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indianexpress:  Lauding The Indian Express for its efforts to highlight the high mortality rate of the conservancy staff workers in the Pune Municipal Corporation, Dr Arbind Prasad, Joint Secretary, Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, said on Thursday that the government was already working in the direction of framing a national policy that will improve the life of conservancy staff throughout the country and will take into account the various inputs collected from the city for the purpose.

“This is a very important issue raised by The Indian Express. It has brought into focus the problems of conservancy staff working in unhygienic conditions,” Dr Arbind Prasad, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, told reporters.

Prasad said he had not come to pinpoint the mistakes of PMC but to understand the working condition of conservancy staff in the city and make suggestions to the municipal corporation to improve their lot.

“We are not here to check as to how many conservancy staff died, but to address the issue,” he said adding the PMC has taken some good steps but there were issues that were yet to be addressed.

The PMC will be encouraged to frame a policy for the conservancy staff and this could help the Union government in formulating a national policy, he said.

“This is an opportunity to focus attention on the issue by all municipal corporations in the country as also the government,” Prasad said.

Along with the working condition, aspects such as health, housing and economic conditions of the conservancy staff should be addressed.

When asked about the discontinuation of insurance cover to the conservancy staff of PMC by the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India, the joint secretary said the issue will be discussed at a national level.

indianexpress: With both the public and private sectors taking note of the rural markets whether for services or for consumer goods, the Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration (YASHADA) will roll out a first-of-its-kind course on rural management from Monday.

The post graduate diploma in rural management will essentially be a one-year correspondence course with regular interactions to be provided at YASHADA. Additional director general course director Meeta Rajivlochan told Newsline that the course would sensitise managers to rural India. The first batch comprises 25 students from various parts of the country. “There would be a 15-day induction course that will be taken up by senior government officials, bankers and academicians. Rajivlochan said the course content would match world class management training programmes and those attending are all senior IAS officers and Class I officers from across the country.

With the rural belt contributing over 50 per cent of the GDP and the services and consumer goods constituting a significant portion in the economy, the course is all set to help develop and manage rural infrastructure and provide services that are crucial to the growth of these rural markets. “This task is performed primarily by government officers and Panchayati Raj institutions, she said. “It is important to train these stakeholders so as to put them higher on the learning curve and enable them to manage the process more efficiently.”

indianexpress:  WITH fast-paced growth of the auto industry over the last few years, automation of manufacturing plants of tier-I and even tier-II auto parts manufacture in the country is becoming increasingly necessary. To race ahead of competition, auto companies are looking at new technologies that will enhance their productivity.

Around 50 engineers and senior officials from automobile and auto component manufacturers in the country had gathered at an exclusive summit ‘Technology Day,’ recently organised by Messung Electronics, Mitsubishi Electric and IBM to discuss ‘how to get more out of the factory automation.’

R Dayal, executive director of Maruti Suzuki Ltd, said that in 2001, Maruti tried out factory automation and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) in one of their plants at Gurgaon, and it led to huge savings, and they are now keen to extend it to all their factories.

Maruti spent Rs 30 crore for factory automation, using PLCs provided by Messung Systems and integrated it with software provided by Compaq — the total system being called MES. Now Messung Systems, which represents Mitsubishi Electrics since 1994, has formed a consortium to deliver the entire MES system including hardware and software with the help of IBM and Mitsubishi Electrics. Each plant producing about three lakh cars, would require MES systems, both hardware and software, costing between Rs 20-30 crore, depending on the automation.

indianexpress:  WITH the malaria death toll at 20 this year, health authorities are worried about the increasing inflow of migrant labourers in the city from Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa who are resistant to anti-malarial drugs like chloroquine. They have also noted the double-fold increase in the number of cases of malaria this year with 1,036 cases registered in the district.

District malaria officer Dr S V Patil said that there was an increase in the number of cases of dengue with the district registering a total of 332 cases with two deaths.

Sassoon General Hospital authorities have recorded a total of 180 cases of malaria. Patil said most of the cases were from Pimpri-Chinchwad. The officials said a parasite load existed in the city and surrounding areas. Once a case is detected in a particular area, then as a precaution, at least 100 households should be fumigated. The problem areas in Pune are Yerawada, Kondhwa and Swargate, Sassoon Hospital officials said.

Doctors have also come across two cases of kala-azar, a disease common in Bihar and rare in Maharashtra, B J Medical College and Sassoon Hospital department of medicine head Dr A L Kakrani said. Fever with chills is the most common clinical presentation observed.

What’s more alarming is that 87 of the cases of malaria detected through the year had a predominance of plasmodium falciparum. PF is the most common cause of severe and life threatening malaria, Kakrani said. The PF has developed resistance to chloroquine in parts of the country.

indianexpress: Sanjay Deshpande of DSK Envo Cell, known for his pioneering efforts in eco-housing in Pune, was invited to participate in a panel discussion at ‘Green Buildings Asia 2007’ that concluded on Thursday at Singapore.

Deshpande made a presentation on the topic ‘Advancing the green building movement in India’ — the possibilities and business opportunities in eco-housing in urban India. ‘Green Buildings Asia 2007’ is Asia’s first senior-level green buildings forum dedicated to covering the most comprehensive spectrum of issues related to sustainable building designs and the most innovative green building products and services.

indianexpress: THE PMC has appealed to citizens and activists of social organisations to keep vigil on the illegal cutting of branches of Kanchan (Apta) tree, as leaves of the tree are used during Dassera festival.
 
Citizens should report to the PMC Garden Department or the nearest police station if they see cutting of these branches. Call 020-25538553 or 25532514.

indianexpress: For the convenience of citizens, the PMC has decided to keep open its Rajiv Gandhi Zoological Park at Katraj and Pune Okayama Maitri Park — also known as the Japanese Garden — till midnight on October 25 on Kojagiri Poornima. The PMC has urged citizens to take advantage of the facility, but not spoil the garden. It has also prohibited crackers and music in the park

techtree: HTC has launched HTC P3300 mobile handset with Global Positioning System (GPS) in the country.

HTC P3300, a slim and stylish PDA phone, operates on the Windows Mobile 6 professional platform. And being a GPS handset, it incorporates the latest version of MapKing R12, a mobile mapping system.

Along with GPS navigation, the handset also offers high-speed wireless LAN access. It comes equipped with a 2.0 MP camera and FM radio. When you take an outdoors photo, the handset automatically embeds the satellite coordinates into the photo.

Featuring a 2.8-inch QVGA display, the P3300 weighs about 128 grams and is 16.8 mm wide. It comes with a 128MB built-in ROM and 64MB RAM.

The handset is loaded with Microsoft Office programs like Outlook Mobile, Word Mobile, 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, and Audio Manager.

For connectivity options, users can look up to high-speed wireless LAN 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, and quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE.

bbc: Social network MySpace is to allow third-party developers to build applications for the site.
The move brings the website into line with rival Facebook, which has seen strong growth since it opened up to outside programmers.

Facebook has become a portal for services such as video, audio and photos since the change.

MySpace has more than 188 million registered users, compared to the 47 million who use Facebook.

MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580m in 2005.

“We hoped it would do very well, but we never imagined it would do this well,” Mr Murdoch told the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
 
Rupert Murdoch (right) and Chris DeWolfe discuss MySpace’s future 

“The idea will be to allow outside developers to tightly integrate their applications into MySpace,” Chris DeWolfe, the firm’s chief executive, told Reuters news agency.

The social network hopes to open up the site in the next few months and hold off the challenge from Facebook.

bbc: The world’s tiniest radio is a step closer to reality.

US scientists have unveiled a detector thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair that can translate radio waves into sound.

According to a University of California team, the study marks the first time that a nano-sized detector has been demonstrated in a working radio system.

Made of carbon nanotubes a few atoms across, it is almost 1,000 times smaller than current radio technology.

Peter Burke and Chris Rutherglen incorporated the microscopic detector into a complete radio system.

  It is conceivable in the future that all components could be nanoscale, thus allowing a truly nanoscale wireless communications system

They used it to transmit classical music wirelessly from an iPod to a speaker several metres away from the music player.