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indianexpress: There is drinking water in sight for many parts of Vimannagar as the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) tankers consigned to quench thirst of the locality go ‘missing’ after filling water at the Wadgaonsheri filling station. As a result, the residents are forced to depend on private water tankers and not surprisingly some of the newly elected corporators have jumped into water business purchasing new tankers in names of their relatives.

The situation is similar in fringe areas of the city where water scarcity is a perennial issue, forcing the PMC to hire tankers to cater to their drinking water needs. “More than 200 PMC tankers are currently plying in various parts of the city to cater to the drinking water need of people,” says V G Kulkarni, PMC development engineer (water department). On the other hand, complaints are pouring in that majority of these water tankers go ‘missing’ after filling water at PMC’s filling stations.

“The PMC has consigned water tanker to our locality, but we hardly see these tankers. We have complained with the PMC that tanker-owners sell water meant for us to housing societies in other localities. Tankers hired by the PMC fill water free of cost at the PMC’s filling station and then sell it at Rs 500-700. No one in PMC is taking cognisance of this theft as tankers belong to corporators,” says Vishnu Wadekar from Vimannagar.

The PMC makes annual provision of approximately Rs 3 crore for plying tankers throughout the year. “ However the end users are not benefited as tanker owners who lend their tankers to PMC on hire are diverting it for money,” says Vishwas Shankar in Katraj.

indianexpress: After three consecutive holidays, employees, department heads and other senior officers of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation still seem to be in Diwali mood. So on Monday morning, the ground floor, first floor and second floor offices at PCMC headquarters in Pimpri had minimal presence. It was only as lunch time approached that situation improved with a clutch of senior officers trooping in. Otherwise, most of the offices wore almost a deserted look for nearly three hours after 10 am when PCMC working hours begin.
 
Among assistant municipal commissioners, only Amrut Sawant holding the charge of the stores department was present in the PCMC headquarters before noon. He wasted no time in holding a meeting on a “serious topic” with his department officials. His office is located on the ground floor.

In property tax department, the employees had till noon no clue as to when assistant municipal commissioner Sahebrao Gaikwad would land. Similarly, chief auditor Sudhir Rajdarkar was also missing. He was reportedly not well. assistant municipal commissioner Sudhir Joshi, who heads the Women and Child Welfare Department, was also conspicuously missing from his office. Till noon, his colleagues too had no idea regarding his arrival.

In the water department located on the first floor, no senior officer was present in his cabin before noon. All of them were said to be on “site visits.” Among them included Vishwas Gaikwad, who is the additional city engineer (water supply), executive engineers Ravindra Dudhekar, Vasant Salvi, J M Barshetty, S D Jadhav, deputy engineers Pradeep Pujari and S P Pardeshi.

indianexpress: With the state reeling under severe power shortage, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has undertaken an energy conservation drive to reduce its consumption for the streetlights across the city.

“The PMC has initiated the project for energy saving which will reduce the municipal corporation’s power bills,” chief of PMC electrical department, Srikrishna Chaudhari told The Indian Express.

He said the PMC has around 90,000 streetlights in its jurisdiction with a monthly bill of Rs one crore. The increasing power tariff would mean a resultant increase the municipal corporation’s power bill from streetlights, Chaudhari said.

“The municipal corporation has started replacing the existing 250 kilowatt lamps in the streetlights with100 kilowatt lamps,” he said.

The PMC has already replaced 3,500 lamps so far and will complete replacement of 15,000 lamps in the next four months, Chaudhari said.

The power saving measure is proving to be a success and the execution of the entire project will take at least two years, following which the municipal corporation will be able to save estimated Rs 30 lakh per month on electricity bills.

indianexpress: An electricity meter — which was supposed to be installed at a residence of B S Mahadik in Pimple Gurav on August 16, 2007 — was instead installed a couple of days later at a flat in Sunshine Housing Society, Kalewadi. On September 1, officials of the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (MSEDCL) inspected the society premises and
charged it with using power illegally for motor pump use.
 
On October 3, MSEDCL filed a police complaint against its own employee Sharad Chavan, a junior draughtsman working with Sangvi section, charging him with complicity in ‘power theft’ at the Kalewadi society. Along with Chavan, three others persons who are MSEDCL contractors were also arrested and a similar offence registered against them. The society has also been fined.

Chavan was arrested on October 4 and was suspended from service. Releasing Chavan on bail on October 5, the Special judge P R Bora of MSEB court at Shivajinagar, however, questioned the application of Section 150 of the Electricity Act, 2003 against Chavan.

Refusing to grant Chavan’s police custody, the special judge said he was not convinced about the charges levelled by the prosecution. “From the prosecution papers itself, it appears that the MSEB possesses complete record of names to whom the electric meters are issued for installing them at their homes.”

indianexpress: FORTY-three child labourers have been rescued during raids conducted by the State Labour Department at 37 establishments across the city since April 2007. Apart from this, action has also been taken against 29 individuals found employing child labour, said Deputy Labour Commissioner Anil Lakaswar.
 
Lakaswar was speaking at a joint press conference along with district collector Prabhakar Deshmukh on Monday to announce the concept of “gram sabhas” to be conducted on November 14 (Children’s Day). Lakaswar said that the State Labour Department had been conducting raids on a regular basis since the ban on child labour in hotels and domestic establishments came into effect on October 10, 2006.

“While most of these establishments were hotels, we found some cases of domestic labour last year. Most of the children are boys under the age of 14. Youth above the age of 14 were also rescued and action was taken against the employers under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act,” said Lakaswar, adding that all the raids were carried out on the basis of tip offs.

indianexpress: THE state government decision to ban vehicular traffic on the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) road passing through Bharati Vidyapeeth (BV) campus will once again feature in the PMC general body meeting. The corporators from the area have submitted a proposal seeking the general body permission to pass a resolution to allow vehicular traffic on the road.

The city police, along with the civic administration, had recently started executing the state government order of banning vehicular traffic on the PMC road passing through the university despite opposition from citizens and local corporators.

The corporators have also approached the Bombay High Court to challenge the state government order, saying it was impacting around a lakh residents of the area who use the road daily.

A delegation of corporators and Congress legislator Balasaheb Shivarkar had met Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh urging him to withdraw the decision.

techtree: Beginning next month, the very irritating “click to activate” warning that pops-up every time an Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) user attempts to access multimedia content will disappear — for good.

The warning was first added to IE7 when Microsoft began requiring users to approve the ActiveX controls.

But courtesy Microsoft’s August settlement with Eolas Technologies, the company can now give “click to activate” the royal ditch.

Microsoft said it would make the ‘Internet Explorer Automatic Component Activation Preview’ available through the Microsoft Download Center next month.

The modified IE7 would also be integrated into the next betas of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3. Ultimately, the changes would be offered to all IE7 users in April 2008. They would, of course, retain the option to decline.

In his blog post, Pete LePage, senior product manager at Microsoft, said the change will require no modifications to existing Web pages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages.

techtree: Intel Corporation has unveiled 16 new server and high-end PC processors that it claims are faster, cooler, and eco-friendly.

Calling this the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, said that the processors are the first to use Hafnium-based high-k metal gate (Hi-k) formula for the hundreds of millions of transistors that are inside of them.

These Intel Core 2 Extreme and Xeon processors are also the first to be manufactured on the 45-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process, further boosting performance and lowering power consumption, Moore said.

The new 45nm (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter) processors boast nearly twice the transistor density of previous chips built on the company’s 65nm technology — that is up to 820 million transistors for quad-core processors, each using Intel’s new formula.

The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad core processor can also be used by hardcore gamers and media enthusiasts. Enhancements such as a larger L2 cache and support for new Intel SSE4 media instructions help bring desktop performance to extreme new levels, the company said.

According to Dr Douglas Binks, R&D manager of Crytek, the new 45nm Hi-k Intel Core 2 Extreme processors use multi-core technology to enable physics, particle effects, and audio on separate cores, creating an astounding gaming experience.

techtree: Deccan, the low cost airline, has announced its ‘m-Fly’ initiative in partnership with Oxigen Services that enables customers book their tickets through their mobile phones.

To access this service, customers need to have an ‘m-Fly’ prepaid account, which can be accessed through mobile phone, to book, pay, and generate Deccan e-tickets at anytime and at any location.

Customers have to get themselves registered on the Web site, or call up the Deccan call center. Upon successful registration, customers are provided with a 4-digit password through an SMS.

After registration, users have to recharge their prepaid account from an Oxigen outlet. Once done, customers then have to simply follow the standard procedure.

On booking, the customers would receive a confirmation SMS, and a copy of the e-ticket is also sent to their ids. Meanwhile, the e-ticket can be collected from the Deccan counter on the day of travel.

Additionally, Deccan has announced other SMS-based initiatives such as SMS Alerts in case a flight gets delayed, SMS Flight Status (flight status at any point during the day or night), and SMS flight availability and fares on any future date.

cnet: IBM once again dominated the competition in semiannual rankings of supercomputers, but the big news is what’s coming next year.

Big Blue is working on a computer nicknamed “Roadrunner” that will combine Cell processors, a family of chips found inside the PlayStation 3, and processors from Advanced Micro Devices.

Roadrunner, which will be delivered to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in summer 2008, will be capable of performing more than a quadrillion operations, or a petaflop, when it’s fully operational. IBM helped design and build the Cell chip and has been looking for ways to expand its commercial potential.

A computer that can churn a petaflop has been a longstanding goal for many manufacturers. IBM had the fastest computer on the Top500 Supercomputer Sites list, which was released Monday at the SC07 conference in Reno, Nev. The top machine, the Blue Gene/L supercomputer–located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory–is capable of 478.2 trillion operations, or 478.2 teraflops a second. Thus, Roadrunner will be twice as powerful