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IndianExpress: Potholed, cratered, waterlogged. If there is one thing that binds Kondhwa to Karvenagar, it is the state of roads which have gone from bad to worse this monsoon. Last year, the Pune Municipal Corporation gave the deluge as the cause for the potholes. This year, though the civic body has maintained that early rains held up road work, citizens say bad repairs carried out over the past year have led to more potholes.

On Wednesday, standing committee chairman Jayant Bhokare and leader of the opposition Anil Shirole reviewed Baner, Warje, Karvenagar, Bhandarkar and Sinhagad roads. Appalled by what they saw, they have set the civic body an almost impossible task of completing road repairs within five days after the rain halts.

The inspection would go for another three days. ‘‘We will inspect the roads and come up with a policy for road repair,’’ said Shirole.

IndianExpress: SHUBHANGI Keshav Vaidya, a 22-year-old resident of Sambhajinagar area in Dhankawadi, died on the spot when she was crushed between two moving PMT buses at Padmavati on Satara Road on Wednesday morning. She was travelling in one of the buses. Two other commuters were injured in the mishap.

Irked, a group of local residents stoned both buses after the mishap.

The buses had been hired by the PMT from private contractors. According to the police, the mishap occurred due to dangerous overtaking by the driver of the bus in which the victims were travelling. Shubhangi had boarded the Katraj-Shivajinagar bus and was standing on the footboard.

When it overtook the other bus at a turn near Vivekanand Statue at Padmavati, Shubhangi fell off and her head was crushed between the two buses. She died on the spot.

IndianExpress: AFTER nearly seven years, Pune Municipal Corporation’s Rs 735.80-crore water supply and sanitation improvement project prepared by Kirloskar Consultancy has received the State government’s approval. The project will include upgradation of Warje, Wadgaon, Holkar and Parvati water works, raw water pumping and conveyance, water treatment, pure water pumping, reservoir storage and improving the distribution system.

While the PMC has already begun the work of upgradation, the project is expected to be completed by 2007-08.

In the first phase, Rs 376 crore will be spent — Rs 201 crore for water supply and Rs 175 crore for sanitation — and 23.22 per cent will come from the State government in the form of grants, while PMC will raise 66.67 per cent by way of loans and the remaining 10 per cent from people’s voluntary contribution.

IndianExpress: WHEN Popat Randhir — a retired State government employee — shifted to Shyam Sundar building at Vitthalnagar on Sinhagad Road eight months ago, he had no idea that his family would be exposed to a major threat to life in the form of frequent floods.

‘‘The lease agreement is for a year. Then we did not know that this building gets flooded so often. Hopelessly trapped in the circumstances, now we just hope that no more untoward incidents take place in the remaining four months. The moment the lease agreement expires, we will be on the move,’’ he says.

And he has every right to feel cheated. He was among the flood victims who were evicted twice in a short span of five days from flood-affected housing societies on Sinhagad Road.

IndianExpress: HER unkempt hair, bare feet and eyes full of fear were a dead giveaway. For Saathi volunteers on the lookout for runaway children at Pune Railway station in the wee hours of Friday, the signs were unmistakable. Sunita (name changed), from Jeur in Dhule, had run away from home.

Of the 28 runaway children found at the Pune railway station on Friday and Saturday, 22 came in trains which stopped in the city at night. The alarming part is that four of them were girls who could have easily fallen into the hands of anti-social elements.

Luckily for them, they were spotted by Saathi, the NGO that takes such children under its wings, and puts them in the care of the Government Railway Police Force.

The Friday-Saturday exercise was conducted by Saathi as a survey to ascertain the number of runaway children arriving in Pune station in the day and night.

IndianExpress: THE incessant rain that Pune has been experiencing for the past few days have not only pounded the roads where deep potholes have cropped up, but have also shattered a 99-year-old record for highest rainfall in July.

The city recorded rainfall of 410 mm during July, which ensured that the city exceeded its average seasonal rainfall, and is the second highest rainfall ever recorded for July.

 “The last time we got more rain during July was in 1907 when 510 mm of rainfall was recorded. This year, the rainfall in July is the second highest in our records,” said Dr Medha Khole, India Meteorological Department director (Weather, Central

IndianExpress: IN a two-month drive by the Central Railways against ticketless travelling, 23,366 people were fined in Pune division.

A press communique by the Central Railways said that around 23,366 people were booked for travelling without tickets and platform tickets. The drive was conducted at Pune, Pimpri, Chinchwad, Dehu Road, Miraj, Sangli and Kolhapur.

 An amount of Rs 78.61 lakh was collected from the commuters who were caught. The amount collected till now in the drive is Rs 7 lakh more in comparison with the amount collected last year.

TechTree.com: Intel Corp has introduced its first NOR flash memory products targeted at the emerging low-cost cell phone segment.

Reportedly, only 20 percent of the world’s population use cell phones, largely because of the costs involved.

According to Intel, the new products feature a pin sharing package to minimize pin count, and are configured to work with low-cost, single-chip baseband and RF solutions from leading chipset suppliers.

The products come in the 32Mb to 256Mb range, and feature an 88-ball QUAD+ package with an address-data multiplexed (A/D Mux) configuration for simplification and economy of the design-in process.

Intel hopes the products will evolve to also support the common 107-ball x 16C package with A/D Mux configuration.

ITWire.com: New technology demoed this week by Microsoft could enable companies promoting tourist attractions or resorts to simply take a whole series of random photos of the facility and use these to create a virtual tour that could be accessed over the Internet.
At the SISGGRAPH 2006 conference in Boston, researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington demonstrated a new photo-browsing system claimed t “enable people to combine their photos with thousands of others collected on the Internet to present a detailed 3-D model which gives viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle.”

“As people navigate around the model with their mouse and click on specific photos, the system smoothly transitions between images to create an evocative sense of movement,” Microsoft claims.

TechTree.com: Wipro Technologies and British Telecom (BT) have signed a licensing and advanced development agreement to jointly develop an advanced mobile/remote workforce management system.

The deal involves joint development of BT’s “mPower” product, and the non-exclusive licensing of “mPower” intellectual property rights to Wipro.

“mPower,” developed by BT’s Research and Venturing (R&V) business, helps organizations to enable their remote workers communicate, collaborate, and co-ordinate effectively to achieve individual and collective goals.

As per the deal, Wipro will carry out development work over the next 12 months to productize “mPower” for BT. In addition, BT will develop its own “mPower” related offerings that it can provide to its customers, as well as license to other companies providing workforce management solutions.