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indianexpress: THE ‘P Budget’ (Budget for Poor) idea floated by former municipal commissioner Nitin Kareer which allocated 40 per cent of the Rs 1,682 crore budget for the underprivileged has been dumped. Corporators and the civic administration in the standing committee meeting last week which discussed the budget decided to drop the idea concluding that there is no need for a special provision for the poor.

“As per the constitutional amendment 5 per cent of the funds are kept aside for the weaker sections so there is no need for a separate fund allocation for the poor. When corporators propose works in their wards, they do take into consideration all sections including slum dwellers. So, there is no need for special provisions,” said standing committee chairman Bapu Pathare.

While announcing the ‘special temporary budget’ of Rs 473 crore for the first four months of this fiscal in March, Kareer had announced proportionate allocation of funds — 40 per cent for those living in slums who constitute 40 per cent of the city’s population. The special budget was presented, as the annual budget could not be sanctioned due to the election code of conduct in force for the February 1 civic polls.

However, the ruling party and the administration have now taken a U turn on Kareer’s proposal. “Kareer had floated the idea. It was not a concrete proposal. The PMC allocates sufficient funds for slum development and hence there is no need for a specific provision for the poor,” said leader of the house Anil Bhosale.

Congress leaders too agreed. “Already the constitutional amendment is in place according to which poor get their quota of funds for development. Every corporator proposes development work in slums falling in their wards and hence the P budget exercise is pointless,” said leader Aba Bagul.

indianexpresss: NOTED water expert and former chairman of Maharashtra State Water Commission Madhavrao Chitale on Sunday called for immediate control of unplanned urbanisation that was resulting in cities like Pune encroaching upon the surrounding irrigated land, which he described as a ‘social sin’.

Chitale was speaking to the media during a field visit to Panshet-Varasgaon dams vicinity organised by Pune Union of Working Journalists (PUWJ).

“Not long ago cities like Pune were surrounded by huge tracts of well irrigated land, where agricultural activities were in full swing round the year. But the rapid growth of cities virtually consumed these irrigation systems, destroying the agriculture tracts,” Chitale said.

He further explained that out of the 18 crore hectare of land in India, 15 crore hectares was good agricultural land. Only around 3 crore hectares was fallow land ideal for planning cities, building industry or special economic zones (SEZs).

However, Chitale said that there was no official survey or assessment of land in the country, and cities continued to grow at the cost of agriculture lands. Urban centres like Pune, Nashik, Dhule, Malegaon and many others were examples of such unplanned growth.

Chitale said that the growth in agriculture sector had helped India evade food security problems, especially so during the past decade. However, the coming decade would be a challenge with even Punjab witnessing a steady fall in wheat production, he added. “While agricultural production had stagnated, the population of the country has been growing steadily which would eventually affect food security,” he said.

Referring to the establishment of the Maharashtra Water Resources Authority, which led to a new law on use of water for agricultural purpose, Chitale said important issues like the requirement of water for livestock were not considered while formulating the law.

indianexpress: AFTER three weeks of high drama, it was finally official. Congress candidate Babu Nair was on Saturday declared elected as the coopted corporator of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC). Along with Nair, NCP’s Hanumant Gawde, Vinayak Ranasubhe and Uttam Hirve and BJP’s Eknath Pawar have also become the coopted PCMC members.

Nair became coopted corporator after municipal court, Akurdi declared him as the official party candidate and directed the municipal commissioner to hold the general body meeting for declaring the names of coopted corporators. Since there were five names and equal posts, no election was held. Divisional Commissioner Nitin Kareer’s decision to recognise expelled corporator Hanumant Bhosale as the PCMC House leader had further created problems for the official Congress candidate. But Saturday’s ruling rescued the party from an embarrassing situation.
 
Nair’s nomination had generated much heat and caused vertical split in the Congress with the party expelling its Pimpri-Chinchwad unit president Shrirang Barne and PCMC House leader Hanumant Bhosale. Nair, a close aide of MP Suresh Kalmadi, was the official Congress candidate whose name was recommended by the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee. However, Barne and Bhosale both opposed his nomination and instead nominated Rajubhau Golande. The Congress quickly reacted, expelling Barne and Bhosale and appointing corporator Bhausaheb Bhoir as the Pimpri-Chinchwad unit chief.

Both Barne and Bhosale, who claimed the support of 12 corporators out of the Congress strength of 20, refused to budge from their stance. However, Nair and Bhoir moved the municipal court where they argued that the former was the official candidate. “I was the official candidate nominated by the party and Bhoir was the president of our unit. We both proved this in the court,” said Nair.

indianexpress: FOR the past two years, 12-year-old Kumar Laxman Kolekar, has been writing an application to the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) almost every week, seeking information under the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005. Kolekar is doing it for his illiterate father, who was denied a job by the civic body’s garden department which claims his application did not fit with the rules.

The Kolekars are Dhangars, a nomadic tribe, living at Jambhulwadi Road in Dutt Nagar on the fringes of Katraj. The father puts his thoughts together and dictates the matter, which Kumar, a student of Chakradhar Vidya Mandir in Dutt Nagar, writes in Marathi and reads it back for corrections.
 
Together, the father-son duo have filed as many as 150 applications till date and now have procured hundreds of documents from the PMC’s garden department. Kumar also reads the replies from PMC’s Public Information Officer (PIO ) to their RTI queries, before filing the appeals.

Kolekar, from Sangola taluka of Solapur district, was working as a seasonal labourer at the PMC’s garden in Swargate and in the social forestry department. In 2002, his application for the post of a gardener was rejected by the PMC on the grounds that he did not fit with their rules. Instead, the PMC hired ten other gardeners who, Laxman says, were complete outsiders. His contention is that he had the required experience and had worked in the PMC and the social forestry departments and should have been given the job.

However, PMC’s garden superintendent Yashwant Khaire said Kolekar’s claim held no water. “Laxman can approach the court for relief. The social forestry department did not forward his name to the PMC and hence he was not taken into service,’’ he said.

indianexpress: THE Suvarna Sahakari Bank Sangharsha Samiti has urged the cooperative department to initiate steps by which depositors could get their money immediately. The samiti in a press release has said that auction of Hotel Ranjeet scheduled on Wednesday is an important development for the depositors. “Depositors should not lose their cool. The cooperative department should take cognisance of the feelings of depositors,” the press release issued by the samiti leaders Shrikant Limaye, Vilas Lake, Subhash Shah and Akash Shinde said. The samiti has also appealed bank members not to believe rumors about the samitis functioning.

indianexpress: CITY-based physicist and former director of Space Application Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation, E V Chitnis was recently presented with an outstanding achievement award by President APJ Abdul Kalam at Hasan in Karnataka, for his contributions to the field of space science and technology.

The award carries a cash prize of Rs 10 lakhs and a citation.
 
The octogenarian Chitnis played an instrumental role as director of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), the experimental satellite communications project launched in 1975 jointly by NASA and the ISRO.

Working closely with Dr Vikram Sarabhai, he was among the first to discover Thumba, a small village near Thiruvananthapuram where the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) was later established.

During the course of his career, Chitnis also received an offer to join Bruno Rossi’s world renowned Cosmic Ray Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

He has also held the position of chairman of the Press Trust of India and is currently on its board.

Chitnis was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 1985. He has also received the Vikram Sarabhai Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996 for contributions to educational communication.

He represented India at the meetings of the UN committee on the use of satellite for communication between 1967 and 1973.

cnet: Junior, the robot Volkswagen, passed its basic driver’s test here Thursday.

Now comes the hard part: a race on mock city streets that will raise the bar for artificial intelligence in the 21st century.

A team of officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) visited a parking lot here next to Google headquarters to test Stanford University’s autonomous passenger car, Junior, in what was its first big qualifying test for the upcoming Urban Challenge, DARPA’s third Grand Challenge competition for driverless vehicles.

DARPA will make so-called “site visits” this summer to evaluate all 53 prospective Urban Challenge contestants, homing in on whether the robots can perform basic driving skills, including navigating a four-way stop with live traffic, passing a stationary car and executing a U-turn.

“It’s a steep ladder to get up to the Urban Challenge. What you saw today was the first rung of the ladder,” Norm Whitaker, program manager for DARPA, said to a crowd of people following a two-and-a-half-hour test of Stanford Racing Team’s Junior.

Driving just 15 miles per hour, Junior passed with flying colors in three of four “missions” on a parking-lot course, including a three-point U-turn and successful navigation of a four-way stop with human-driver cars. But it got stuck on a course passing a car.
 
“Stanford had a little bit of a hiccup, then recovered,” Whitaker added.
 

beta: Saying the functionality within the application is now available through other programs and within Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to discontinue its Digital Image Suite Product, a notice on its Web site reads. Remaining products will be sold through retail outlets while supplies last, and the company will support users of the applications for up to three years from date of purchase or April 30, 2010, whichever is first.

Microsoft’s application was a competitor of Adobe Photoshop Elements, a much-trimmed down version of its flagship Photoshop product. The company also recently has launched Expression Studio, which includes Expression Design, a professional illustration and graphic design tool. Windows Vista offers similar functionality to Digital Image, however with far fewer options.

beta: Throughout the entire consumer digital photography revolution that has reinvigorated even the market for PCs, the two biggest names in consumer photography during the 1980s - Kodak and Polaroid - have been largely out of the loop. Now Kodak has unveiled a new technology which could put it back in the fight, the old-fashioned way: by making better photographs, just like it used to do.

This morning, Kodak confirmed the readiness of a technology with multiple patents apparently attached, that will add a panchromatic element to the single image sensors mass-produced for digital cameras. Such cameras typically use charge-coupled detectors (CCDs) that feature a trio of sensors for red, green, and blue channels.

By adding this fourth element, which is sensitive to the intensity of light at all frequencies, cameras can interpret a luminance channel that attributes intensity directly to frequency, without image processors having to interpolate that channel mathematically.

The summary description paragraph from one of Kodak’s patents on this technology explains the situation surprisingly well: “These image sensing devices have a very limited dynamic range when compared to traditional negative film products,” it reads. “A typical image sensing device has a dynamic range of about 5 stops. This means that the exposure for a typical scene must be determined with a fair amount of accuracy in order to avoid clipping the signal. In addition, oftentimes the scene has a very wide dynamic range as a result of multiple illuminants (e.g. frontlit and backlit portions of a scene). In the case of a wide dynamic range scene, choosing an appropriate exposure for the subject often necessitates clipping data in another part of the image. Thus, the inferior dynamic range of an image sensing device relative to silver halide media results in lower image quality for images obtained by an image sensing device.”

An example of this low-quality result, compared to the improved quality of the panchromatic sensor result, appears in a prepared Q&A presented today in the online photography magazine Adorama. There, Kodak senior engineer John Compton and Kodak researcher John Hamilton explained how companies today use Kodak’s so-called “Bayer Pattern” (named for one of its scientists) to interpret red, green, and blue channels separately…but in such a way that, historically, green tends to lose out. Some compensation methods have helped green to make a comeback in recent years, but perhaps you’ve noticed, it’s still an imperfect science when reproducing the true color of plants and leaves.

beta: Network and multimedia hardware company Linksys is seeking beta testers to trial a new product for high-definition TVs, which enables displaying pictures, music or videos on the TV over a wireless network. Those not selected will have the opportunity to beta test future products from Linksys.

Testers for the Apple TV-like device must speak fluent English but live in the United Kingdom, France or Germany, as well as owning an LCD or plasma HDTV and at least two computers running Windows. Those in the United States and Canada can still go through the application process, but not complete the specific test survey to be considered first for future betas. For more information and to apply, visit the beta callout page.