News

IndianExpress: It seems Pune is paying the price for being the education hub of the country. In the last 50 days, gullible aspirants to professional courses, mostly from other parts of the country, have fallen prey to cheating and the total amount has been put at Rs 39 lakh. In the three cases that have been reported, it was the aspirants who approached the touts seeking a seat as they failed to make it on merit.

Incidentally, in all the three cases the destination was Bharati Vidyapeeth, a deemed university run by Minister for Cooperatives Patangrao Kadam. However, Bharati Vidyapeeth officials have said the letterhead used by the conmen were fake and they had nothing to do with it.

‘‘People come from all over the country seeking admission as ours is a reputed deemed university. They do not know the admission procedure and therefore, fall prey to such tricksters,’’ vice-chancellor S F Patil said.

IndianExpress:  In a case of insurance fraud, a gang of ingenious scamsters took advantage of a loophole in the e-banking system and swindled over Rs 32 lakh from insurance companies in Satara, Kolhapur, Nashik and Panjim in Goa last month. The gang, which managed to con the New India Assurance, Oriental Insurance and National Insurance Company, within a span of just 15 days, devised a new modus operandi and used forged cheques to withdraw the amount.

‘‘The men made use of a loophole in the e-clearance system. While the cheques were badly forged and would normally be detected by bank staff there is a lot of pressure during e-clearance as cheques have to be processed within three hours. Due to this, the staff do not check documents carefully,’’ said an insurance officer investigating the case. He said the gang presented seven forged cheques of which five were honoured by the banks.

IndianExpress: Pune’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is about Rs 46,000 which is 50 per cent higher than the country’s per capita income. It is higher than Hyderabad’s and on par with Bangalore’s. Also, Pune has the least income disparity between its rich and poor, says the Environmental Status Report for 2005-06 released by the Pune Municipal Corporation on Thursday.

The GDP, underlining the size of the city’s economy and its standard of living, can trace a direct correlation with its IT boom and sizeable investment in the automobile, electronic, software, bio-technology, large and small-scale companies. It is also emerging as a prominent centre for BPO companies.

The projected software export is estimated at Rs 9,000 crore in 2006-07, up from Rs 7,500 crore last year. While 109 IT companies have made their offices in Pune, another 100 companies are in the process of setting up base here. The overall industrial sector too has witnessed a boom time with 1,700 new companies setting up base here — a 25 per cent growth.
 

IndianExpress: It is an India shining story that is being repeated in the infotech hub of Pune and city engineers are smiling their way to the bank. With pay packets touching Rs 9 lakh per annum — the highest in the city — it is the global giants Microsoft and IBM vying with local bigwigs Infosys, TCS and Cognizant for the best brains from the campuses.

In the thick of action is the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), having six of its students — Trupti Asudani, Neha Deodhar, Supriya Naik, Shantanu Kurhekar, Pranav Karkhanis and Ashish Chiplunkar — being picked up by the Redmond-based software behemoth Microsoft for a whopping Rs 9.1 lakh a year salary.

Incidentally, Microsoft is all set to open its development centre in Pune by year-end and has earmarked Rs 1,000-crore investment for its expansion outside Hyderabad, according to Maharashtra IT secretary Arvind Kumar.

IndianExpress: Vasanti Baburao Khasnis, a 71-year-old woman who recently helped the police in nabbing two women, suspected to be involved in cheating senior citizens, under the garb of offering them help in receiving gifts from rich people, was felicitated by the Police Commissioner D N Jadhav on Thursday.

The policemen who made the arrests were also felicitated by the police commissioner. Inspector Sopan Jamdade said Khasnis and her son Deepak had played a vital role in the arrests of Laxmi Mohan Asade (38) and her daughter Jyoti (18).

The two women tried to dupe Vasanti Khasnis on May 11. Khasnis immediately alerted the police. Later, Khasnis and her son Deepak accompanied the police in looking out for Laxmi and Jyoti. The police later recovered gold worth over Rs 3.34 lakh from the two women.
 

IndianExpress: Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has directed Municipal Commissioner Nitin Kareer to submit by Friday a report on the decision to give away for development at a low cost, nine-acres land at Wakdewadi costing Rs 100 to Rs 125 crore.

Deshmukh expressed unhappiness over the Pune Municipal Corporation decision after a delegation of corporators comprising Vandana Chavan, Shiva Mantri, Ramesh Kale, Shyam Mankar, Shivram Mengde, Anil Shirole and Ujjwal Keskar met him, seeking his intervention.

The general body meeting had approved the proposal of reconstruction of PMC employees’ colony at Wakdewadi on Tuesday.

IndianExpress: In the wake of the recent Mumbai bomb blasts and reports on plans of terrorists to engineer blasts in Pune during Ganeshotsav, the Pune Municipal Corporation has stepped up security in its main building and other vital installations including the water works. Security arrangements at gardens, stadiums, mandais and ward offices have also been beefed up.

Standing Committee chairman Jayant Bhokare met municipal commissioner Nitin Kareer on Wednesday requesting him to step up the security at the PMC building.

Civic chief security officer L M Kondhare said he has beefed up security at all entry and exits of the building and access to the building was restricted.

TechTree.com: Samsung Electronics has announced a 4GB solid state disk (SSD) meant to virtually eliminate hard drive delays on PCs.

According to Samsung, the 4GB SSD will serve as a high-speed NAND flash cache for notebooks and PCs, in conjunction with the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista operating system.

The 4GB SSD is compatible with Windows ReadyBoost, which is a new Windows Vista feature using flash memory to improve system responsiveness. The SSD promises to enable users avoid hundreds of annoying multi-second delays that they experience every day when moving within and between frequently-used applications.

Don Barnetson, director - flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, said, “By caching hard drive data using Samsung’s flash SSD, and the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, a typical user will see performance gains that will make working with their PC lightning-fast.”

TechWorld.com: Intel will release its “Conroe” desktop chip later today, prompting the usual drop in older chip prices and a new series of PCs with the chip in.

 Dell will launch a series of desktops and workstations powered by the Conroe Core 2 Duo chip, and Gateway will use the chip in its high-end FX510 desktop PC, designed for gamers. Anticipating a marketplace battle, rival AMD slashed its prices on Monday on some Athlon 64 X2 desktop processors by as much as 57 percent.

AMD also cut prices for its Turion 64 notebook chips to make them more competitive with Intel’s “Merom” Core 2 Duo chip, which is also due this week.

ITWire.com: It seems that Microsoft wants users to upgrade to the Internet Explorer 7 browser so badly that it plans to make the upgrade part of its automatic updates program for Windows XP. However, they will be able to say no if they wish.
Users will be urged to get the upgrade when automatic updates are downloaded.

However, mindful of the bad publicity it received recently when it used its automatic updates facility to foist Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) on unsuspecting users, Microsoft will make sure that users have a clear option to refuse the IE 7 update.

Instead of installing automatically, users will be presented with three options on a screen describing the benefits of IE 7. The options are the familiar Install, Don’t Install and Ask Me Later buttons.

Microsoft promises that clicking the Don’t Install button will stop users from receiving any future prompts to upgrade to IE 7 from Microsoft.