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indianexpress:  The labour office here has sought information about the grounds on which Bajaj Auto Limited had decided to suspend manufacturing at its Akurdi plant from September 1. The company has to submit this information by August 31 and this will be sent to the labour ministry in Mumbai. There could be a meeting between the company management and the State Government to discuss the future of the Akurdi plant.

Anil R. Lakaswar, deputy commissioner of labour, Government of Maharashtra, said here on Thursday: “The Government is concerned about the future of Bajaj Auto’s 2,800 workforce as also the fate of 170 vendors and their employees and the impact it could have in the region.”
 
The labour office has asked for details about production, wages, sales tax, octroi, other taxes, expenditure on water and electricity incurred by the company at all its plants — Akurdi, Chakan and Waluj in Aurangabad — and a comparison of this with the subsidies offered by Uttarakhand at Bajaj’s Pantnagar facility, Lakaswar said.

However, Lakaswar made it clear that this was not a ‘labour issue’. “There were no labour disputes and the management has taken a decision based on taxation and production costs. So the labour department could only play a limited role in this issue,” the deputy labour commissioner said.

Responding to allegations by the Unions that the company management had not notified the Labour Commissioner about the action, Lakaswar said that BAL was not shutting down the plant, just suspending the production.

Earlier, hundreds of protesting employees gathered outside the Labour Commissioner’s office and their labour unions, the legally recognised Bharatiya Kamgar Sena (BKS) and Vishwakalyan Kaamgar Sanghatana, submitted their list of demands.

indianexpress: Pune Municipal Corporation has come in for more criticism for the way it has handled the traffic situation in the city, in particular for its execution of the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS).

While lauding its initiative to launch the BRTS, police commissioner Jayant Umranikar said PMC got a beating in the planning and implementation departments. “For instance, I haven’t understood the logic behind having the BRTS lane in middle of the road,” Umranikar said at a discussion on the traffic situation in the city, organised by Nagrik Chetna Manch on Thursday. “After getting off the bus, the BRTS commuter is expected to cross the road.”
 
Umranikar added that the separation of lanes by merely placing metal rods would not ensure that vehicles don’t infringe into the BRTS lane. “Nine fatal accidents were reported with three months of the BRTS execution,” he said, adding the basic design of the roads was poor, with no service lanes in place.

To resolve the traffic chaos, he said the city has to be decongested. “There is a dire need of ring roads, so that the heavy traffic passing through the city can be diverted from the outside,” he said. “Besides, we have asked PMC to build sufficient parking spaces for luxury buses passing through the city.”

While admitting that very little could be done without the civic administration’s initiative, Umranikar said the police have started bringing the traffic flow in control by setting speed limits for the vehicles. “The city is exploding with 19 lakh vehicles,” he said.

indianexpress:  After doing away with encroachments from roadsides, Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has now turned its attention to encroachments on spaces reserved for parking around buildings, throughout the city.

“We will serve notices to owners of all buildings whose parking spaces are being encroached upon, before demolishing these encroachments,” PMC’s city engineer Prashant Waghmare said on Thursday.
 
The move comes after all the political parties demanded action against the same. Waghmare said PMC had received complaints against restaurants and offices that encroached spaces reserved for parking in front of buildings. This has led to vehicles being parked on the roads which in turn has created traffic congestion.

Meanwhile, the civic administration has already started rehabilitating licensed hawkers by identifying plots for the purpose, along with the anti-encroachment drive, on the city’s roads. But hawkers’ union Maharashtra Pathari-Hathgadi Vyavasayik Sena said they would continue with their agitation against the anti-encroachment drive by organising a Jailbharo Andolan on September 3 outside Yerawada jail

indianexpress:  After having received a rejection slip from the civic administration, Pimpri-Chinchwad Mayor Vaishali Ghodekar has decided to rope in the private sector to shore up the Mayoral Fund which has witnessed a rapid decline in last five months of this fiscal. The mayor has written personal letters to big industrial units like Tata Motors, Bajaj Auto, Thermax, Force Motors, SKF and KSB Pumps, pleading with them to contribute to the PCMC’s charitable trust. The letters, which have already been despatched, bear the names of the likes of Rahul Bajaj, Madhur Bajaj and Abhay Firodia.

On Wednesday, Ghodekar told Newsline she was prompted to send the letters to big industrial units as the Mayoral Fund is fast running out of cash and the civic administration has conveyed its inability to help out. “The Mayoral Fund boasts of an amount of Rs 3 lakh every year. In last five months, Rs.1.5 lakh has been disbursed as medical aid to over 50 citizens. There are another 100 applications pending. If we add the applications that are received practically every alternate day, then in a matter of days the entire Rs 3 lakh will be used up. After that I will not be in position to pay anything to the needy citizens,” she said.
 
Ghodekar said the industrial giants are being requested to contribute to the Mayoral Fund, voluntarily. “We are not forcing them to pay. It is up to them to contribute to the charity or not. There is no fixed amount sought, they can contribute any amount they wish.”

Ghodekar said the Dilip Band administration has told her that an increase in the amount of Mayoral Fund will require State Government’s permission. “A year ago, the PCMC had sent a proposal to State Government to increase the Mayoral Fund to Rs 25 lakh, but there has been no response from the government yet,” she said.

indianexpress: A Unique job fair, organised by the Employment and Self-Employment Department of Pune district, saw 244 unemployed youngsters — who registered with the department — bag jobs in various companies. About 1,300 of the 2,500 registered applicants have been shortlisted as well.

The fair was organised on Thursday after a Government Resolution (GR) was brought out in June, citing that 2,30,000 and five lakh youngsters were unemployed in Pune district and the state, respectively.

Job fairs will also be organised in Mumbai, Thane, Kalyan, Panvel, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Satara, Mahabaleshwar, Solapur, Kolhapur and Aurangabad among other major cities in Maharashtra.

As many as 2,500 aspirants with non-technical expertise applied with 29 private employers on Thursday, a list that included Tata Picasso Systems, Swarowski India and Kirloskar Pneumatics. Mahesh Deshpande, assistant director of the Employment and Self-Employment Department, said one more job fair would be organised next month to recruit youngsters with technical background in Talegaon, Pimpri-Chinchwad.

“The fair was met with good response from both the companies as well as the applicants,” Deshpande said.

indianexpress: The dilapidated shed-like structure at the entrance of Vawajavane village in Khed taluka is just a stone’s throw away from the largest house in the village. And every time Dagdu Mahadeo Havaji Bachche looks out of the decrepit shed to see the imposing structure ahead, his pain deepens. For the latter is where he spent his childhood and youth and the former is where he is whiling away his twilight years — in abject penury.

What makes his situation more ironic is that Dagdu is the son of Mahadeo Havaji, the founder of the flourishing dabbawalla community of Mumbai. The house ahead was built by his father who left the village in the late 1890s and started the famed tiffin service in Mumbai. Due to his efforts, over the years, more and more people migrated from this village and surrounding areas to be absorbed into the service. Today, about 90 per cent of the dabbawallas in Mumbai hail from Khed taluka, some 60 km from Pune, along with neighbouring Mulshi and Maval talukas. These are known as dabbawalla talukas.

However the only son of the founder of this community is today ailing and surviving on the charity of the villagers. Inside his dwelling hangs a framed photograph of his father — one of the few possessions of 71-year- old Dagdu and his wife Shantabai. “I have no work. I get Rs 750 every three months by way of the Sanjay Gandhi grant but how can one live in that amount,” he asks .

Dagdu was a dabbawalla too in Mumbai. “I was 11 when my father called me to Mumbai in 1947. He had 45 dabbawallas under him. I worked there till 1952 before returning to my village,” relates Dagdu, who then decided to take the easy life, living off his father’s land and savings. His father passed away in Mumbai in 1957. Dagdu started to dabble in politics and in 1962 was elected sarpanch. He remained the sarpanch till 1982. Hard days had started to creep in — mainly due to Dagdu’s love for alcohol, say the villagers.

techtree: Even as the world is hard put to decide whether it’s HD-DVD or Blu-ray coming next, a Jerusalem-based company called Mempile has reportedly introduced an optical disc about as thick as a standard DVD or slightly thicker, which it claims can store up to 1TB or 1,000GB of data.

What’s more, the company claims that once the transition to blue lasers is done, the optical disc will be able to store up to 5TB of data.

Mempile’s 1TB DVD sports 200 distinct layers, each offering 5GB of storage space. Unlike in regular DVDs, the layers in this DVD are not stuck together or stacked physically. Mempile claims the discs are made from a polymer variant called polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), which is a mixture of Perspex, Lucite, and Plexiglass. Incidentally, the discs derive their Yellow color from this compound.

Also unlike typical DVDs wherein 2 dimensions are used to store data, Mempile claims it’s DVDs use 3 dimensions in the polymer to store data. Mempile’s new technology is currently restricted to WORM or write once, read many. However, the company intends to make read/write drives available in future.

While Mempile’s concept is not entirely new, the company claims it’s prototypes are already reaching 600GB to 800GB of storage, with 1TB storage expected soon.

However, from an industry perspective, Mempile needs to get it’s discs/drives to market soon enough for these not to be overtaken by heavyweight rivals — HD DVD and Blu-ray…

msnbc: LG Electronics announced its first premium camera mobile phone on Thursday and an executive told Reuters the company aimed for 10-15 percent of this market segment within about a year.

The “Viewty” will go on sale in Europe in mid-October, priced somewhere between its hit “Shine” phone, which sells for about 400 euros ($547), and its LG Prada fashion phone, which sells for about 600 euros ($820), Chang Ma told Reuters.

Ma, who is in charge of design strategy at LG’s mobile communications division, said the phone was designed for ease of sending, sharing and viewing pictures and video.

It has a touch screen, a 5.1 megapixel camera and a hot key for uploading video to YouTube.

Ma said the Viewty would go on sale worldwide within a month or two of its European launch.

LG also launched a new smartphone, the LG-KS20, with touch screen and high-speed HSDPA Internet access.

The KS20 is the first device based on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform LG has launched in Europe.

msnbc: Japan’s Sharp Corp on Thursday unveiled a prototype of what it called the world’s thinnest LCD TV with a main display section only 20 mm thick.

The 25 kg TV was designed with digitalization and Web-based TV in mind as consumers look for high definition models that can be mounted on walls, Sharp president Mikio Katayama said ahead of the IFA electronics fair.

He said the 50-inch TV would consume 140 kilowatts of power per year, based on a typical household’s viewing pattern, compared with consumption of 233 kWh by Sharp’s current LC-37 P55E 37-inch set.

reuters: Sony Corp. will begin shuttering its Connect Music Store in March, the company confirmed Thursday.

Rumors of the shutdown began in June after the company laid off 20 people and allocated remaining staff and resources to the PlayStation group.

Behind the move is Sony’s decision to support Windows Media Audio DRM in its new line of Walkman digital music players, also announced Thursday. The Connect service, and previous Sony portable devices, used a proprietary technology called ATRAC which never caught on. The new devices will now work with any other Windows Media-enabled digital music store, such as Wal-Mart and others.

The Connect deactivation will take place on a phased basis in North America and Europe. Specific timing for each region was not disclosed, but is not expected to begin until March. Connect’s e-book service will remain operational.

Customers who bought ATRAC-encoded files can continue to manage their library with past Sony devices, but the company is advising them to back up their library to audio CDs, as future Walkman devices may not support the format.

Sony’s new Walkman devices for the first time include video. The Sony Pictures Entertainment division is providing video content for the new devices via http://www.sonystyle.com, rather than Connect.