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indianexpress: To address all the complaints of citizens regarding property tax, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) on Monday decided to conduct a tax adalat while extending the payment deadline by one month to November 15.

“A lot of citizens have complaints regarding assessment of taxes on their property by the civic administration. There are also complaints about billing and several cases are pending in courts which is the main reason behind citizens delaying the payment of taxes within the deadline,” said Deputy Commissioner Dnyandeo Thube of the tax assessment and tax collection department.

Thus, to clarify all the queries of citizens, he said the PMC will be conducting a tax adalat thrice a week for the next one month so that the complaints of the citizens can be resolved.

“The tax adalat will be held between 4 pm and 6 pm in my office every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Citizens should bring old bills for the hearing,” Thube said.

He said the set deadline of October 15 to pay the property tax has been extended by a month to November 15 since the PMC delayed the process of issuing tax bills to citizens.

The PMC has distributed bills to 5.28 lakh of the total 5.73 property owners while 55, 000 bills will be distributed in the next 15 days, Thube said.

indianexpress: “Sad and shocking,’’ said Kinetic Engineering Ltd vice-president sales and marketing Ajnkya Firodia, describing the sorry state of affairs that govern the lives — and deaths — of the conservancy staff of the Pune Municipal Corporation, highlighted by The Indian Express.

“These are the kind of incidents that cause so much harm to the country’s reputation. We do not display any sensitivity when it comes to issues of cleanliness and hygiene and do not accord basic dignity to the workers who carry out this important task for us,’’ Firodia said. In his own company at Kinetic Engineering there exists an accident insurance as well as company benevolent scheme for all workers. Compensation is the higher component between insurance and Workmen Compensation Act amount, in case of death due to other than natural causes.

Serum Institute of India chairman Dr Cyrus Poonawalla similarly described the revelations as “absolutely alarming”. “The PMC must be held accountable,” he emphasised. At the Serum Institute all workers are covered under the Employment State Insurance (ESI) Act and the Workmen Compensation Act. “However, since compensation under these schemes take a long time, as a company we feel obliged to offer a satisfactory compensation from our side in case of death of an employee on duty,’’ added Poonawalla.

Similarly, Thermax Ltd too has worked out a policy that is a combination of government rules and their own initiative. According to Thermax chairperson Meher Pudumjee, if a worker dies while in service due to natural causes, the family is entitled to a Death Benevolent Fund amount which comprises one day’s salary of all employees and a matching contribution by the company. Apart from this, gratuity is paid to the family as if the deceased had been in service up to retirement. Should a worker die of an accident, then the family is entitled to compensation under the Workmen Compensation Act.

indianexpress:  With the state government sanctioning Rs 64 crore towards infrastructure upgrade, Sassoon General Hospital and BJ Medical College is now flush with funds, but the fund availability has far from resolved problems arising from manpower shortage. The forensic medicine department of the medical college conducts almost 9,000 post-mortems every year, with bodies sent from as far as Satara and Ahmednagar, but it has only two personnel manning the task.

In other words, presuming that these 9,000 dead bodies arrive at the hospital in an equal spread over 365 days, there are two dozen post-mortems being conducted by only two doctors.

While two posts are sanctioned for the post of professor at the department only one has been filled. Same is the case of the assistant professor’s post. Again a few lecturer posts are vacant that are currently covered up by assistant lecturers.

What is frustrating for the professors on duty is the lack of cooperation from authorities who keep sending dead bodies from outside Pune. For instance a constable is required to accompany a dead body if it is from Satara so that the panchnama is done and then the post-mortem is conducted. Most of the time the policemen are missing, rue professors at B J Medical College

indianexpress:  Many consider swimming a sport, for several others it’s an exercise. But for 16-year-old Gauri Gadgil, a mentally- challenged girl, swimming has helped transform her personality. Not just that, it has also brought a ray of hope in her life.

Gauri last week bagged a silver medal in the 25-metre butterfly stroke at the Special Olympics Summer Games held in Beijing, China between October 2 and 11.

A delighted Sneha Gadgil, her mother says, “About seven years back, in order to cure the imbalance between her mental thoughts and physical activity coordination, we enrolled her into swimming classes. She took to the sport in no time and in 2003 won the gold medal in a competition organised by the Swimming Association of India for the disabled. But what is really heartening is that with this sport her concentration has improved considerably. She can stay alone at home for hours, attend the phone calls and even her teachers have seen a drastic improvement in her academic performance.” In January 2006, Gauri stood first in the national-level swimming competition for the challenged.

To prepare herself for the international competition, Gauri would get up at 5.30 am and put herself through four hours of gruelling practice sessions every day. “There was a time when I thought of giving up as I couldn’t take the burden of practising. But my coaches Hrishikesh Tatooskar and Saurabh Deshpande encouraged me a lot,’’ says Gauri. Tatooskar says her training sessions were not compromised in any way. “But we ensured that she got sufficient breaks during the practice sessions. Also, we dealt with her with a certain amount of patience as she showed tempers at times. But she remained focused.”

indianexpress: IN a scathing attack on the Maharashtra State Energy Distribution Company Limited (MSEDCL) floated Krishi Swabhimani Yojana, president of Pune Zilla Akhil Bhartiya Grahak Panchayat Balasaheb Auti, termed the scheme to be unilateral and exploitative in nature. Auti said the scheme inflicted injustice on farmers as it enabled MSEDCL authorities to penalise farmers by imposing heavy fines.

The grahak panchayat has demanded that MSEDCL do a rethink over the implementation of the scheme, stop levying heavy penalties, extend deadline for restructuring the entire scheme and provide authorised electricity connections to those farmers who had filled the quotations. Hundreds of Grahak Panchayat members staged a demonstration outside Rasta Peth MSEDCL headquarters on Monday afternoon, raising slogans that their demands be met.

indianexpress: The Indian Air Force will be organising a recruitment rally to induct Airmen in Group ‘X’ (technical) and Group ‘Y’ (trade) categories at the Shivaji Stadium, City Police HQ, Takli, Katol Road, Nagpur from October 26 to October 31. Candidates born between January 1, 1987, and March 31, 1991, (both days inclusive) will be eligible and should bring seven recent passport size photographs, original documents along with photocopies of marksheet, NCC certificates, domicile certificates and two unstamped self addressed envelopes. For details, contact Zilla Sainik Welfare Officers or Commanding Officer, 6 Airmen Selection Centre, Air Force Cottongreen, Mumbai 400033.

techtree: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies claims to have developed the world’s smallest read head for hard drives.

The newbie has been named, “Current Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magneto-Resistive” or CPP-GMR head.

And for those not-in-the-know, existing hard drives have a tunnel magneto-resistance head with two magnetic layers with an insulating layer in between.

The interesting thing about a CPP-GMR head is that it replaces this insulating layer with a conductor, typically Copper.

So, current ceases to run parallel to the middle layer; instead, it runs perpendicularly — thereby reducing resistance and allowing shrinking of the head.

To put it simply, while today’s drive heads can read media with tracks that are 70 nanometers apart, the new heads will be able to read media having tracks that are only 50 nanometers (or even less) apart.

Commercially, the first such new drives are expected sometime in 2009 or 2010.

But how will regular desktop/laptop users benefit from this? They can expect to shop for up to a 4 terabyte HDD for their desktop, and/or a 1 terabyte drive for their notebook sometime in 2011.

techtree: HTC has announced its latest PDA phone, the P3300, which has Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality among other features. With the P3300, users can take photos outdoors, and automatically embed satellite coordinates into the photos.

The iron Gray colored PDA weighs in at 128 grams, and is about 16.8 mm thick. It sports a 2.8-inch QVGA display screen, a phonepad input option, and operates on Windows Mobile 6, besides featuring 128MB built-in ROM and 64MB RAM.

For GPS functionality, the P3300 has MapKing R12, a latest version mobile mapping system, plus the SiRF III chipset with 20 parallel channel receiver.

Apart from this feature, the phone offers high-speed wireless LAN access, and is equipped with a high-resolution 2.0 mega pixels camera as well as built-in FM radio.

The P3300 comes equipped with Microsoft Office programs including Outlook Mobile, Word, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, IE Mobile, and Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

Users can also access Adobe Reader (PDF), Sprite Backup, Activesync, Comm Manager, Internet sharing, Network Wizard, Audio Manager, as also Pocket MSN with emails pushed to them.

bbc: A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi.
The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The smaller head can read greater densities of data stored on the disk.

Hitachi said the advance would fuel the “terabyte era”, with a 4TB drive able to hold more than a million songs.

Hard drives store data by magnetising the surface of the disk in a pattern which represents the data in digital form.

The data is stored digitally as tiny magnetized regions, called bits, on the disk. A magnetic orientation in one direction on the disk could represent a “1″, while an orientation in the opposite direction could represent a “0″.

To store an ever increasing amount of data, the magnetised regions on the disk are packed ever closer together, requiring smaller and smaller read-write heads.

Current hard disks can store about 200 gigabits of information per square inch (6.4sqcms) while Hitachi believes its new technology means it can store up to 1 terabit of data per square inch.

cnet: Chipmaker Broadcom said Monday that it has developed a new processor that integrates all key 3G cellular and mobile technologies onto a single chip.

The processor that operates at extremely low powers will enable cell phone makers to build new 3G phones in more compact form factors with very long battery lives at a fraction of what it costs today, the company said.

The new 3G “Phone on a Chip” supports the four next-generation cellular technologies used throughout the world: HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access), HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), and EDGE (enhanced data for GSM evolution). It also can transmit and receive FM radio for playing music on a car stereo. And it supports Bluetooth technology and processing capability for a 5-megapixel camera.

Broadcom claims it is at least a year ahead of competitors, such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, in terms of integrating so much functionality into a single chip. The company also said the chip is already available to a select group of Broadcom customers.

In 2006, Broadcom had only about 1.4 percent of the cell phone chip market. By contrast, TI and Qualcomm each had about 20 percent of the 2006 mobile phone chip market, according to iSuppli.