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indianexpress: The Congress’ attempt to gain favour in its traditional votebank in the city’s slums by demanding 350 sq ft tenements for slum dwellers under the slum rehabilitation scheme, has got the ruling Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and its leader guardian minister Ajit Pawar, all prickly. The Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) will be executing housing schemes for slum dwellers residing in 503 slums in Pune.

Congress MP Suresh Kalmadi has sought 350 sq ft tenements for slum dwellers while the State government has allotted 270 sq ft units. “Slum dwellers should get 350 sq ft houses as Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, during his recent Pune visit, had promised to give better tenements to slum dwellers,” said Kalmadi.
 
MLA Ramesh Bagwe said they will take up Kalmadi’s demand in the monsoon session of the assembly which starts on Monday.

Pawar has questioned the Congress’ propriety to speak on behalf of the slum dwellers since it had failed to implement rehabilitation schemes when the party was in power. He also refuted the Congress’ demand of 350 sq ft house as ‘politically motivated.’

There has been much rancour between Kalmadi and Pawar about the SRA. Pawar, who was appointed as SRA head by Deshmukh, had to let go of it after Kalmadi and city Congress leaders took up the matter with party president Sonia Gandhi. Even when he held the reins, Pawar could do precious little because Congress MLAs and Kalmadi himself refused to attend crucial meetings.

“Our demand for 350 sq ft tenements is an effort to reclaim the slum votebank which drifted away from the Congress in the last civic polls. MP Suresh Kalmadi will stretch the matter to gain confidence of slum dwellers in view of assembly and Lok Sabha polls,” said a partyman close to Kalmadi.

indianexpress: Finally, the Army’s compound wall running along the Phugewadi-Dapodi stretch of the Pune-Mumbai highway is on its way out.

The Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC), after bringing down a spate of structures hindering the widening of the Pune-Nashik highway at Bhosari, has now trained its guns on the nearly two-kilometre long and 10-feet high compound wall housing the College of Military Engineering at Dapodi.

The PCMC administration, which is expecting the Defence Ministry’s nod soon, has readied a plan to reconstruct a new compound wall before demolishing the existing one. Municipal Commissioner Dilip Band told Newsline that permission for demolishing the wall has been received at the local-level.

“Last month, when Minister of State for Defence M M Pallam Raju was in the city, he had approved our proposal and had promised us the final nod from the Defence Ministry,” he said.

Band said he also met Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar who has assured to convene a meeting with Defence Minister A K Antony by the end of this month. Along with the Dapodi wall issue, the PCMC also plans to hold discussions on acquiring 36 hectares of land in possession of the Army in PCMC limits.

However, the PCMC is not just looking to get rid of the wall — a major obstacle for 61-metre widening of the Pune-Mumbai highway under its jurisdiction — it has also promised the Army that it would reconstruct the wall as it is.

“We will reconstruct the wall as per the Army’s layout and suggestions. First the new wall will be constructed and only then the old one demolished,” Band said.

The compound wall would be pushed inside from its current location by 18 metres.

The space available after pushing the wall inside would facilitate our highway widening plan, the commissioner said. Last month, the PCMC has already floated a tender for reconstructing the wall at Dapodi which is likely to cost Rs one crore, Band said.

indiane

indianexpress:  When Gururaj B.S started off his first job in 1997 in Delhi to write an instruction manual for data-entry operators on Linux, he got a monthly salary of Rs 2,500. A decade down the line he is a documentation manager and has a five digit hefty monthly package.

Pune, for the third time in a row, is the city with the highest pay package for technical writers, the average being Rs 8,37,694 lakh per annum.
 
This and other interesting facts about the profession were revealed at the Regional Conference for Society for Technical Communicators-India, attended by over 100, here on Sunday.

The fourth salary survey of Indian technical communicators released at the conference reported a 55 per cent rise over the past two years. The entry level salaries improved by 65 per cent since 2005. Pune offered the highest pay package, while Hyderabad and Bangalore were runners-up.

Paresh Naik, who conducted the survey, attributed the higher pay packages in Pune to the presence of a greater number of product development companies compared to service IT companies. “Technical writing for products developed in India fetches greater returns as compared to writing for service companies which cater to products abroad,” he observed. He said service companies act like middlemen, an extra link in the profit chain who take their own cut from the profit margins before the money reaches the technical writer. “Though Pune seems to offer higher packages, Bangalore still has the largest number of technical communicators,” he added.

indianexpress:  Last month when youngsters basked in the glory of their success at the SSC examinations, a group of nine students were on top of the world. They had also cleared the exams that would open doors to further education and opportunities.

The students from Pardhi community, one of the 150 denotified tribes branded ‘criminal’ under British law, had indeed climbed every mountain. As students of Bhatke Vimukta Vikas Pratishthan, an Osmanabad-based organisation started by activist Girish Prabhune, most of them are now in Pune, pursuing standard XI at the New English School, Chinchwad and staying at Gurukul, another organisation run by Prabhune for children belonging to the nomadic, tribal and backward castes.
 
Their refrain is to empower the community to bring back lost dignity.

“I want to teach Sanskrit. My mother always wanted me to be a teacher. When weddings of a couple of girls from my village were being planned, I convinced their parents to let them study,” says top scorer Bhavana Jamdade with 76 per cent.

Eighteen-year-old Sachin Pawar from Mohol village in Solapur district who scored 67 per cent wants to become a policeman, “From when I was in Std I, I wanted to become a police inspector. I want to work for my community and enable the youth to look at educational opportunities,” explains Pawar, whose mother is the president of the Pardhi Samaj Mahila Mandal in Mohol.

Sisters Seema (16) and Sushma (17) Mane, both with 60 per cent also want to be police officers emulating their sister-in-law who is with Aurangabad police

indianexpress: The Master is gone. And it is still difficult for us, his batch of 1989 at the Indian Express Pune, to come to terms with this sudden loss. “He went quietly,” was what most of us, now spread out — in New Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, and even Pune — felt.

For his presence in the newsroom was, to put it in a rather forthright manner which was his hallmark, a nightmare, especially for us reporters.

He was a reporter at heart and remained so even after donning the mantle of the Resident Editor and later, Senior Editor (Express Initiatives).

“Kai Re Gadhva, Kai Kartois,” (Hey donkey, what are you up to), would send a chill down our collective spines. It did not matter to whom these words were addressed, everybody present would scurry back to their desks and start flicking the pages of notebooks for some substantial information to satisfy The Master.

I was, as he often referred to me, the ‘Baccha’ (baby) of the team he painstakingly put together as the founder of the Pune edition of The Indian Express in 1988. My senior colleagues that time, who were past the trainee stage, called me his ‘blue-eyed boy’.

In Prakash Kardaley’s own words, this is how I started: “A cub reporter halfway through his journalism course which I advised him to ignore since I was offering him a job on spotting his potential as a reporter”.

msnbc: A building with waterfall walls that can display images and words is being designed by a team of architects and engineers.

The interactive “digital water pavilion,” to be unveiled at the International Expo Zaragoza 2008 in Spain, will feature an exhibition area, café and various public spaces—all enclosed within curtains of recycled water.

The MIT team’s pavilion showcases the potential of “digital water” and will be the first time that this idea has been implemented in architecture. Since recycled water is sometimes cheap and plentiful, water walls could conceivably be created on a larger scale in the future.

“To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water,” said Carlo Ratti, head of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory.

The effect is created by a row of valves spaced along a pipe suspended in the air. A computer controls the opening and closing of the valves. This produces a curtain of falling water similar to a waterfall, with gaps at specified locations. The entire surface becomes a liquid display that continuously scrolls downward. The resulting pattern of air and water droplets resembles the digital pixels used to create images on computer monitors and other displays.

The water curtains are also equipped with motion sensors. “You could throw a ball at the wall, and then see an open circle drop down to meet it precisely where and when its trajectory intersected the water surface,” Mitchell explained, “and like the Red Sea for Moses, open up to allow passage through at any point.”

msnbc: Chinese scientists have developed a “Wing-In-Ground” (WIG) aircraft which can fly long distances just a few feet above the sea surface, state media said on Wednesday.

The plane can fly as low as half a meter (1 ft 7 ins) off the surface, hitting speeds of up to 180 miles per hour and can carry up to 4 tons on takeoff.

“It’s as safe as ships, although five or six times faster,” associate professor Xu Zhengyu, vice-president of the research team at Tongji University in Shanghai, was quoted as saying.

“And it can carry much more weight than ordinary planes while costing half as much and using half as much fuel.”

Wing In Ground effect refers to the reduction in drag experienced by an aircraft as it approaches a height approximately twice a wingspan’s length off the ground or other level surface such as the sea.

Xu said the plane could be flown for military use and border control.

Tongji University planned to develop a 50-seat WIG by 2013, with 200 prototypes capable of carrying 200 to 400 tons scheduled for 2016 or 2017.

“Taking advantage of the aerodynamics of the ground effect, which adds extra lift when flying at very low altitudes, the aircraft can fly close to the water’s surface,” the China Daily said.

“This cuts back at least one third on fuel consumption, compared with standard planes of the same size, because the plane can benefit from air buoyancy.”

The WIG has been listed as one of three types of aircraft given the green light in the general aviation field by the State Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defense, Xu was quoted as saying.