple geometry effects. Using state of the art Cartesian-grid numerical methods with the full field equations, high-resolution two-phase flow data sets of a canonical stern with three different half-beam to draft ratios are simulated down to the scales of bubble entrainment. These data sets are used as the foundation for: (i) characterization of wake structure and near-wake air entrainment of the stern; (ii) analysis of turbulent mass flux in the wake of the stern; and (iii) a priori testing of multiphase turbulence models for turbulent mass flux. We obtain results to show that these techniques enable analysis and physics-based parameterization of near-field air entrainment about surface ships for use in Computational Ship Hydrodynamics.