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TOI : PUNE: There will be no load-shedding in Pune from April 5. The Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (MSEDCL) on Friday signed a tri-party agreement with Tata Power Company and Tata Power Trading Company Ltd wherein 100 MW power will be supplied on a 24-hour basis exclusively for Pune from midnight on Friday.

The Tata Power Company has no problems in supplying the required power to Pune and is willing to take the risk associated with starting the arrangement before getting Merc’s approval of the cost of power and the reliability charge.

“There was no problem in continuing the arrangement till Merc’s approval was received in about five weeks’ time,” sources said.

Pradeep Bhargava, chairman of Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Maharashtra council, who is the force behind the Pune model, told TOI that the captive power plants (CPP) participating in the Pune model were always on standby and the CII would do whatever was required to bridge the gap.

It may be noted that the Pune model came into being from June 2006, wherein 30 CII members started generating and consuming about 60 MW power to bridge the gap between demand and supply for power and keep Pune free of load-shedding. Puneites have been paying a reliability charge of 42 paise per unit for this arrangement.

However Pune’s demand for power has increased since then and the shortfall reached between 160 and 180 MW, compelling the MSEDCL to divert power from the state kitty to keep the model running. The Merc, on March 14, directed the power company to stop giving grid support to the Pune model from April 1 and source additional power exclusively for Pune by appointing a distributed generation-based distribution franchisee.

Meanwhile, Bhargava stated that Merc’s approval would be needed for this unique experiment as the regulatory body will…More

TOI : PUNE: The four-member Sarjerao Nimse panel — set up on Thursday by the University of Pune’s (UoP) board of examination — has its task cut out in terms of reviewing and recommending an extensive overhaul of the university’s exam system. Flying squads are just one of several aspects that the panel will examine.

Vice-chancellor Narendra Jadhav said the panel would consider transfer of the first- and second-year undergraduate exam work from the university to individual colleges; reducing the number of exam centres; revising norms for appointment of internal as well as external supervisors; subject-wise cluster of exams for rural and urban centres; police protection for colleges; internal security systems; infrastructure and provision of financial punishment against colleges indulging in unfair exam activities. Introduction of bar coding system and strengthening of the exam department workforce are other issues, Jadhav said.

According to UoP controller of exams (CoE) M.S. Phirange, the exam department has 125 officials and personnel to take care of exam-related work. This includes one deputy registrar, six assistant registrars and seven section officers. The numbers simply do not match the volume of work the department is saddled with.

One of Phirange’s predecessors told TOI that things have changed a lot in the last few years, considering the pace at which the university has added new courses, number of students, affiliated colleges and institutions. “In the last five years, the number of colleges have gone up from a little under 300 to the present 450-plus,” the former CoE said.

Against this, the department has quite an inexperienced and young team of supervisors and other staffers. Several of them are less devoted to work, he added.

“There has been no corresponding strengthening of the exam department to tackle the rise in the number of colleges. The exam department is a key revenue generating unit of the…More

TOI : PUNE: The 130 heroes of the 1971 India-Pakistan war, whose plot of land was vandalised by miscreants last year, finally asserted themselves on Friday. With assistance from the Army’s sub-area office and a security cover by the city police, the ex-armymen rebuilt the compound fence and boundary posts around the plots allotted to them.

Members of the Veer Sainik Association had originally planned to undertake the re-building exercise on April 6 but postponed the event after the the district administration and the city police department requested against it.

The two-acre-land at survey number one in Wadgaonsheri had been granted to to the 130 Gallantry award winners of the 1971 war by the Maharashtra government. However, bureaucratic hurdles lasting over than three and half decades, meant that the individual plots measuring 3,000-4,000 square feet had been lying idle for a very long period of time.

According to Colonel (retd) Anil Athale, member of the Veer Sainik Association, residents of the locality came forward last night (on Thursday night) and dismantled the barricades set up by the hooligans. “We employed labourers to put up the new barbed wire fence and cement posts around the compound,” he said.

He added that their next course of action would involve entering into agreement with some builder to start work on private residences and apartments.

TOI was the first newspaper to have reported about the struggle undertaken by the war heroes to claim their land (TOI, November 2, 2007). Among the beneficiaries who received individual plots by the state were former chief of army staff late General Arunkumar Vaidya, Major General Ian Cardozo (who lost a hand and a leg during the war) and Air Commodore Ashok Shinde (hero of the air battle in Chamb sector).

“We appreciate the help extended by the army’s sub-area office and the city…More

TOI : PUNE: Activists of the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena (BVS), the student wing of the Shiv Sena, on Friday alleged that students of a municipal school in Laxminagar were forced to write invitation letters for a programme to felicitate city Congress MP Suresh Kalmadi hours before their final exams.

Ajay Shinde, president of the city unit of the BVS, said the students were forced to write the invitations on post cards for the last two days.

He said the BVS workers found the students writing the invitations at 11 am on Friday, two hours before the their exam.

“We questioned the teachers about this and have also informed the the municipal commissioner about the goings-on,” Shinde said. The BVS did not start an agitation against the incident as final examinations are currently on in municipal schools, he stated.

Local Congress corporator Aba Bagul, who has organised the felicitation on the occasion of Kalmadi’s birthday on May 1, refuted the charge saying that the party’s political rivals were deliberately trying to raise a contrioversy over the felicitation. “I have already sent out nearly ten thousand letters written by Congress party workers,” he said. Print Save EMail Write to Editor Get personalised news s…More

TOI : PUNE: In fresh cases of atrocities against women, two girls, including a minor, have been allegedly molested and a woman was set ablaze, allegedly by her in-laws.

An 18-year-old SYB.Com student was forcibly brought out of her exam centre on Thursday and allegedly molested by a resident of her locality in Yerawada.

The 18-year-old has filed a complaint saying that she was writing her second year BCom exams at a centre in Mahatma Housing Board on Thursday afternoon. Around 4 pm, Sanjay Paul Godinho (21) came in her examination hall, forcibly took her out of the class and molested her, she alleged.

Godinho, who stays in victim’s locality, was arrested by the police, who were on duty at the exam centre, after the girl raised an alarm.

In a broad daylight incident, a 13-year-old girl was abducted and molested by two youths at Lullanagar on Tuesday. The victim’s mother has filed a complaint that the girl was abducted by Narendra Dhotarmani and Vishal Jogi. They gagged her and took her in their rickshaw when she was retruning from tuition classes. The girl has recognised the accused because they live in her locality in Bibvewadi.

The youths allegedly took the victim to the Kendriya Vidyalaya premises at Lullanagar and molested her. The girl managed to escape while the suspects, who were bringing her back, slowed down the rickshaw and got busy with some conversation.

A housewife, Sujata Ubale (19), of Anandnagar in Chinchwad was set ablaze on Monday (March 31), allegedly by her in-laws who were demanding a vehicle from her parents. She was married to Sachin (25) in May 2006, after which her in-laws started demading dowry.

Sujata, who hails from Latur, had earlier given a statement to the police that she had sustained burns after the stove caught fire. However,…More

TOI : PUNE: With more than Rs 5,000 crore needed to improve the city’s traffic infrastructure, municipal commissioner Pravinsinh Pardeshi has proposed launching of a special purpose vehicle (SPV), an undertaking of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), which will be called the Pune Municipal Infrastructure Development Corporation.

The civic chief has spelt out several options for collecting funds for the proposed SPV, which will be taken up for discussion by the civic standing committee on April 8. Some of the major resource mobilisation modes recommended by Pardeshi include floating of bonds, attracting investments from citizens through stocks, taking loans from financial institutions, capital investments from private industries which stand to benefit from the infrastructure projects and, most importantly, allowing private investors of the company to operate “certain services” — for a stipulated period only — to recover their investments.

In a bid to ensure that the elected members support the proposal, the civic chief has recommended adequate representation to them on the company’s governing board. According to the proposal, the mayor, leaders of the five political parties in the PMC, commissioner and five senior civic officers will be on the governing board. Similarly, the civic chief plans to rope in representatives of the city’s prominent business organisations, including the MCCIA, PBA, CII and others on the governing council.

A separate advisory council will also be formed, but its members will not have the right to vote and they can only make recommendations to the governing council. The advisory committee members will include members from the state’s irrigation, transport and public works departments and technical consultants from government and semi-government agencies.

The first and main objective of the proposed company will be to examine the traffic and transportation problems of the city and execute the projects listed in the ‘Comprehensive Mobility Plan’ —currently being prepared by the PMC — through…More

TOI : PUNE: The University of Pune (UoP) conducts 275 exams each in two sessions in April and October every year. Nearly 6.6 lakh students from Pune, Ahmednagar and Nashik districts appear for these exams, with the April session alone accounting for 4.25 lakh students. An exam centre status has been extended to each of the varsity’s affiliated colleges, which takes the total number of exam centres to over 450.

Against this, the university’s department of examination has barely eight flying squads (four members in each squad) to carry out surprise inspections and keep a tab on the activities at the exam centres. While Pune has four squads, Ahmednagar and Nashik have two each.

The flying squads are expected to inspect the infrastructure of exam centres, check the exam proceedings, fulfilment of exam-related norms by the institution, movement of exam stationery, ensure that the principal is physically present at the centre and that incidents of cheating and copying are reported in time.

No wonder then that colleges located in remote and fringe areas are susceptible to unscrupulous activities during exams — as was seen during the first-year B.Com maths, statistics and BA (psychology) paper leak incidents at the Genba Sopanrao Moze Trust’s College of Arts, Science and Commerce at Wadmukhwadi along the Bhosari-Alandi road.

Colleges may get more exam responsibilities Print Save EMail Write to Editor Get personalised news s…More

TOI : PUNE: Puneites can heave a sigh of relief. There will be no load-shedding in Pune from April 5.

The tireless negotiations, wheelings and dealings by the Maharashtra Council of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), to keep the revolutionary Pune model of zero load-shedding alive, have finally borne fruit.

The Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (MSEDCL) on Friday signed a tri-party agreement with Tata Power Company and Tata Power Trading Company Ltd wherein 100 MW power will be supplied on a 24-hour basis exclusively for Pune from midnight on Friday.

MSEDCL officials in Mumbai told TOI that Tata Power Trading Company has agreed to act as an interim franchisee to facilitate this arrangement, which will be in force till April 14. “This means that there will be no load-shedding in Pune,” officials stated.

This will also give much-needed time to complete the required formalities and legal procedures for appointing a long-term franchisee and to enable the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (Merc) to fix the cost of the power and the reliability charge Puneites will pay for the convenience of zero load-shedding, officials explained.

A statement released by the MSEDCL late in the evening said that state energy minister Dilip Walse-Patil, the CII, Mahratta Chamber of Commerce Industries and Agriculture, Prayas energy group and Sajag Nagrik Manch have been working for the last four days towards a way to avoid load-shedding in Pune.

However these seems to be some confusion about the April 14 time-frame mentioned by the MSEDCL in their official statement. Sources revealed that the power shortfall for Pune was 160 MW and the Tata Power Company has agreed to supply 100 MW. The MSEDCL was wondering about the balance 60 MW.

Next challenge to conserve energy: CII Print Save EMail Write to Editor Get personalised news s…More