News

IndianExpress: THE city’s struggle to get an improved airport has hit another roadblock as the civil aviation ministry has excluded it from the list of non-metro airports slated for city side development through public private partnerships (PPP). The Lohegaon airport, which is under the control of the Indian Air Force, has been removed from the list as there is no land available nearby for developing passenger facilities, according to the Airports Authority of India (AAI).

This effectively means that the city will lose out on passenger facilities like hotels, shopping malls, restaurants, food courts and parking lots. In short, the city has lost out heavily on planned fast-track development that will now take place in cities like Lucknow, Indore and Nagpur.

IndianExpress: THE Pune Traffic and Transportation Forum (PTTF) has expressed grave concerns regarding planning and implementation of Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) on Pune-Satara and Pune-Solapur roads and asked Municipal Commissioner Nitin Kareer to appoint a properly qualified consultant to prepare a Detailed Project Report (DPR) for the BRTS pilot project on the two corridors.

The PTTF’s stand comes at a time when the State government has scrapped the decision of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC)’s Standing Committee denying approval of tenders of BRTS works on the two corridors and asked the civic administration to resubmit the tenders to the committee. The State government has given a month’s deadline for the committee to take a decision on the tenders.
 

IndianExpress: UNIVERSITY of Pune would take strict action against colleges which had not appointed full-time principals by June 2007, warned Vice-Chancellor Narendra Jadhav. He was speaking at the University Senate meeting on Wednesday.

As reported by Pune Newsline on October 17, only 126 of the 408 affiliated colleges have full-time principals, while the rest are managed by acting principals for years together, while University regulations state vacant posts must be filled within six months.

IndianExpress: For time immemorial, sweet shop owners in Pune have been using boxes made from gray-boards and straw-boards to pack their products. But most of this packing material is recycled from discarded paper, which often finds its way to garbage bins, making it unhygienic as packing material for food. However, for the past couple of months, leading sweet shop owners of this city are using packing boxes made from Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF) paper, which is environment friendly, hygienic and non-contaminating.

IndianExpress: CHIKUNGUNYA claimed its first victim in Pimpri-Chinchwad when Ranubai R Pawar, a resident of Indiranagar in Chinchwad MIDC area, succumbed to it late on Tuesday night.

Ranubai suffered from high fever, severe body ache, pain in the joints and knees. On Tuesday afternoon, she had developed stiffness in legs and was not able to walk. Later in the night, Ranubai complained of chest pain and vomited blood. She died on way to the hospital.

IndianExpress: TWO drivers of cars ferrying employees of Hadapsar-based WNS Business Process Outsourcing unit were injured when they were hit by stones that flew off a pavement after a police constable fired a round from his service rifle following a quarrel with a roadside food vendor at Fatimanagar Chowk on Tuesday night.

The injured _ Chandrakant Mergal (27) and Vishwas Jai Singh Nikam (27), both residents of Patas village in Daund taluka _ suffered multiple injuries on the chest, shoulders and face. They have been admitted to Sassoon Hospital where doctors said they were out of danger.

TechTree: TVSE has launched the TVS Champ Multimedia Keyboard and Optical Mouse Combo pack, targeted at the home segment for the first time ever.

The Internet ready TVS Champ Multimedia keyboard sports 18 hot keys and three special keys - Power, Wake, and Sleep, and is compatible with Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP, and NT. It comes equipped with membrane tactile key switches, and has a life of 10 million keystrokes. Whereas, the three button optical mouse has an 800 dpi resolution

TechTree: Microsoft has announced that its Virtualization format software will now be available freely for all.

This software from Microsoft, known as Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), has been available since May 2005. It captures the entire virtual machine operating system and the application stack in a single file. In simple words, it enables one machine to run several operating systems and applications at the same time.

Now on, the company’s specifications will be made available to anyone who wants to use them under an Open Specification Promise (OSP) that was introduced last month