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indianexpress:  Seven months after it announced its plan to initiate a ‘no-hawkers’ policy on city roads, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has finally come up with a rehabilitation policy. The civic administration’s decision to take action against hawkers had twice attracted flak from political parties and hawkers’ organisations who insisted that action could be taken only after the PMC made plans for alternate relocation of the hawkers.

According to information released by deputy municipal commissioner (special) Dynadev Thube, the rehabilitation policy will be finalised after it is approved by the general body meeting scheduled for next month.
 
Rehabilitation will be done as per priority at amenity spaces, along side nallahs, additional space next to footpaths, parts of multi-purpose parking spaces, roads in lay-out, dead-end, existing oata markets and oata markets shown as reserved in the Development Plan.

A rehabilitation and a town vending committee appointed by the PMC to finalise a comprehensive rehabilitation policy would include traffic personnel, police officials, anti-encroachment officials etc. An advisory committee headed by the mayor will also be formed.

Before starting the rehabilitation process, the PMC’s anti-encroachment department will be conducting a survey to identify authorised as well as unauthorised hawkers. With hawkers’ organisations providing a list of 15,000 hawkers, the survey will also cover hawkers on 30 roads declared as ‘no-hawkers zone’.

The survey would cover details such as name, address, age, education, original or existing place of business and nature of business. Post-survey, identity cards will be issued to hawkers bearing a photograph and thumb imprint of the hawker with approval signature from chairman of hawker committee ie the deputy municipal commissioner (special). Also,special batches and number plates as ID cards will be provided to hand-cart pullers and stallowners.

Rehabilitation will begin once survey and distribution of ID cards is completed.

indianexpress:  Seven months after it announced its plan to initiate a ‘no-hawkers’ policy on city roads, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has finally come up with a rehabilitation policy. The civic administration’s decision to take action against hawkers had twice attracted flak from political parties and hawkers’ organisations who insisted that action could be taken only after the PMC made plans for alternate relocation of the hawkers.

According to information released by deputy municipal commissioner (special) Dynadev Thube, the rehabilitation policy will be finalised after it is approved by the general body meeting scheduled for next month.
 
Rehabilitation will be done as per priority at amenity spaces, along side nallahs, additional space next to footpaths, parts of multi-purpose parking spaces, roads in lay-out, dead-end, existing oata markets and oata markets shown as reserved in the Development Plan.

A rehabilitation and a town vending committee appointed by the PMC to finalise a comprehensive rehabilitation policy would include traffic personnel, police officials, anti-encroachment officials etc. An advisory committee headed by the mayor will also be formed.

Before starting the rehabilitation process, the PMC’s anti-encroachment department will be conducting a survey to identify authorised as well as unauthorised hawkers. With hawkers’ organisations providing a list of 15,000 hawkers, the survey will also cover hawkers on 30 roads declared as ‘no-hawkers zone’.

The survey would cover details such as name, address, age, education, original or existing place of business and nature of business. Post-survey, identity cards will be issued to hawkers bearing a photograph and thumb imprint of the hawker with approval signature from chairman of hawker committee ie the deputy municipal commissioner (special). Also,special batches and number plates as ID cards will be provided to hand-cart pullers and stallowners.

Rehabilitation will begin once survey and distribution of ID cards is completed.

indianexpress:  * An online search engine that gives only those search results that you really want.
* A farmer in a remote village in drought-hit Vidarbha, using his radio to tune in to weather information broadcast from a computer terminal in New Delhi.

These are entries by two student teams — Techmint and AITtude — from Pune’s Army Institute of Technology (AIT) for the Imagine Cup 2007, a worldwide student technology competition sponsored by software giant Microsoft. They have made it to the national rounds to be held in New Delhi on May 4. The worldwide finals to be held in Seoul, South Korea. The theme is ‘Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all.’

For AITtude’s four-member team of final year engineering students Anupama Nair, Sunjeet Singh, Sonali Upadhyaya and Karanbir Singh, it all began in December 2006 after the government introduced a policy to allow NGOs to set up community radio networks.

“We decided to create a system where an NGO can set up an online radio station,” explains Sunjeet. After setting up an account on the web-based system, NGOs can upload files for broadcasting, along with the schedule. This will be transmitted over the internet to a computer terminal in the vicinity of the target area. “For the last few miles, the information will be conveyed over radio, so that villagers can listen to it,” says Karanbir.

The Techmint team sought to reduce the time taken for information search. “Seeking information online can be tedious, as a search engine often throws up a many useless results,” says AIT student Shiv Anand Thakur, who joined hands with Lucknow-based computer applications student Sumeet Kumar Pranav.

Techmint’s Educational Content Identification and Grabbing System (ECIGS) makes use of a natural language processing software based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), which analyses the meaning of the key words used for the search. “Normally, the computer does not analyse the meaning and context of the words, thus throwing up irrelevant results,” explains Thakur. For example, a phrase like ‘time flies like an arrow’ would also throw up results of pages about the insect ‘fly’, since ‘flies’ can have two meanings depending on the context.