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The focus of special education around the globe may be to provide specialized instruction to meet unique needs of children to help them achieve their full potential. However, each country around the globe may also have its own unique issues, barriers, legal frames, policies, and practices, as well as a history of its origin and evolution of policies and practices that govern special education in that country. This chapter describes how special education in Spain originated and evolved to its current state. It includes the following chapter sections: origins of special education in Spain; legislative acts; prevalence and incidence of various recognized disability areas; an overview of Spain’s education system including special needs education; current assessment and intervention practices; teacher education practices; family involvement considerations; and future challenges to special education.

The study aims to analyse the challenges faced by the Indian Handloom Sector with a special focus on the state of Uttar Pradesh before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study further explores the benefits of AatmaNirbhar Bharat Abhiyan for the betterment of the livelihood of the COVID-19–hit handloom weavers and allied workers.

A total of 400 handloom weavers and allied workers from ten cities of Uttar Pradesh were contacted through telephone. Descriptive statistics were applied to measure the awareness about the government welfare schemes and the benefits of these schemes. Furthermore, satisfaction and opinion of the handloom weavers and allied workers regarding the benefits and sufficiency of the funds received under these schemes have also been measured.

Based on the results, the least awareness has been noted about government welfare schemes. However, a small number of weavers and allied workers were found beneficiaries of the schemes. Additionally, the majority of the respondents were found dissatisfied with the benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic is an addendum to the plight of handloom weavers and allied workers. The measures of AatmaNirbhar Bharat Abhiyan could be used to aid weavers and allied workers to restore their lost revenue.

This study has limitations. Firstly, the research is limited to the handloom industry of Uttar Pradesh. Future researchers could consider the handloom sector of other states like Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, known for hand-woven clothes. Secondly, this study aims to analyse the role of AatmaNirbhar Bharat Abhiyan in improving the living conditions of handloom weavers and allied workers and not to measure the impact of the Abhiyan on handloom weavers or the handloom sector. Researchers could measure the impact in future studies. Thirdly, the authors have not applied any behavioural theory or marketing models such as the Theory of Reasoned Action or the Blackwell model, which may be applied to study the attitude of handloom weavers towards welfare schemes. This may prove to be a potential direction for future research. Additionally, master weavers and handloom cooperatives societies were excluded while collecting the data. Future researchers could consider them to examine the role of the government’s welfare schemes for uplifting the socio-economic condition of the handloom weavers, allied workers, master weavers and the business of cooperative societies. Finally, due to lockdown and travel ban, the authors were forced to limit their survey to telephone only because of which they could not get the qualitative information in full. Researchers for future studies could visit the handloom concentrated areas personally or take the help of an enumerator for data collection.

The research holds significance for the young and competent designers, handloom weavers and allied workers. Designers could work with and hire handloom weavers of Uttar Pradesh. If designers and weavers work together, it will help them restore their business and generate revenue that they have lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, policymakers can collaborate with designers, which will help enhance the socio-economic condition of handloom weavers and allied workers, which has deteriorated due to the COVID-19 crisis.

The research holds significance from the point of view of exploring the challenges faced by handloom weavers and allied workers of the state of UP before and during the COVID-19 period while examining the role of AatmaNirbhar Bharat Abhiyan in setting off these challenges.

Medical textile is one aspect of technical textiles and it is classified according to performance and functional properties for hygienic and healthcare products. Seaweeds have curative powers for curing most degenerative diseases. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present study focusses on the extraction of dyes from five seaweeds such as Ulva reticulata, Ulva lactuca, Sargassum wightii, Padina tetrastomatica and Acanthophora spicefera. The presence of bioactive compounds, antioxidant and antimicrobial properties of dye extracted from seaweeds was analysed. The dye extracted from green seaweed was applied on cotton fabric to obtain antimicrobial and other properties used to make non- implantable materials.

A maximum antioxidant inhibition percentage of 86.48+2.84 and a maximum antibacterial activity of 27 mm inhibition zone were obtained on the fabric treated with the dye extract from the Ulva lactuca seaweed. The physical properties such as tensile strength and tearing strength did not show much significant difference in untreated and treated fabric. The air permeability, water absorbency and wicking behaviour of treated fabric were reduced compared with untreated fabric. The washing and rubbing properties of treated fabric were very good after repeated washing.

This bioactive fabric has been used for non-implantable materials such as wound healing, face mask, surgical gowns and hygienic textiles in recent years.

Load balancing is an effective enhancement to the proposed routing protocol, and the basic idea is to share traffic load among cluster members to reduce the dropping probability due to queue overflow at some nodes. This paper aims to propose a novel hierarchical approach called distributed energy efficient adaptive clustering protocol (DEACP) with data gathering, load-balancing and self-adaptation for wireless sensor network (WSN). The authors have proposed DEACP approach to reach the following objectives: reduce the overall network energy consumption, balance the energy consumption among the sensors and extend the lifetime of the network, the clustering must be completely distributed, the clustering should be efficient in complexity of message and time, the cluster-heads should be well-distributed across the network, the load balancing should be done well and the clustered WSN should be fully connected. Simulations show that DEACP clusters have good performance characteristics.

A WSN consists of large number of wireless capable sensor devices working collaboratively to achieve a common objective. One or more sinks [or base stations (BS)] which collect data from all sensor devices. These sinks are the interface through which the WSN interacts with the outside world. Challenges in WSN arise in implementation of several services, and there are so many controllable and uncontrollable parameters (Chirihane, 2015) by which the implementation of WSN is affected, e.g. energy conservation. Clustering is an efficient way to reduce energy consumption and extend the life time of the network, by performing data aggregation and fusion to reduce the number of transmitted messages to the BS (Chirihane, 2015). Nodes of the network are organized into the clusters to process and forwarding the information, while lower energy nodes can be used to sense the target, and DEACP makes no assumptions on the size and the density of the network. The number of levels depends on the cluster range and the minimum energy path to the head. The proposed protocol reduces the number of dead nodes and the energy consumption, to extend the network lifetime. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: An overview of related work is given in Section 2. In Section 3, the authors propose an energy efficient level-based clustering routing protocol (DEACP). Simulations and results of experiments are discussed in Section 4. In Section 5, the authors conclude the work presented in this paper and the scope of further extension of this work.

The authors have proposed the DEACP approach to reach the following objectives: reduce the overall network energy consumption, balance the energy consumption among the sensors and extend the lifetime of the network, the clustering must be completely distributed, the clustering should be efficient in complexity of message and time, the cluster-heads should be well-distributed across the network, the load balancing should be done well, the clustered WSN should be fully connected. Simulations show that DEACP clusters have good performance characteristics.