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Techies falling prey to stress P3
Want an X-ray done? You are in queue here P5
Over a decade, 17,015 trees chopped in Pune
• From February 2005-2015, 13,733 trees were replanted • The civic officials have no idea of the number of replanted trees that have survived • On ground, only a few hundred newly planted trees are visible
A year on, MPs haven’t utilised their funds Our very own Anil Shirole hasn’t spent a penny on works in his constituency
See Spotlight, p8-9
See p4
Good Samaritans step into traffic cops’ shoes Aniruddha Rajandekar
Bottlenecks at Viman Nagar and Airport Road junctions prompt three IT professionals to regulate traffic for hours every day
See p5
Pics by Aniruddha Rajandekar
TGS LIFE
MUMBAI
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
PUNE
“If farmers don’t get loan waiver and crop insurance amount in the next eight days, we will take to the streets.” - Dhananjay Munde, Leader of Opposition in Legislative Assembly
A year on, MPs haven’t utilised their funds P4
Troubled by diabetes octogenarian commits suicide Leaves behind a suicide note stating that diabetes was taking a toll on his health and he did not want to be a burden to family
Ved Prakash Adlakha
BY YOGESH SADHWANI @yogeshsadhwani An 80-year-old resident of Chembur, Mumbai, committed suicide on Friday evening. The retired general manager of Rashtriya Chemical Fertilisers was depressed because he was suffering from diabetes and felt that he was becoming a burden on his family. Ved Prakash Adlakha jumped off the Vashi bridge on Friday and rescue operations were on to search for his body till Monday evening. Experts claim that over 20 per cent of diabetics are depressed and need to be treated. The incident occurred on Friday evening, at around 6.45 pm. His family revealed that he had borrowed a car and driver from a friend and said he wanted to step out for a walk. Once the car reached the old Vashi bridge, he asked the driver to park on the side. Police officials from Vashi police station, where a case has been registered, said that the octogenarian told the driver to wait while he went for a walk. “From a distance the driver saw the elderly man go close to the railings and jump off. The driver immediately alerted the owner of the car, who rushed to the spot,” said Sandeep Sahane, assistant police inspector attached to Vashi police station.
The Vashi bridge, from where Ved Prakash Adlakha plunged to his suicide; family members during the search operation (below)
A rescue operation was immediately launched with the help of the cops, fi re brigade and local fishermen. Hours later, the operation was called off on Friday only to be resumed on Saturday. Over the weekend, authorities kept looking for Adlakha’s body but came up empty handed. Adlakha, a resident of Dongre Park in Chembur, is survived by his wife Susheela, who retired as principal of Jawahar Vidya Bhavan School in RCF Colony. His son Sanjay works in Tanzania. Sanjay’s family used to stay with Adlakha and his wife. While the family was in no state to talk, police officials revealed that Adlakha left behind a suicide note. “He has stated that he did not wish to become a burden on anybody. He was diabetic and recently had to undergo a surgery for a wound that wouldn’t heal because of diabetes. The senior citizen, who had always led a healthy life, felt that he was becoming a burden and did not want to die a painful death. In his suicide note, Adlakha stated that
Mama’s girl ties the knot Ace designer Neeta Lulla’s daughter, Nishka, tied the knot with Dhruv Mehra of Shivam Steel at Iskcon temple recently
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TGS NEWS SERVICE @TGSWeekly
ashion designer Nishka Lulla, daughter of prominent Bollywood designer Neeta Lulla, tied the knot with Dhruv Mehra of Shivam Steel, at Juhu’s Iskcon temple, on Wednesday. The wedding was a simple traditional affair, in the presence of family and very close friends. The venue was chosen considering Nishka has an ardent devotee of Lord Krishna since her childhood and she has frequently designed clothes for characters playing Lord Krishna and Radha. The wedding took place on Wednesday morning in the temple, where elders of the family were present to bless the couple. The wedding reception and celebrations are to be held over two days, June 11 and 12, at Anantara
Riverside Spa and Resort in Thailand. The celebrations will commence on the morning of June 11, with a mehendi ritual followed by lunch. The theme for the do is Bohemian and the dress code is Resort Chic Indo-Western. In the evening, the engagement and Sangeet ceremony
nobody is to blame for his death. His family has told us that his diabetes was out of control recently and he had to be put on insulin injections,” said API Sahane. Experts say that Adlakha’s case cannot be treated as an isolated one and should serve as a wake-up call
is scheduled at the Chaophraya Ballroom of the resort. The theme will be Vintage Romantic Fairytale and the dress code is formal. On the evening of June 12, Mangal Pheras will be held at the Riverside Terrace. The theme of this ceremony is Radha-Krishna, and dress code is traditional Indian wear. No prizes for guessing the reason for this theme and dress code. The ceremony will be followed by a Red Carpet-themed after party at the Chaophraya Ballroom, where the dress code is western formals. The highlight of the evening, other than the lovely bride and her lucky groom, will be the exclusive lehenga designed by the mother of the bride, and four-time National Award winner for costume designing, Neeta Lulla. Neeta has won awards for her designs for films like Devdas and Jodha Akbar. Like Madhuri’s lehenga in Devdas had created waves, this pink lehenga
for our society. With more than six crore patients, India is the diabetic capital of the world. Dr Harish Shetty, a renowned psychiatrist, explained that over 20 per cent of diabetics are depressed. “Th is is quite common with senior citizens. After a person is diagnosed with diabetes, I would recommend that he be screened for depression as well. Often, such patients tend to go quiet and everybody mistakes it for a person becoming calmer. But the fact is that s/he is depressed and needs help,” he said. Dr Shetty added that it is about time that the government starts depression screening centres or initiates a mechanism to identify such cases. “I have been suggesting to various government agencies that just as they go looking for mosquito breeding spots, we need to start screening people house to house for depression. It is taking a huge toll on our society. Mental health vigilance is the need of the hour,” explained Dr Shetty. yogesh.sadhwani@goldensparrow.com
will be one to look out for. Neeta has poured all her love and even used her own wedding lehenga to design an exclusive piece for her dear daughter. The senior designer began work on the lehenga on the day the date of the wedding was fi xed. Nearly 400 guests from all over the world are expected to fly into Thailand for the two-day ceremony, of which 250 are from the Maximum City. Kintoo and Kishore Bajaj, Anita Mehra head of Emirates Airlines, Rizwan Sajan of Danube group, and producer Krishika Lulla are a few of the celebrities on the invitees’ list. tgs.feedback@goldensparrow.com
Centre launches ‘Khoya-Paya’ to trace missing children P6
Munde’s dream rail project cleared on death anniversary eve On the eve of the union minister Gopinath Munde’s fi rst death anniversary, the state government gave a green signal to his dream project a railway line connecting his small home village in rural Maharashtra, officials said here on Wednesday. Munde, 65, a fi rebrand leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rural Development Minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, was killed in a road accident in New Delhi on June 3, 2014. On Tuesday, the Maharashtra cabinet granted approval to the long pending Ahmednagar-BeedParli Vaijnath railway line which will be a boon to the development of the backward, parched areas of Marathwada region of central Maharashtra. “The project is a tribute to the late Munde Saheb... The project which was dear to him will now become a reality... The central government has already given its consent. Today we have given the approval for our 50 per cent share of funds for the project,” Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on the occasion. The state and central governments will share 50 per cent of the Rs 2,826 crore total cost for constructing the 261 kms long railway line, one of the major such projects of the Indian railways in the mofussil regions. The project had been hanging fi re for long and was fi rst approved in 2009 by the state government on a similar cost-sharing basis. At that time, the total cost was estimated at Rs 1,010 crore, with the state-centre ratio coming to barely Rs 505 crore each, but it is now escalated to nearly three times due to various reasons. Marking Munde’s fi rst anniversary on Wednesday, his nephew and once political heir Dhananjay Munde, who is now with Nationalist Congress Party and Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Council,
Family members of BJP leader Gopinath Munde, who died in a road accident last year, immersed the ashes of the late soul at the Sangam in Allahabad on February 2, 2015
offered floral tributes to his uncle in Mumbai. The Mumbai BJP led by Ashish Shelar has announced a threeday programme to plant 51,000 saplings in Mumbai as a tribute to Munde’s memory. S i m i l a r commemorative events have been planned for the day in Mumbai, Beed and his native Parli Vaijnath village and other parts of the state. Munde’s daughter Pankaja Munde is a cabinet minister in Maharashtra, while his second daughter Pritam is a Lok Sabha member from Beed constituency. Besides them, Gopinath Munde - the brother-in-law of the late BJP strongman Pramod Mahajan, who died nine years ago - is survived by his widow Pradnya and a third daughter Yashashri. IANS
The total cost of the railway line project has escalated three times in six years
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
Dealing with ‘f ’ word P14
PUNE
“We have stopped all road digging work in the city, including CCTv project work. We had already given an extension to this project due to security concerns.” - Kunal Kumar, Pune Municipal Commissioner
Techies falling prey to stress
State Intelligence suffers brain drain
70 per cent of IT sector professionals face anxiety, hypertension due to high-stress work place atmosphere
Officers quitting force after clearing two-year training at Intelligence Academy
BY ARCHANA DAHIWAL @ArchanaDahiwal Thirty-two-year-old Saurav keeps checking his pulse rate at regular intervals, often wiping off sweat from his brow, in his workplace. He is scared of a heart attack when such palpitations occur. On few occasions his colleagues have had to rush him to hospital due to anxiety attacks and hypertension. However, the ECG, and pathological tests show his blood sugar levels to be normal. But Saurav is even more worried because he thinks his medical problem is not diagnosed. Tension is unavoidable for him at the office and there is no way out of that for Saurav. Arpit, 35, has been suffering from palpitations, anxiety and depression due to the constant stress at office since one and a half years. Arpit has a fouryear-old daughter, who his wife quit her job to take care of. They shifted to Pune four years ago. At times his anxiety attacks are so acute that he feels on the brink of collapse. He was hospitalised but even his medical reports are normal. Someone suggested psychiatric counselling but that made him even more depressed. His wife has acquired a driving licence just to be able to drive him to hospital in an emergency. Arpit wants to give up his high paying, high-stress job but it’s necessary for him and his family. And the thought of changing jobs and adjusting to a new work place is daunting. Saurav and Arpit are not unique, as a growing number of techies are suffering from similar stressrelated maladies, in the Pimple Saudagar, Baner, Aundh and Nigdi-Pradhikaran areas. They also resort to various therapies to alleviate stress. Cases of workrelated stress have mushroomed in the last two years in Pune city, owing to the extreme competitive nature of the jobs and the kind of lifestyle their working hours induce. City-based Zeil Mind Solution organises free awareness workshops and seminars to focus on how to deal with stress and manage it through mind therapy. Director and Chief Therapist at Zeil Mind Interventions, Dr Pushkar Khair, said, “Seventy per cent of our clients are from the IT fraternity. The basic reason for their condition is that they are not happy at their workplace and/or personal life, and have issues with their authority at work. Palpitations, hypertension and anxiety symptoms occur especially on Sunday evenings, or in the evenings on working days.” Explaining how mind therapy treatment works, Khair said, “Conflicts within the mind are very
BY GITESH SHELKE @gitesh_shelke
common. They are very much responsible in reducing our efficiency. They prevent us from reaching our goals in life. You don’t have to be a patient to visit a mind therapist. A mind therapist gives you time to open up. The therapist tries to map your unconscious mind. The unconscious mind has healing power. “The principle is that learning happens best at the unconscious level. Giving adequate time and building a good rapport are the foundations of a good therapy session. If not treated in time, it can lead to severe depression, forgetfulness, an overstressed mind, and also withdrawal from the situation,” he added. Speaking to a therapist helps in reprogramming of the unconscious processes that are disturbing. Neurolinguistic mind programming is an effective way of communication with the unconscious mind. It uses language patterns by which a person realises many new dimensions to his or her thought processes. A session can last for 60 to 90 minutes. The patient clearly defines the outcomes he wants from the session. It is called healing more than curing. The doctors use a combination of Modern Medicine (Allopathy), Indian Medicine (Ayurveda) and Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy in the treatment. This transformation involves empowering the person
Work related stress is common in the IT industry
with the knowledge of how their mind is programmed. It involves teaching them to use effective language patterns to get the outcome they desire. It involves re-programming the neurology to get a person out of the box of limiting beliefs. Stress de-coding workshops help people understand and read their own mind. It installs a mind GPS so that one doesn’t feel lost or at sea in stress situations.
Online counselling Video counselling via Skype or through a chat session could help to channelise one’s thoughts while sitting in the comforts of home. Online counselling serves well as a post workshop support for those who participated in the Zeil workshops. Even NRIs have started seeking guidance from the mind therapy experts.
It is a cause for concern for enforcement agencies, mainly State Intelligence Department (SID). Many newly appointed Assistant Information Officers (AIOs) and Senior Information Officers (SIOs) who are selected and undergo training at the premier Maharashtra Intelligence Academy (MIA), Pune, are quitting to join other private firms and other government departments. Insiders reveal that around 10 per cent of intelligence officers have quit after being trained extensively. Experts say it is a waste of government resources as MIA trains these cadets for two years before they join SID. The state home department conducts examination and selects candidates for training at MIA. SID deputes the passouts to different units across the state. These officers are not allowed to seek transfer to executive wings of the police force as it is a dedicated branch of intelligence on the lines of Intelligence Bureau (IB). The state government established MIA in 2010 after the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11. The officers are trained to collect intelligence and information about terror related activities in the state, including Naxalism. The extensive training programme focuses on terrorists, their modus operandi,
learning foreign languages, how terror moles are developed and operate, how Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are made, spying and others threats. Senior police officers, IB officers, retired IPS officers and other officials conduct lectures for the cadets. SID officers in Pune said that about 10 per cent intelligence officers have left their jobs after securing Class I grade posts with the state or central government or getting well paying private sector job. Private companies offer jobs to these officers in mainly fraud detection or intelligence gathering areas. MIA director Inspector General Sanjeevkumar Singhal said, “The cadets and officers keep looking for better opportunities. They join government jobs after clearing MPSC exams after leaving the job of an intelligence officer,” he said. Cadets are made to sign a bond stating that they will not leave their jobs, but an MIA officer said that many cadets pay their bond fees to the state government before joining other services. A SID Pune officer said that many AIOs quit the service as compared to SIOs. “AIOs are graduates and the extensive training that they get at MIA is appreciated by private companies,” the officer said. Singhal said that it is expected that these police officers should carry out the responsibility assigned to them after undergoing training. “But if they are joining other government jobs or private sector, there is nothing that we can do,” Singhal said. gitesh.shelke@goldensparrow.com
Khair said, “Stress is not always an unwanted guest. An optimal level of stress is needed at times to cross the finishing line. Stress only becomes a problem when we let this guest stay permanently within. It is then that it lowers the productivity and performance and brings the need of stress management. An individual who is at peace with his or her circumstances definitely performs better and contributes to self growth and the growth of the organisation.” archana.dahiwal@goldensparrow.com
They will get you arrested if you are cruel to animals The Animal Law Enforcement Rescue Team is dedicated to save animals from being mistreated BY RAJIL MENON @RajilMenon A group of animal lovers in the city has become the voice for mute, speechless animals who face cruelty meted out to them by mankind. Animal Law Enforcement Rescue Team (ALERT), founded by animal welfare officer (AWO) Meher Mathrani, other AWOs and volunteers, takes up cases related to animal injustice. According to ALERT, cruelty to animals is morally unpardonable and unacceptable, as animals are defenceless before the perpetrator. The members of the NGO receive calls regarding cruelty to animals and advise legal course of action after verifying facts. Mathrani said that sometimes corporators pressurise authorities to relocate strays from their areas. “Alert citizens inform us and we take up such cases. No authority or agency can act against any sterilised dog, unless the animal is found to be rabid. We are a guild of animal welfare officers and handle five to eight cases in a week. We are not animal rights activists but an extension of law protection force. Providing necessary proofs, photographs and other evidence to police is our main mission. We sometimes have to convince the cop that we are genuine people,” said Mathrani. ALERT work as volunteers and are part of statutory body Animal
Welfare Board of India (AWBI) formed under the Ministry Of Environment and Forests. The members of ALERT informed that senior police officers are supportive of the cause but they have to educate cops manning police stations and chowkeys about animal laws. “We have to spend about 8-12 hours at police stations to file a First Information Report (FIR) and 5-7 hours for a Non-Cognisable Report (NC). I think that 75 per cent of police force does not know about animal protection laws. Pune police commissioner KK Pathak has invited me to hold a programme on animal laws for senior officers,” she said. The legal body took up a case where pigeons were killed in Market Yard area. Shopkeepers belonging to the Bishnoi community used to feed these birds, but during their absence in holidays, some troublemakers used to hunt them by catapults and the dead birds were sold to quacks and roadside vendors who sell biryani. “The Market Yard police cooperated with us in handling this case,” she said. Mathrani also cleared a public misconception that those who feed animals and birds should be responsible for their welfare. “The Supreme Court through various judgements has ruled that no feeder is responsible for animals or birds. Residents of housing
congratulations
WINNERS OF PREVIOUS HOUSING SOCIETY CONTESTS BY GODREJ PROPERTIES, PUNE
Meher Mathrani, Founder of Alert
societies visit police stations to file a complaint against feeders but they are in fact doing a service to society and should not be victimised,” she said. THE LAW According to Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, if any animal is treated in any cruel way, in any of the ways provided under Section 11 (a) to (o) of The Prevention Of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, the offender (in the case of a first offence) will have to pay fine which shall extend to fifty rupees, and if it is the case of second offence or subsequent offence committed within three years of the previous offence, he will be fined not less
than twenty-five rupees but which may extend to one hundred rupees or with the imprisonment for a term which may extend to three months or with both. Also, in the case of second offence, the offender’s vehicle is confiscated, and he will never be allowed to keep an animal again. The police officer has every power provided to him by the law to arrest any offender who is found to be treating animals with cruelty. But even a private person can do so. Section 43 of CrPC confers the power on every private person to arrest or cause to be arrested any person who has committed a nonbailable and cognisable offence. rajil.menon@goldensparrow.com
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THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
PUNE
“Pune zilla parishad has been told to identity houses without toilets and cattlesheds that have no security walls. We will provide toilets to every house to restrict open defecation.” — Saurabh Rao, Collector
‘Lack of awareness, sensitivity lead to road accidents’
Global tender to construct Nalanda campus
P10
P12
A year on, MPs haven’t utilised their funds Our very own Anil Shirole hasn’t spent a penny on works in his constituency BY PRIYANKKA DESHPANDE @journopriyankka Even as the Narendra Modi government completed one year of wielding reins of power at the Centre, Pune BJP MP Anil Shirole has not spent a single rupee from the fi rst instalment of funds under the MP Local Area Developmental Scheme (MPLADS). Performance of other three MPs from the district is not up to the mark, with huge amounts of MPLADS lying unused. The MPs are entitled to a sum of Rs 25 crore each, for the five years of their tenure, which is meant to be used for developmental works in their constituencies. The first instalment of the amount was released in October 2014. Shirur MP Adhalrao Patil and Maval MP Shrinranga Barane received the second instalment of funds in February this year. However, all the four MPs in the district, including Baramati MP Supriya Sule, have showed a miserly attitude towards spending the MPLADS money in their respective constituencies. Interestingly, out of the
four MPs from Pune district, the three who have not used a major share of the funds, belong to the BJP and its alliance partner, Shiv Sena. Pune BJP MP Anil Shirole has not made suggested adequate developmental work and recommended work worth only Rs. 43 lakh from the Rs. 2.50 crore he received as first instalment. Though the other three MPs have suggested works, the actual amounts spent for the works are meagre. According to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of Government of India in its statewise details of fund release and expenditure of the 16th Lok Sabha (as of June 1, 2015), BJP MP from Pune Anil Shirole did not spend his fi rst instalment, while the Shiv Sena’s Shriranga Barane and seasoned politician and Sena MP Shivajirao Adhalrao Patil, have spent only Rs 1.37 crore and Rs 2.26 crore respectively, out of the Rs 5 crore that was sanctioned by the Government of India. Baramati MP Supriya Sule has spent only Rs 25 lakh in her constituency in the entire year.
Shrirang Barne, Maval
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irst time MP and former corporator of NCP from Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation, Barne shifted loyalties to the BJP to contest the Lok Sabha election. Awarded the Sansad Ratna award for outstanding performance in 16th Lok Sabha, Barne’s performance in AMOUNT AVAILABLE WITH INTEREST: 5.00 CR AMOUNT RECOMMENDED: 5.61 CR EXPENDITURE INCURRED: 1.37 CR PERCENTAGE OF UTILIZATION OVER RELEASE: 27.31
WHAT POLITICAL SCHOLARS SAY Political scholar Dr Prakash Pawar, who is an expert in Political economy and the electoral process in Maharashtra, said that MPs who are also a part of District Planning Committee, can always take a follow-up about their proposals. “MPs’ duties do not stop just by sending letters of proposals to District Planning Department. Moreover, MPs themselves are part of this committee, so they can always keep tabs whether the officers in the department are working efficiently when it comes to spending MPLADS funds,” said Dr Pawar. About the MPs’ claims, where they held DPC responsible for delaying works, Dr Pawar said that it was nothing but lame excuses to avoid taking responsibility. “Out of four, two MPs are not fi rst timers and have been in electoral politics for quite some time. They certainly know how to get the work done. However, what is important is the intension to work,” added Dr Pawar. priyankka.deshpande@goldensparrow.com
spending money in his constituency however, is not up to the mark. Out of the Rs 5 crore that has been released by the government, Barne has spent only Rs 1.37 crore. Even after getting two instalments of the funds, Rs 3.63 crore is still unspent. He suggested work of Rs 5.61 crore, while his percentage of utilisation of funds is 27.31. “I have already suggested works like renovation of crematoriums, the street lights in tribal bastis, and repairing and maintenance of roads in my constituency, and I frequently keep making proposals for developmental work. However, it is the duty of the DPC (District Planning Committee) to release the fund, and the department is delaying the whole process, which why I am not able to start the work in my constituency, “said Barne.
Anil Shirole, Pune
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irst time MP Anil Shirole received Rs 2.50 crore from the Government of India on October 27, 2014. It has been more than six months since he received the amount, but he has not spent a single rupee on developmental work in his constituency. Pune has lacking development, especially on the public transport front. However, it seems that the Pune MP is waiting for other people to suggest projects to use the money on. “I have not received any suggestions yet from the citizens. I do not want to exhaust the funds just for the sake of spending. The funds should be spent for the right purpose and there are four more years to
AMOUNT AVAILABLE WITH INTEREST: 2.50 CR AMOUNT RECOMMENDED: 0.43 CR EXPENDITURE INCURRED: 0.00 CR PERCENTAGE OF UTILIZATION OVER RELEASE: 0.00
Shivajirao Adhalrao Patil, Shirur
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ena senior leader and three-time MP from Shirur constituency, Adhalrao Patil has so far spent the amount of Rs 2.26 crore in his constituency, out of the Rs 5 crore that he received in two instalments from the government. He denied any unspent balance and said that the data provided by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of GSI is not correct. “When we send the letters for proposing the work, it is entitled for the District Planning Committee to make the estimate of the work within one month. However, the fact is the department take three or even more months just to make an estimate. Th is is why we cannot
THE MUCH HYPED MPs WHO HAVEN’T DONE ENOUGH Out of 48 MPs from the state, 25 MPs did not recommend work worth even a single rupee in the entire year since the government was formed. Their entire amount is lying unspent, even after receiving the instalment for this year. Out of these 25 MPs, 20 are from the BJP and Sena (BJP - 10, Sena - 10). The two MPs each from Congress and Nationalist Congress Party and one from Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana have not recommended any proposal under MPLADS fund.
Anandrao Adsul (Amravati)
Pritam Gopinath Munde (Beed)
Raosaheb Danve (Jalna)
Shiv Sena Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
BJP Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
BJP Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
Sanjaykaka Patil (Sangli)
Heena Vijaykumar Gavit (Nandurbar)
BJP Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
BJP Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
spend this amount, as it would not lapse,” said Shirole, while speaking with TGS. Shirole has recommended developmental work of only Rs 45 lakh, when Rs 2.50 crore is already available to him. His percentage of utilisation of funds for work is nil. Shirole added that he already sent a letter in December last year and proposed work of Rs 1.29 crore. “Benches on Pune and Shivajinagar railway stations, to install new drainage line in a slum near Ferguson College, amusement centre at Karve Road, multi-purpose hall in Kothrud and donation of computers in city’s few schools are some of the proposals I suggested through a letter to District Planning Committee,” said Shirole. Beautification of Mula-Mutha river is not on Shirole’s agenda for the next five years, which was on his election manifesto.
Anant Geete (Raigad)
Ashok Chavan (Nanded)
Shiv Sena Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
Congress Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
Udayanraje Bhonsale (Satara)
Raju Shetti (Hatkanangle)
Bhavana Gawali (Yavatmal-Washim)
NCP Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
Shiv Sena Amount available Rs 2.50 crore
able to spend the money,” said Adhalrao Patil. He recommended work of Rs 9.03 crore, which is the highest amount of money recommended by any MP in the state. He received adequate money for the year, that is Rs 5 crore, out of which he has spent only Rs 2.26 crore. The percentage of utilisation of funds is 45.17. Adhalrao Patil claimed to have sent proposals AMOUNT AVAILABLE WITH INTEREST: 5.00 CR AMOUNT RECOMMENDED: 9. 03 CR EXPENDITURE INCURRED: 2.26 CR PERCENTAGE OF UTILIZATION OVER RELEASE: 45.17
Supriya Sule, Baramati
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econd time MP, Sule recommended work of Rs 5.22 crore, but has actually spent only Rs 25 lakh out of the Rs 2.50 crore that she received as her fi rst instalment. Her unspent balance after the year since the government was formed is Rs 2.25 crore, while the percentage of utilisation over release is only 9.92. “Out of the Rs 5.22 crore recommended works, the works to the tune of Rs 2.40 crore are already in a process of tendering. The approval of district administration is necessary for spending the money for these developmental works. Besides the incurred amount Rs 25 lakh, the other amount is yet to be approved by the district administration,” said Baramati MP Supriya Sule.
AMOUNT AVAILABLE WITH INTEREST: 2.50 CR AMOUNT RECOMMENDED: 5.22 CR EXPENDITURE INCURRED: 0.25 CR PERCENTAGE OF UTILIZATION OVER RELEASE: 9.92
State RTI online portal fails to click Citing technical snags activists prefer manual exercise BY PRIYANKKA DESHPANDE @journopriyankka Maharashtra government’s Right to Information (RTI) portal launched in December 2014 faces many technical glitches. The facility that was widely accepted by RTI activists across the state as they did not now had to visit Mantralaya to submit application hit snags within six months. Applicants are now finding it extremely difficult to fi le details online and prefer to do the exercise manually. City-based RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar has written to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis sharing
his grievances about the online system. “RTI applications do not reach the authority concerned but fee is accepted by the system,” said Kumbhar. He said that the online system promptly accepts application fee but delays receiving additional fees required for procuring extra documents. The RTI activist recently sought information from State’s Anti-Corruption Cell through online system. “I found that the system does not have any mechanism to accept additional fee needed for extra documents. The meagre amount of additional fees has to be either sent through money order or hand deliver to
Mantralaya,” Kumbhar said. RTI activist Anoop Awasthi said that fees for appeals under RTI is not accepted by the online system. He had used the online system to seek information on recruitments in Public Works Department and declaration of property by police. “In both the cases, I received the information after 30 days whereas by applying manually I used to get it within 15 days,” Awasthi said. He said that when he did not get the information within 30 days, he had to make appeal and pay fees through money order. “What is the use of this online system if we have to pay fees manually?” Awasti said.
RTI activist Tanmay Kanitkar used the online system only to get information after three months. “I was astonished to hear from the Mantralaya officer that they could provide information as fee was not received,” said Kanitar who had sought information about the job profile and role of state guardian ministers of all districts. “I would now think twice before filing an online RTI application,” Kanitkar said. Noted RTI activist Anil Galgali from Mumbai said, “I find the online exercise cumbersome and decided not to use it. I file over a dozen RTIs every week and an effective portal
Vijay Kumbhar
would have suited my purpose. I personally visit personally to submit applications. For people not staying in the capital, manually visiting offices is tiresome. The government should allow people to submit applications to local district offices and arrangements should be made to forward it to state departments
in Mantralaya. I think that the state government is not committed to giving out information.” Denying activists’ concern that online RTI system was not working effectively, Additional State Informatics Officer of National Informatics Center Dr A Lalita Dixit said that the portal was unable to provide details of
additional fee as departments had failed to feed the information. “The system works on the details that are provided by the department concerned. There is a mechanism of accepting additional fees but it has not been updated yet,” she said. priyankka.deshpande @goldensparrow.com
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
“RTA should note that the last revision was done on October 15, 2013. Fares have not been revised since then, but prices of all other components have gone up. We feel that a revision is long pending.” —Nitin Pawar, convenor, Rickshaw Panchayat
Resolving India’s development dilemma
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Concern mounts as India sees 12 per cent deficit monsoon
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Good Samaritans step into traffic cops’ shoes BY RAJIL MENON @RajilMenon Traffic cops do not miss an opportunity to blame techies for causing jams at Hinjewadi. They are accused of driving on the wrong side, being impatient and even for being unruly. But at Viman Nagar it’s the opposite. Techies are seen putting in several hours every day to regulate traffic at the busy Viman Nagar and Airport Road junctions. Traffic snarls are a common feature there and cops are nowhere to be seen. Tired of being mute spectators, a group of techies have taken it upon themselves to clear peak hour chaos. “We take the route to get home from work. In the evenings we come across traffic snarls. Fights between motorists are common. It’s a pity that traffic cops are nowhere in sight. Instead of just moving on, we decided to do something about it,” said Vishal Trivedi, a 36-yearold employee of an IT company based out of Viman Nagar. He is joined by his colleague, Ravi Kumar T, 30, and Ranjit Sawale, 40. While Vishal and Ravi work with PCB Apps LLC, Ravi works with IBM. Vishal hails from Indore and has been living in Pune for the past few months. Similarly, Ravi moved to Pune from Andhra Pradesh only three months ago. Ranjit is a local. “It used to be absolutely chaotic in the evenings. Motorists would honk incessantly. Everybody was in a hurry to clear the four-way junction. In the confusion that ensued, there were times when vehicles wouldn’t move an inch for several minutes in any of the directions,” said Ravi, who walks back
to his company guest house not too far from his workplace. Realising that situation would only get worse and banking on traffic cops to sort out the mess was a bad idea, the techies have now taken on the mantle. On Wednesday evening, The Golden Sparrow team spotted the three techies regulating traffic for over two hours at the junction. Seeing them, Sunil Tikone, an auto rickshaw driver and Raju Mhaske, a taxi driver, also joined in. “Traffic jams here are a regular feature. I wish there was a better way to sort out this situation. I saw the three of them (techies) doing their bit and decided to join in,” said Sunil, who carries a whistle with him. The five of them put together took a road each, while one of them stood at the centre. They would let vehicles on every road pass in turns. This ensured that there was no chaos at the junction. Interestingly, the day happened to be Ranjit’s 40th birthday. “I would get home, cut a cake and celebrate my birthday with my family. But this is more important than my party. I just couldn’t bear the thought of thousands of motorists wasting their precious hours,” said Ranjit. The five of them called off their mission for the day only at 9 pm when traffic had thinned. “Now this has become a habit. Each time we see a snarl here, we just take over. We are just doing our bit for society,” concluded Ravi. Their popularity is growing by the day. Motorists who disobey the traffic volunteers are promptly pulled up by local hoodlums, who prefer to sit on the side and watch. rajil.menon@goldensparrow.com
Aniruddha Rajandekar
Bottlenecks at Viman Nagar and Airport Road junctions prompt three IT professionals to regulate traffic for hours every day
Ranjit Sawale (left), Vishal Trivedi (right) and Ravi Kumar (below), managing traffic at busy Viman Nagar and Airport junctions after putting in a hard day’s work. Autorickshaw drivers and locals are assisting them now
Want an X-ray done? You are in queue here
Sassoon Hospital patients endure hours of ordeal owing to non-functioning X-ray machines
People waiting before X-ray room in Sassoon General Hospital is a common sight
BY PRIYANKKA DESHPANDE @journopriyankka Forty-two-year-old Balu Kamble came to Pune with the hope that his ailing mother would get better medical treatment here. A resident of Bhoyare Pathar, a small village in Ahmednagar district, Kamble was told by the doctors back in his village that his mother would get free treatment for her injured shoulder at the state-run Sassoon Hospital. A labourer by profession, Kamble brought his 65-year-old mother to Sassoon Hospital, where she was advised an X-ray of her shoulder. However, they had to wait for four hours in a queue before the X-ray could be done. The reason? Three out
of the five X-ray machines at Sassoon Hospital have not been working for the last 20 days, owing to some technical glitch or another. TGS Team visited the X-ray department of Sassoon Hospital a couple of times this week to survey the situation. The department gets around 130 patients on an average every day. There was a mad rush for registration of X-ray and ultrasound sonography. Patients admitted to the hospital are brought by stretcher to the department as soon as the registration is done. These patients had to wait for hours for their X-ray or sonography, and most of them were too ill or in pain to be able to speak with us. Sachin Chavan from Keshavnagar area in Pune, had come to Sassoon
Hospital for his brother’s X-ray of the knee. “My brother injured himself while playing, and the doctor had suggested an X-ray to assess the injury. I cannot afford private hospital fees, so I came to Sassoon,” said Chavan. However, to his dismay, the X-ray department was a scene of utter chaos. “There is no one to look after patients here. The rush for X-ray keeps increasing and there are no attendants to control the crowd. I really do not know when my brother’s turn will come,” said Chavan, who had been waiting with his injured brother for three hours. TGS Team noticed the order from the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) on the door of one of the X-ray rooms, cautioning over the sealing of X-ray equipment, if the hospital authority was operating X-ray equipment without obtaining a licence from AERB. In the last month, AERB in its surprise inspections of medical diagnostic X-Ray centres at Jaipur, Raipur, Pune, Nagpur and Chennai, found that some of the medical diagnostic X-ray facilities were violating the provisions and requirements of the Atomic Energy (Radiation protection) rule 2004. According to AERB, these medical centres are operating X-ray equipment without obtaining licence/registration from them (AERB). AERB has sealed nearly 24 medical diagnostic X-ray centres, warning medical diagnostic X-ray facilities personnel to comply with the requirement within 30 days. Sassoon Hospital is one of the centres issued a warning, failing which X-ray equipment at Sassoon will be sealed indefinitely. “This is not the first time that these machines are not functioning properly,” said a source from Sassoon on the condition of anonymity. When TSG contacted Sassoon Medical Superintendent Dr DG Kulkarni, he first denied the dysfunction of X-ray machines. Later he said he would confirm whether they were functioning or not. priyankka.deshpande@goldensparrow.com
TECH
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
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Nature’s super waste management crews
The first two video games copyrighted in the US were Asteroids and Lunar Lander in 1980. http://www.wtfdiary.com/
Flyover construction causing chaos at CoEP
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Future uncertain, but crucial
Google’s $50 million Android is essential to the search giant’s growth but faces threats from high and low-end competition
In 2005, Google bought a tiny mobile software company named Android, and almost nobody in the technology industry saw its potential — not even Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and then-chief executive. “One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn’t even notice,” Schmidt told reporters in 2009, referring to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders. A company spokesman later assured me that Schmidt was joking; Android reportedly cost at least $50 million, a big enough sum for the chief to get involved. But the joke suggests how little regard even Google’s executives held for Android a decade ago. Android, which is software that runs smartphones, tablets and a variety of other machines, was a side bet, and few considered it consequential to the search company’s fortunes. Things have changed. In an era ruled by portable computers, Android has become essential to Google’s future. Like an unstoppable friendly bacteria advancing upon a powerless host planet, Android, in the past five years, has colonised much of the known world. Android is now not just the globe’s most popular smartphone operating system but the most popular operating system of any kind. More than 1 billion Android devices were sold in 2014, according to the research firm Gartner. That’s about five times the number of Apple iOS devices sold, and about three times the number of Windows machines sold. In other words: About 1 of every 2 computers sold today is running Android. Google’s once underappreciated side bet has become Earth’s dominant computing platform. Yet all is not well on planet Android. Cracks are emerging in Google’s hold over the operating system. Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android. Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 per cent in 2014, according to independent analyst Chetan Sharma. Over the holidays last year, according to research firm Strategy
Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 per cent of the profits in the smartphone business. The stark numbers prompted a troubling question for Android and for Google: How will the search company - or anyone else, for that matter - ever make much money from Android? Google is sanguine about Android’s prospects and said the company’s original vision for Android was never solely about huge profits. “The bet that Larry, Sergey and Eric made at the time was that smartphones are going to be a thing, there’s
advertisers). Because Google pays billions to Apple to make its search engine the default search provider for iOS devices, the company collects much more from ads placed on Apple devices than from ads on Android devices. A recent analysis by Goldman Sachs estimated that Google collected about $11.8 billion on mobile search ads in 2014, with about 75 per cent coming from ads on iPhones and iPads. A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play.
Android is the most popular operating system in the world by far, but it is under siege by low-end upstarts and fares poorly versus Apple’s iOS in ad revenue
going to be Internet on it, so let’s make sure there’s a great smartphone platform out there that people can use to, among other things, access Google services,” said Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s vice president for engineering for Android. Google points out its bet has benefited users. The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices. So we should all be thankful for Google’s largess - but, at the same time, given the increasing threats to Google’s advertising business, we might also wonder how long that largess can continue. Google faces several major Androidrelated headaches. First, while Google makes most of its revenue from advertising, Android has so far been an ad dud compared with Apple’s iOS, whose users tend to have more money and spend more time on their phones (and are, thus, more valuable to
And now, an app for local retailers BY ANIRBAN GHOSHAL
CHENNAI: After the onslaught by e-commerce sites, here comes an app which helps you to buy offl ine from your neighbourhood retailer. Started for residents here, VBuy is app-based product pricing search engine for local retailers and consumers. Developed by Chennai-based VS Online Services, the app started its journey on the web before arriving at the Android platform two weeks back. “The app provides hyperlocal (within 25-km radius) retailer price search engine solution for the consumer to compare prices and availability of electronic, home and kitchen products,” says Sivakumar Anirudhan, founder and CEO of VBuy. The company expects to expand to other cities in a few months. Anirudhan said: “Amidst the growing tussle between retailers and e-tailers, local retailers also need online presence and this is where we step in and redefine the shopping experience. Our model is research online and buy offline.” According to Anirudhan, VBuy’s marketing team identifies and verifies retailers providing them with a login to keep their prices updated. “Going by the response we have received, we will venture out to other cities in six months and start adding other categories,” Anirudhan said. Although Vbuy has only 10 employees now, it is also planning to start its logistics service to compete with rivals like shopCity. Soon, the app will also nestle a feature that reminds the user to shop for something he had searched for when he is near the local retailer or outlet. anirban.g@ians.in
For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly. Google is investing heavily to make sure that continues. Purnima Kochikar, business development director for Google Play, told me her team supporting Android app makers grew “by 15 times” in the past 2 1/2 years. She added that even if hot Silicon Valley start-ups still create apps for iOS first, app makers in other parts of the world see Android as a surer path to the masses. But how long Google can expect Play to keep paying remains an open question, thanks to the second Android-related headache. Google’s strategy of giving
Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China. One software startup, Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors — and has signed a “strategic partnership” with Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft — to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android. “We share services revenue with the phone makers — and today they get very little of that from Google,” said Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s chief executive. “There are very few companies in the world today that really like Google. Nobody wants Google to run the table with this game. So it’s a good time to be a neutral third party. We’re Switzerland, and we want to share that revenue with our ecosystem partners in a meaningful way.” Google, for its part, said there was ample room in the Android world for a variety of services to thrive. “It’s up to any party in these ecosystems to figure out how they want to make money,” Lockheimer said. The final threat for Google’s Android may be the most pernicious: What if a significant number of the people who adopted Android as their first smartphone move on to something else as they become power users? In Apple’s last two earnings calls, Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive, reported “a higher rate of switchers than we’ve experienced in previous iPhone cycles.” Apple has not specified the rate of switching, but a survey by Cowen & Co found that 16 per cent of people who bought the latest iPhones previously owned Android devices; in China, that rate was 29 per cent. For Google, this may not be terrible news in the short run. If Google already makes more from ads on iOS than Android, growth in iOS might actually be good for Google’s bottom line. Still, in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google - losing the high end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Xiaomi and Cyanogen. Android has always been a tricky strategy; now, after finding huge success, it seems only to be getting even trickier. © 2015 New York Times News Service
Centre launches ‘Khoya-Paya’ to trace missing children Says putting up details on portal is not a replacement for filing FIR with police NEW DELHI: The government has launched an exclusive web portal dedicated to tracking down missing children. The website called ‘Khoya-Paya’ aims to help trace missing children by allowing citizens to post information about a child who is not to be found. Simu lta neously, anybody who has seen a child alone or with suspicious people can post information or photographs of the child on the portal. Information about missing and sighted children can be uploaded at khoyapaya.gov.in. The portal is also available as a mobile application. “Th is website would be different from the website called ‘track child’ which is at present being maintained by the home ministry,” Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said at the launch of the web portal here. “The plan originated from the prime minister,” she said. Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar
Make travel easy and memorable LiveATC
Android: Rs 164 Stuck in the airport terminal with endless delays? Have you always wondered what pilots talk to air traffic controllers about? Now you can stop wondering and tune in live! LiveATC for Android provides a quick and easy way to listen in on live conversations between pilots and air traffic controllers near many airports around the world. LiveATC for Android lets you browse by state or by country to find an airport and listen in to live air traffic conversations at or near a given airport. You can also use the ‘Nearby’ feature to find an airport near you. You can then add any channel to your Favorites list for quick and easy access.
Indian Train Status
IOS/Android: Free This app gives quick and easy access to live running train status, train numbers, station codes, PNR status and a unique berth and seat calculator for Indian Railways. You can also add home screen widgets for ultra-quick, one-touch access to train, station and time tables. It also features the handy berth and seat calculator for the times when you want to quickly know whether it’s a lower berth or an aisle seat. The reservation date calculator helps to find the reservation opening date for a given date of travel, and also set reminders for it.
HERE
Android: Free Here’s to finding your way no matter where you are. Here’s to having the confidence to live your life, because you always know exactly where you’re going. With HERE, you can plan your journey ahead of time and save a map of your destination right on your phone. With maps for more than a 100 countries around the world, you’ll never be lost — even when offline. See exactly where you are and find the best way around with a route planner that shows you driving, public transport and walking options at a glance.When you’re ready to head out, turn-by-turn, voice-guided driving and walk navigation takes you right to your destination you can use their public transport maps and schedules to get around by train or bus. With HERE, your maps are always loaded and ready to use, and you never need to rely on an internet connection. Find restaurants and shops in your area and browse ratings and reviews from TripAdvisor, LonelyPlanet and more to plan your night out. You can take a peek inside shopping centres and airports with 3D indoor maps that show you the locations of stores, elevators and other facilities.
PackPoint Premium packing list
IANS
BY FARHAD MANJOO
APP WORLD
Android: Rs 126 PackPoint is a travel packing list organiser and packing planner for serious travel pros. PackPoint will help you organide what you need to pack in your luggage and suitcase based on length of travel, weather at your destination, and any activities planned during your trip. Once your packing list is built and organised, PackPoint will save it for you, and then you can choose to share it with your friends and family in case they need help packing too. Punch in the city you’re going to travel to, the departure date, and the number of nights you’ll be staying there.
Goibibo - Hotel Flight Booking Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad (left) and Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi at a press conference organised to launch ‘Khoya-Paya’ in New Delhi
Prasad said the portal was a step towards the government’s vision of bridging the digital divide. “Th is website is likely to benefit the poor and underprivileged sections more,” he said. Gandhi said the website was an enabling platform, where citizens can report missing children, as well as sightings of
their whereabouts without wasting much time. Found children can also be reported on the portal. Citizens can also provide information about abandoned, lost children and those sighted with suspicious people. Th rough this portal, they are also advised to inform the nearest police station. Officials of the women
and child development ministry, however, clarified that putting up information on the portal was not a replacement for fi ling an FIR with police. As per information provided by the National Crime Records Bureau, the number of children who go missing every year is about 70,000. IANS
Android: Free With the Goibibo book hotels, flights and buses now becomes an easy task! You are sure to get the best deal on accommodation and intercity travel at anytime. Need a hotel booking, a flight schedule, a bus booking, they bring you great options. Find the best hotels, over 20,000 bus routes and great deals on flight bookings. You can also find and book a room securely with over 14,000 hotels throughout the country. For cheap hotel rooms or 5 star luxury suites you can search by city or hotel name or find properties close to landmark, location and locality. Check out their nifty sorting filters such as price point, city localities and important amenities and facilities.
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
“Sterlite is working closely with the government to drive smart sustainable city initiatives and supports Digital India programme. We are collaborating with Ericsson to implement the programme.” — Anand Agarwal, CEO, Sterlite Technologies
“Fashion and lifestyle industry in India is growing. Brands have realised that consumer experiences are becoming the focal point of planning because experiences are bigger than products alone” — Chandan Chowdhury, MD, Dassault Systemes
Online toy library to fulfil children’s playtime wishes
Grocery shopping is far easier online City has lapped up the facility that saves time
Toyshare provides a wide range of educational and fun toys to kids on rent BY ZAINAB KANTAWALA @kantawalazainab At a time when parents bear the burden of the steep and rising costs of branded toys and the constant pressure to upgrade children’s expensive shelves of toys, an online portal that allows to rent toys is welcome news. Th ree mommies have joined hands to start Toyshare, the city’s fi rst online toy library. The site provides toys, games, puzzles, books and CD/DVDs on rent. To bridge the demand-supply gap and enrich children’s creativity, concentration and coordination; mompreneurs Parvati Mohan (36), Namita Joshi (40) and Sushma Bhat (39) came up with the plan for an online toy rental service that allows members to hire, use and return a wide range of branded toys. The library provides a variety of toys on rent for the age group of newborn to twelve years and delivers
TGS NEWS SERVICE @TGSWeekly
Apart from having around 180 kids as members, Toyshare also rent toys for parties. They have 1,000 items online with free home delivery to almost all areas in Pune (From left) Parvati Mohan, Sushma Bhat and Namita Joshi left jobs after becoming mothers and started online toy portal Toyshare
them at the doorstep of its member. The growing days of their kids generated the need to start such an
online facility among these moms, who are also best friends. “We left our IT jobs after having kids but wanted to do something innovative together, and Toyshare happened,” said Sushma. On the high cost of branded toys, she said, “How many can afford to buy these toys and their lifespan is also limited as kids outgrow them. The concept of branded toy rental service suits all.” The library’s collection includes myriad colourful toys, building blocks, puzzles, board games, dolls and soft toys and video games. Children can pick up their favourite toys after becoming members. They get a wide range of toys to play with unlike the buy option that is limited. “As parents we always wanted the best toys for our kids. But their
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interest span is short and the costly toys end up as piles in cupboards. Kids can play with different toys every week after joining our online library,” she said. Apart from having around 180 kids as members, Toyshare also rent toys for parties. They have 1,000 items online with free home delivery to almost all areas in Pune. “We invested around Rs 5 lakh and had to explore the city to fi nd an ideal place to start business and get dealers. Once the website was created, there was no looking back. We knew this idea would work. The response we received encouraged us and now kids look forward to receiving new toys every week”. zainab.kantawala@goldensparrow.com GET IN TOUCH 96657 72109 or mail toysharelib@gmail.com
The online grocery shopping experience in Pune has all the essentials to suit different palates. A fast-moving urban lifestyle has led consumers to shift to online shopping. For people who have no time to visit retail shops or malls, online shopping is the best bet. For those who spend nothing less than 2-3 hours to buy their monthly groceries, the online facility that takes just 10 minutes. is a big boon And the credit goes to all the sites that cater to grocery shopping. AaramShop, BigBasket, MyGrahak, ZopNow, Kiranawalla, Punexpress, LocalBanya and RationHut are some of the stores retailing groceries online . They offer a complete range of essentials, across categories such as grocery, baby care, household supplies, personal care and healthcare amongst others. These online grocers cover the entire Pune area. Orders can be placed on their websites, or over the phone, and the payment options include Cash on Delivery (CoD). Manpreet Singh, 42, a techie who resides at Amit Sapphire Park in Balewadi with his wife and two children, has switched to online grocery shopping. “They bring the items in neatly packed containers, unpack it at the kitchen and keep it at the desired places. We just have to guide them. All the products, including non-vegetarian items, are fresh,” he said. Another major attraction is timely delivery. Some have morning and evening shifts to hand over the items within 24 hours, others claim to deliver
QUICK FACTS • The retail market in India is expected to hit $725 bn (about Rs 43 lakh crore) by 2017. • India is the 6th largest grocery market in the world • Only 5-8% of grocery stores are organised corporations. • The online grocery market is growing at 25-30% annually in metropolitan areas and large cities
it within five hours of placing the order. THE GROCERS’ TAKE For Punexpress founder Roshan Desarda gaining the confidence and trust of customers tops the agenda. Ashish C and Shruti S’s rationhut offers more than 4,000 products across categories such as grocery, home care, personal care, amongst several others. rationhut accepts orders only online. “Pune has been the fastest growing market so far for us,” said Vipul Parekh, co-founder BigBasket.com. THE REASON For consumers, grocery shopping had become increasingly tiring. Visiting a store, or walking around in malls looking for items and queuing up to pay bill seems an ordeal. Online grocery store owners say the mindset is changing and customers are shopping online. The comfort level is ensuring customer loyalty and they are sending feedback on how to imp[rove services. The convenience is bringing in more and more people shoppiong online for groceries. tgs.feedback@goldensparrow.com
Eyes on the road, head in the cloud Companies are devising gadgets to ensure safety of people who multitask while driving STUART GOLDENBERG/THE NEW YORK TIMES
The devices project driving information and data streamed from a smartphone into a driver’s field of view
BY MATT RICHTEL In a widely watched YouTube video, a man is driving around Los Angeles when his phone rings. On a small screen mounted on the dashboard, an image of the caller, the man’s mother, appears. But there’s an optical twist: The image actually looks to the driver as if it’s floating above the roadway. The man answers the call with a hand gesture. “Hi,” his mother says over the car speakers. “I just wanted to say I love you.” “I love you,” the man responds, and then, before signing off, “I’m making a video right now.” That video - the one posted on YouTube - was a promotion commissioned by Navdy, one of a handful of start-up companies bringing a futuristic spin to the debate over distracted driving and how to curb it. The devices project driving information and data streamed from a smartphone into a driver’s field of view. There are several versions of this nascent technology, but they generally work by using a projection device that
wirelessly picks up information from the phone and uses sophisticated optics to allow the information - maps, speed, incoming texts, caller identification and even social media notifications to hover above the dashboard. Hand gestures or voice commands allow drivers to answer a call or hang up. Navdy’s device isn’t shipping until later this year, and it’s not clear if it will work as seamlessly as presented in the video when used in less perfect reallife conditions. But, broadly speaking, the Navdy device falls into a booming category of in-car gadgetry that might be fairly categorised as “you can have your cake and eat it too.” Drive, get texts, talk on the phone, even interact on social media, and do it all without compromising safety, according to various makers of the socalled head-up displays, repeating a position taken by a growing number of automakers who sell monitors set into the dashboard or mounted on it. Some carmakers also display basic driving information, like speed and turn-byturn directions, within a specialised windshield so a driver can remain looking ahead and not down at the instrument panel.
Google, with Android Auto, and Apple, with CarPlay, have also leapt into the evolving business. Each allows phones to be plugged into a car’s USB port so that information streams to a monitor set into the dashboard. IHS Automotive, a company that analyzes car industry trends, expects many automakers to integrate these systems. IHS consumer surveys indicate drivers want systems that provide maps, music, news and social connection. These emerging display devices have become part of a debate over whether technology can provide safer ways for people to multitask while driving. Safety advocates argue that technologies that try to minimize the dangers of multitasking are based on the false premise that drivers can safely attend to the road while juggling social communication - and are, in turn, encouraging a risky behavior. The argument on the other side boils down to a simple notion: Drivers are going to do it anyway, so why not minimise the riskiest kinds of multitasking, like looking down at the phone or handling it? The US government has issued nonbinding guidelines that govern car “infotainment systems,” and one of its main messages is that performing certain nondriving tasks interferes inherently with a driver’s safety. Experts in the science of attention say that some of the new head-up displays may be raising risks that are so plain that you don’t need to be a driver’s mother to appreciate them. “It’s a horrible idea,” said Paul Atchley, a psychologist at the University of Kansas. Attending to the road is much more complex than having your head turned toward it, he said. “The technology is driven by a false assumption that seeing requires nothing more than having the eyes fi xed on the right spot.” The US Department of Transportation has sponsored research at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute into whether the safety benefit of having head-up displays in cars outweighs the risk of distraction; that study will conclude in 2016. © 2015 New York Times News Service
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Four cylinders, four doors, all-wheel drive. The CLA 45 AMG and Evo X misbehaving around the hills.
Wet conditions and the Jaguar V8 R Coupe addup to an impossibly fun afternoon spent mostly sideways.
We went to the top of the world in an insane rally Thar and a Suzuki V-Strom 1000. We came back too.
Look our for the alive logo in the magazine to watch the action unfold
Going back to when Toyota’s were cool, we drive a custom Supra with a big turbo and come away scared, and maybe a bit wistful.
w w w. a l iv e a r. c o m
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
PUNE
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
PUNE
Ahmednagar Road
Pics By Aniruddha Rajandekar
Taljai Hill
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aljai Hill in Sahkarnagar is one of spots where PMC claims to have planted a lot of saplings over the years to make good for rampant felling in the city. The Golden Sparrow team found that several freshly planted trees had been damaged. Local tree lovers revealed that residents of neighbouring slums systematically damage the trees for firewood. “Slum dwellers come in the afternoons and break the branches. The branches are left on the spot to dry. Over a period of time, they uproot the entire tree,” said a local tree lover.
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he road falling within the jurisdiction of PMC was widened and several trees chopped down to make way for infrastructure development. The work on some of the stretches is still underway. PMC officials claim that new saplings have been planted to replace the ones that had to be felled. The Golden Sparrow team took a trip along the road only to find that the replantation is nothing but a sham. Starting from Gunjan theatre, we spotted a species of palm trees planted along the median. These, the civic officials claim were planted four years ago, to replace the banyan trees that used to line the road. Most of the trees have sparse foliage and some are drying up. Moreover, the Bombay High Court order clearly states that only saplings of indigenous variety have to be planted. PMC officials are quick to add that they were planted much before the September 2013 HC order. As we went further down the road, the garden department officials accompanying us showed us peepal saplings planted a year ago along the sides. The officials did not know as to how many of them had been planted. Moreover, several saplings had dried up or had been damaged. Construction material had been dumped around the saplings not allowing them to grow. Most importantly, in complete violation of the Bombay High Court order, none of the saplings had girth of 10 cm or were above six feet in height.
Madanlal Dhingra Stadium Sangamwadi Road
Over a decade 17,015 trees chopped in Pune by Archana Dahiwal and Rajil Menon @ArchanaDahiwal @RajilMenon
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his stretch too has been widened recently to support the increasing population. Once again, PMC has no idea how many trees were chopped for the project. Civic officials told us that several new trees have been planted to replace the ones that were felled. The Golden Sparrow team took a trip along the road to find that only a few saplings had survived. Most pits meant for fresh plantations were empty. Throughout the Sangamwadi Road just about 50 per cent trees had survived. Further down, on Deccan College and Golf Course extensions, the situation was equally grim.
Roads and streets lined with banyan, peepal and gulmohars are fast vanishing from Pune. The city is losing its green cover, something that every Puneite was proud of. This is all thanks to the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), which has over the years granted permissions to chop down trees to make way for development. As per the law, for every tree chopped, three are to be replanted. The civic body in Pune, however, has failed miserably in abiding by the law. The numbers speak for themselves. In response to the RTI query filed by Omkar Vahikar, an environmental activist, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) stated that from February 2005 to 2015, 17,015 were chopped down. In place of the felled ones, 13,733 were replanted. This is far from the 1:3 ratio specified in the Maharashtra (Urban Areas) Protection and Preservation of Trees Rules, 2009.
Interestingly, the numbers given by PMC under RTI are also fudged. As we went around the city inspecting spots where PMC claimed to have planted as many trees, we were greeted by empty tree guards and pits. Several trees were missing. They had either not survived after plantation or had been chopped. Clearly, the civic body doesn’t really care about ensuring that the newly planted ones survive. Moreover, the fresh plantations are also in clear violation of the Bombay High Court order. Way back in 2009, Omkar’s father Deepak Vahikar had filed a Public Interest Litigation to highlight PMC’s apathetic role when it came to green cover. In September 2013, a division bench of Justice Dr D Y Chandrachud and Justice M S Sonak pulled up the civic body and even laid down guidelines for replantation. As per court orders, the civic body is supposed to plant grown saplings well above six feet and girth of the trees should be more than 10 cm. On ground, we spotted saplings that were barely two-three feet high and their girth was just about four cm. The court also directed that the agency replanting the trees should ensure
that they survive. From what we saw, PMC couldn’t care less. The situation is not very different in neighbouring Pimpri-Chinchwad. The name Pimpri-Chinchwad for the twin township has its origins in the three most common and much-loved tree species of Maharashtra peepal (pimpal), tamarind (chinch) and banyan (wad). Once seen at every nook and corner and along every road, these trees are fast vanishing. There is an overwhelming lack of awareness over green cover and its immense contribution to human health and well-being among the general public and the Pimpri-Chinchwad civic authority, which is largely responsible for the denudation. Along with local bodies, even the citizens are also responsible for the unrestrained, large-scale tree cutting. Ancient trees dating back hundreds of years are axed in a jiffy for trivial reasons. The municipal corporation allows tree cutting for developmental purposes, while citizens resort to tree cutting for reasons such as trees posing a threat to their houses or obstruction. The Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation’s (PCMC) solution to fast
vanishing trees is to plant more. However, that happens once a year on June 5, World Environment Day. This year PCMC proposes to plant 50,000 trees. On paper, the civic body Fact claims theyFile: have planted 2,20,000 trees in the last three years. PCMC garden superintendent Suresh Salunkhe claims that 90 per cent of the trees have survived. He quickly rattles off the numbers for the last three years - 50,000 trees in 2011-12, 70,000 in 2012-13, and one lakh trees in 2013-14. One wonders where these trees are as you barely spot them in PCMC limits. Likewise, in Nigdi-Pradhikaran, an upmarket area that was known for its green environs, the green cover is vanishing fast. Pimpri Chinchwad New Town Development Authority (PCNTDA) has granted permissions for felling of several trees to make way for constructions and infrastructure projects. Here too, several trees are claimed to have been replanted. But neither PCMC, nor PCNTDA have records of the number of trees that have been cut and how many new trees have been planted. archana.dahiwal@goldensparrow.com rajil.menon@goldensparrow.com
‘Corruption’ in garden departments
Vishrantwadi Road
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his was another stretch where the civic officials claimed saplings had been planted a few years ago to replace the trees felled to make way for widening. Here too, civic officials had no count of trees that had been felled and the new ones planted. As we went along the road, we found several empty pits meant to house trees. Garden department officials in PMC remarked that 20 per cent casualty in fresh plantations is common. They quickly added that fresh saplings are immediately planted to replace the ones that do not survive. However, locals tell us that the after the first round of plantation, PMC officials never came back to check or even replace the ones that did not make it.
Omkar Vahikar “The courts have said in their judgments that the Tree Committee is illegal and so are the permissions that have been granted by the Pune Municipal Corporation’s Tree authority. The Commissioner should take legal action against the Tree Committee. The authority should not be allowed to grant any further permissions to cut trees. Members of the committee are politicians who are neither experts, nor are they qualified to take such decisions,” said tree activist Omkar Vahikar. Vilas Kute
Fifty-six-year-old Kute has been targeting the corruption in the garden department for over two and half decades. His bitter experiences with the PCMC garden contractors led him to turn into a tree activist. He has stridently protested every instance of illegal tree cutting in Pimpri-Chinchwad. He also moved courts against the corruption. Kute has a stack of papers to prove that the ‘corrupt’ garden department is responsible for the loss of green cover in PCMC areas. He explains that the civic body gave him a contract to plant one lakh trees in 1998. The work order was also issued, but even before a single tree was planted, the PCMC claimed to have planted one lakh trees, at a function at Bhoirnagar, Chinchwad attended by renowned environmentalists. Kute said, “In the monsoon seasons it is not possible to plant one lakh trees, as digging pits is a problem. I had the work order and said that the work had not yet started. The former garden superintendent and local corporators threatened me at that time. I have worked as PCMC contractor in the garden department for several years and have seen closely how the civic body is harming the environment. “Corruption in other departments is easy to curb but in the garden departments there is no control. Tree plantation is seen only on paper. Moreover, there is no record of how many planted trees have survived. Conservation of trees is totally neglected. In PCMC, transfers of civic officials is mandatory after three years, but in PCMC, the garden superintendent and supporting staff have not changed in almost 15 years. Nobody bothers about it. Vinod Jain Vinod Jain, a well known tree activist of Pune and co-petitioner in the Public Interest Litigation filed in 2009. He is far from happy with the functioning of the Tree Authority in PMC. “When we asked the Pune Municipal Corporation through RTI for the total number of trees in Pune, the reply
was that the census is going on,” Jain said. “When any application for cutting a tree comes to the PMC, they have no way to find out the total number of trees that were originally there on that plot of land, and how many are left after the cutting is done. The PMC has stated in an RTI reply that they have no method to establish all this,” Jain said. “According to the Tree Act, the tree authority should submit a report of permissions granted by the tree authority for felling trees to the general body of the PMC every six months. They fail to do that,” said Jain. Sameer Nikam Sameer Nikam was involved in the clean-up drive at Omkareshwar river bank on June 2. He and other tree activists have pledged to plant several trees on the river banks. He alleged that the PMC has cut down at least 25,000 trees this year. “The PMC plants foreign trees in the place of the trees it has chopped. The PMC has not planted the prescribed quota of trees and its plantation drive is just a farce. The tree officer has not visited spots where they have replanted trees, nor made arrangements to ensure that the trees are safe,” he said. Hitesh Choudhari The 27-year-old resident of Nigdi and owner of Grahak Bazar in sector 25 has seen several cases of tree felling. “People cut down the trees in twin town for selfish motives. There is no control since no action is taken by the civic authority, and illegal tree cutting is rampant. There is no avenue for citizens to lodge complaints about illegal tree cutting or destruction. If we complain, no action is taken against the culprits. Century-old trees are cut down it in a single day. “ Raju Savale This activist from Sangvi has filed several complaints and RTIs to protect trees. “PCMC has constructed big roads but has failed to replant or replace trees chopped down for development. There is no record available in PCMC about the replacement or replantation of trees. I tried to get the information under RTI, but the officers delay it unnecessarily. The civic body itself chopped down around 2250 trees recently for Dehu-Alandi BRTS route at Charholi phata, despite protests.”
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early 20 big trees, including rain tree, cassia, subabul, among others were chopped at the Madanlal Dhingra Stadium ground in sector 25, Nigdi-Pradhikaran, after the PCMC’s garden department granted permission. The reason stated was that these trees were coming in the way of children playing cricket. In the name of trimming, they chopped 75 per cent of the big trees. Whatever was left of the trees was once again chopped to facilitate an aero modelling show, organised on the occasion of the birthday of deputy mayor Raju Misal a few months ago.
Citizens not left behind in the race
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hile on one hand civic bodies are contributing to denudation, citizens are also doing their bit to get rid of the green cover. In Nigdi Pradhikaran’s sector 25, plot number 179, behind Durga Sweet, citizens have allegedly poured acid to destroy a 20-year-old audumbar tree. Local tree activists have lodged complaints with the civic officials stating that the permission was only to chop some of the branches and not destroy the whole tree. Activists revealed that it started with the civic staff chopping a few branches as they were causing a hindrance to residents of a building. Once the staff from the garden department left,
Authority Speak Mohan Dhere, Tree Officer, PMC Asked if the green cover in Pune had diminished, Mohan Dhere, Tree Officer said that the loss of green cover was mainly due to development work. About tree count in Pune, he replied that the official tree census of 2013 puts the total number of trees in Pune at 48 lakh. He said that they have planted three trees for every tree that was cut. Such tree plantations have been done on the stretch of road from Sangamwadi to Sadalbaba chowk, and Bombay Sappers to Vishrantwadi chowk, on Deccan College Road and Nagar Road. There were many saplings that were seen planted along these roads. The saplings were planted in place of the trees cut for road-widening in 2010, but the PMC is not sure about how many trees were planted and how many cut down. When it was pointed out that some of the trees were in bad shape, and that saplings were missing and there were only empty pit holes at some spots on Nagar Road, Dhere said that the PMC will plant more saplings. “A 20 per cent casualty is normal, as some saplings die and some wither away, but we will plant more,” he added. Suresh Salunkhe, Garden Superintendent, PCMC This year PCMC proposes to plant 50,000 trees. On paper, the civic body claims they have planted 2,20,000 trees in the last three years. PCMC garden superintendent Suresh Salunkhe is claims that 90 per cent of the trees have survived. He quickly rattles the numbers for the last three years - 50,000 trees in 2011-12, 70,000 in 2012-13, and one lakh trees in 2013-14.
local residents started to pour acid near the roots to ensure that the tree does not grow again. In most areas citizens systematically damage the trees that come in their way. The most used technique is to remove the bark and gradually chop the tree. Another way is to get permission for trimming and completely kill the tree. There have been several cases of housing societies seeking permission to chop trees obstructing their entrances, parking, among others. In sectors 25 and 26, Nigdi, citizens have sought permission to fell trees because it is tedious for them to sweep their compounds full of dry leaves.
HC’s directives for replantation flouted In September 2013, a division bench of Bombay High Court that was hearing a Public Interest Litigation laid down guidelines for replantation in Pune. The guidelines are openly flouted. Here are some of the points that HC stressed upon: • The height (of new saplings) shall not be less than Six feet •The Collar Girth should not be less than Ten centimeters • The age of the sapling should not be less than five years • The species of the sapling should be local or indigenous • The Applicant shall continue to maintain the aforesaid trees after plantation or, as the case may be, uprooting of the trees • The Applicant shall not use or develop the property on which the plantation is to be done, in such a manner which will adversely affect the growth or survival of the trees planted/ transplanted thereon
On Ahmednagar Road saplings with girth of mere four cms have been planted
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
PUNE
“I want to remind that the responsibility to fulfill Babasaheb’s (Ambedkar) mission is mine, of the Congress and of every citizen. Everyone needs to come forward to fulfil their responsibility in ending casteism.” — Rahul Gandhi, vice president, Congress
Investment demand recovery blueprint P14
yet to nominate ‘Lack of awareness, sensitivity Govt Anglo-Indian lead to road accidents’ members to LS
International Road Federation (IRF) says government must do more to improve the scenario IANS
New Delhi: Holding factors like lack of awareness and sensitivity and poor law enforcement as some of the important reasons for the ever increasing road accidents in India, the International Road Federation (IRF) said the “government must do more to improve the scenario”. “Awareness is the key. People must be made aware about the issue and sensitised that one has to be a responsible road user,” IRF chairman KK Kapila told IANS. He also expressed concern over the country not having proper comprehensive legislation on the issue. The Road Transport and Safety Bill, which is to replace the Motor Vehicle Act (1998), is being delayed unnecessarily, he said. “Even after reviewing it four times, why is it being delayed...I don’t see any reason for it to be delayed any further,” he said, adding that “at least have the act in place”. On how could the situation be improved, Kapila said the government and the authorities concerned must do more to arrest the mounting deaths due to road accidents in the country. “Teach and train people - school children should be sensitised, they must be given proper education on road usage and when they grow up and start driving they would be good road users,” he said. Kapila also urged the authorities
months ago urging her to nominate the members. The association had New Delhi: Even though suggested some names to the minister. the Narendra Modi government The association had also submitted has completed a year in office, the a memorandum to the president, the nomination of two Anglo-Indian prime minister, the home minister and members to the Lok Sabha is yet to be BJP president Amit Shah seeking their decided. urgent intervention to This, despite nominate the members several reminders from “without delay”. members of the AngloThe Anglo-Indian Indian community and members in the last Lok its organisations. Sabha were Charles “The process to Dias from Kerala and nominate two members Ingrid Mcleod from of Anglo-Indian Chhattisgarh. community to the Lok E x p r e s s i n g Sabha is still on. We have dissatisfaction over received some names delay, Dias, who is also from the community the president of Anglo- CHARLES DIAS but no decision has been Indian Associations taken yet,” Minister of India, told IANS of State for Minority from Kerela that this Affairs Mukhtar Abbas is “cruelty” to the Naqvi told IANS. community, adding: “We will go to any “Appropriate persons will be extent for our constitutional right.” nominated soon,” he added. He said the government had not According to Article 331 of the even responded to their request. “This Constitution, the President may, if is a very serious issue. The government he is of the opinion that the Angloshould make its stand clear soon,” he Indian community is not adequately added. Dias said that the “unjustifiable represented in the House of the delay” had caused one-fifth of the People, nominate two members of the period to pass without the members. community to that House. In all previous Lok Sabhas, Cabinet minister for Minority including during NDA rule under Affairs Najma Heptulla had earlier prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, written a letter to the prime minister the nominations were made soon after a after a delegation of Anglo-Indian new government was voted in. Associations of India met her three IANS
“The Centre should make its stand clear soon.”
International Road Federation (IRF) has urged authorities to train bus and truck drivers in giving first aid to accident victims
to train bus and truck drivers in giving first aid to accident victims. “It would help a lot. If a victim gets that crucial help during the golden hour, it would certainly help us save that life,” he said. On being asked how he expects bus and truck drivers to be helpful as most of road users in India are in the habit of running away from the accident spot fearing police harassment,
UAE employers must register online Abu Dhabi: The Indian embassy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made it mandatory for prospective employers seeking to hire Indian workers to register online on its website, an official statement here said. According to the statement issued by the embassy recently, the employers will need to register online at the eMigrate system (www.emigrate.gov. in) after which they can obtain a permit to recruit workers directly or through approved recruiting agents. The new system will be implemented in phases — employers hiring between 50 and 150 Indian workers will have to register before June 30; those hiring 20 to 50 workers must register by July 31; and those
By Brajendra Singh
hiring less than 20 workers must register by August 31. Employers hiring over 150 workers are advised to register online with immediate effect. Employers will be required to declare the terms and conditions of employment at the time of registration. IANS
Kapila said once they are trained they would certainly come out of this fear psychosis and help people in trouble. He also stressed the need to identify the black spots in Delhi and other cities to minimise road accidents. “It has to be teamwork for all involved. We as an NGO are prepared to assist at all levels to make India’s roads safer,” he said. An official of the Save Life
Army to help Gujjars become soldiers Jammu: Efforts will be made to help youths from the tribal Gujjar community in Jammu and Kashmir to become soldiers, a senior Indian Army commander said recently. Defence ministry spokesman Colonel Manish Mehta said this to IANS after Lt General KJ Singh, the GOC-in-Chief of the Western Command, reviewed the security in Jammu sector and met members of the Gujjar community. “The army commander promised that efforts will be made to train Gujjar boys for recruitment in the Indian Army,” the spokesman said. The commander also promised to help provide education to young Gujjars. He said a army recruitment rally would be held in Kathua and Samba districts. IANS
Foundation also expressed similar views on the issue and said all departments concerned must work together to make India’s roads safer. “People who come asking for a driving licence must not be given the same easily but the authorities must ensure that they are fully trained and have the required skills to be on road as drivers,” he said. IANS
Musical taste divides rich and poor Study finds poor and least-educated people over eight times more likely to dislike classical music compared to the best-educated respondents Toronto: Can the genre of music that you love also reveal the social class you belong to? Yes, it can, new research suggests. “What upper class people like is disliked by the lower class, and vice versa,” said study author Gerry Veenstra, professor at University of British Columbia in Canada. The researchers found that the poor and least-educated people in the study were over eight times more likely to dislike classical music compared to the best-educated respondents. Meanwhile, lowbrow genres such as country, easy listening and golden oldies were disliked by higher-class listeners. The study involving nearly 1,600 telephone interviews with Canadian
adults examined their likes and dislikes of 21 musical genres. The researchers found that poorer, less-educated people tended to like country, disco, easy listening, golden oldies, heavy metal and rap.
Meanwhile, their wealthier and better-educated counterparts preferred genres such as classical, blues, jazz, opera, choral, pop, reggae, rock, world and musical theatre. The study determined that wealth and education do not influence a person’s breadth of musical taste. “Breadth of taste is not linked to class. But class filters into specific likes and dislikes,” Veenstra said. However, class and other factors such as age, gender, immigrant status and ethnicity - shape our musical tastes in interesting and complex ways, according to the study. The study was published in the Canadian Review of Sociology. IANS
South Asian varsity to house 5,000 students from 8 countries By Ranjana Narayan
Indian Studies as “through them we can get a lot of South Asian specialists”, New Delhi: The South Asian she added. University (SAU), an educational External Affairs Minister Sushma initiative of the eight SAARC Swaraj, speaking at the ceremony, neighbours, has already inked a said that Prime Minister Narendra partnership agreement with Dhaka Modi had proposed at the SAARC University, while it is in the process Summit in Kathmandu last year that of linking up with SAU connect with at the Royal University least one university in of Bhutan and Kabul each of the South Asian University, giving it a Association for Regional wider footprint in the Cooperation (SAARC) South Asian region. countries. According to The campus is SAU president coming up on 100 acres Kavita Sharma, the of land that India has collaboration with provided free of cost. Dhaka University was India is also funding signed about 20 days the $198 capital ago. cost, including the “We hope to have construction. According - SUSHMA SWARAJ the Royal Bhutan to Sushma Swaraj, India University and Kabul is “committed to bearing University on board. 100 per cent the capital We are exchanging letters with each cost towards establishment of the other. It is in the pipeline,” Sharma told varsity”. IANS on the sidelines of the groundSharma said they are working to breaking ceremony for the SAU speed up construction, with a boundary university campus at Maidangarhi wall to be erected first after which near Chhattarpur recently. four sets of buildings, for housing, a A link-up is also planned with the guest house and the faculties of earth Gurgaon-based American Institute of sciences, life sciences and humanities
“India will bear 100% capital cost towards setting up of the varsity.”
Set up in 2010, SAU has been functioning out of the Akbar Bhawan campus in Chanakyapuri. At present it has 418 students, five faculty and seven departments
would be constructed. Set up in 2010, SAU has been functioning out of the Akbar Bhawan
campus in Chanakyapuri. At present it has 418 students, five faculty and seven departments. The fifth batch of
students passed out earlier this year. The varsity at present offers masters’ and research programmes in Applied Mathematics, Biotechnology, Computer Science, Economics, Legal Studies, International Relations and Sociology. When ready in five years, the campus is estimated to cater to 5,000 students from the eight SAARC countries, as well as 400 faculty members who would be staying on campus. Sri Lankan High Commissioner Sudharshan Seneviratne, who was present at the ceremony, termed it a “fantastic initiative”. “The political success of SAARC would have been much more productive once the people get together, this is my belief,” Seneviratne told IANS on the sidelines of the event. “I always said that for SAARC, we should have started ground up, with people-to-people connect with artistes and academics; all the connectivity and shared heritage comes from the ground level,” he added. He said establishment of the SAU would have a “ripple effect” with it connecting to other varsities in the region. He said he could write to Sri Lankan varsities and tell them
to connect to SAARC. “This (SAU) will be like a nucleus”, said the envoy, adding that political differences should not intrude into the arena of education. “When it comes to education, no one wants to block it,” he said. “I feel good about it; each country’s students bring in a different experience and come and share ideas. This is the best people-to-people connect,” Seneviratne said. According to the Indo-Nepali team of architects, from Archiplan of Nepal and Abrd Architects of India, the campus will have 10 hostels to house the students and faculty. It will have a 600-seat convention centre that will act like a multi-purpose hall for baithaks and exhibitions. The state-of the art building has already got 5-star rating fom GRIHA, India’s National Rating System for Green Buildings. Equipped with solar panels on top of each building, the university campus would generate 25 per cent of its electricity, said an official. The rainwater would be harvested and waste water would be recycled at three in-house treatment plants, which would make it reusable for horticulture and flushing and for the cooling towers, the official added. ranjana.n@ians.in
ENVIRONMENT “Lifestyle changes were leading to increasing incidents of cancer. Good health leads to good life. People have to be made aware of the close relationship between tobacco and cancer.” — Ram Naik, Uttar Pradesh Governor
H EALTH
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY
Computing the data to decide if India’s path to development should be coal-based or not BY AMIT BHANDARI MUMBAI: India’s development dilemma centres around a basic calculation: the carbon emission for an average Indian is only marginally higher than the carbon dioxide produced in flying one passenger from Tokyo to San Francisco. In other words, while a commonlycited fact is that India, after China and the US, is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide - the main gas implicated in warming the planet globally, there is, seemingly, enough data to absolve India of special responsibility.
Was India’s overwhelming dependence on coal the real reason for the government crackdown on Greenpeace?
TO FIND AN ANSWER, CONSIDER THREE FACTS: Fact 1: Citing total emissions is misleading. India’s annual carbon dioxide emission is 1.93 billion tonnes, compared to 1.4 billion tonnes emitted by Japan, the world’s fi fth-largest polluter. India’s emissions are spread among 1.27 billion people; Japan’s come from 127 million, a tenth of India’s population. On an average, a citizen of Japan is responsible for seven times as much carbon dioxide as an Indian. Citizens of countries such as Britain, Germany, Canada and the US have a carbon footprint between five
After lull, cold fusion gets warm welcome BY K S JAYARAMAN BENGALURU: India is poised to revive research on controversial cold fusion two decades after abandoning what was then billed as a potential source of clean energy. Recommendations for restarting cold fusion experiments have been made by a ‘high level group’ that included two former chairmen of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE): Anil Kakodkar and Srikumar Banerjee. The meeting at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) was sponsored by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and its recommendations have since been sent to the ministry, said NIAS director Baldev Raj, who was formerly director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR). Nuclear fusion that powers the Sun and forms the basis of a hydrogen bomb occurs under conditions of extreme temperature and pressure in which hydrogen (or its heavier cousins deuterium and tritium) nuclei fuse to release energy. In 1989, chemistry professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, of the University of Utah in the United States, startled the world with
their claim of having achieved fusion of deuterium at room temperature in an electrolytic cell that used heavy water (in which hydrogen is subsumed by deuterium) and a palladium cathode. Their work came under attack from several scientists. India was in the forefront of cold fusion research from early on. Some of the best cold fusion research ever published was performed at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) under the leadership of late P K Iyengar. At its peak, 12 independent research groups - in BARC, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and IGCAR - involving about 50 scientists were engaged in the DAE programme on cold fusion research. According to Mahadeva Srinivasan, former Associate director of BARC and a cold fusion pioneer, the DAE stopped the research in 1994 because of “global peer pressure”. “The recognition by the mainstream Indian science journal for the emerging field of new energy marks a turning point for LENR research in India,” Srinivasan said. (IANS) killugudi@hotmail.com
Nuclear fusion occurs under extreme conditions
The best cold fusion research was performed at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre
PUNE
“The poor did not cause the problem of climate change, but they are now condemned to bear the brunt of its effects. Universality and shared responsibilities cannot be a pretext for the abdication of historical responsibility.” — Amit Narang, a Counsellor at India’s UN Mission
Resolving India’s development dilemma
FIRST, THE BACKGROUND FOR THIS DISCUSSION: Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere is at a record high at 404.11 parts per million (ppm), driving extreme weather events, including high temperature, storms and droughts, according to some studies. As IndiaSpend recently reported, the rainfall over rain-dependent India is becoming increasingly uncertain, unsettling the nation’s agriculture, economy and politics. Another recent much-debated IndiaSpend story explained how India’s overwhelming dependence on coal was the real reason for the government’s crackdown on the global NGO Greenpeace. Some readers said India’s dependence on coal would be disastrous. Others argued that doing away with coal would be equally disastrous. What should India’s path be? Coal-based or not?
JUNE 06, 2015
and 12 times that of an Indian. With one-sixth of the world’s population, India accounts for a twentieth of carbon emissions. China and the US, with just less than one-quarter of the world’s population, account for 44 per cent of current CO2 emissions. Europe (with Russia) accounts for another 20 per cent of emissions. India accounts for 5.5 per cent. So, a vast majority of greenhouse gases are coming from the developed world plus China. Fact 2: It is hard to ignore past responsibility. Per capita data are only part of the jigsaw. CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere has not been emitted only over
On the path to lower emissions in India BY SAHANA GHOSH KOLKATA: Improving education and creating favourable living and working conditions are essential for India’s transition to a society with minimal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, said an expert who authored UNEP’s latest report on resource use in Asia-Pacific. A buzzword in climate negotiations, the concept of low carbon society or development, has its roots in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted in Rio de Janerio in 1992 and is now generally expressed using the term low-emission development strategies. For India, the way ahead is through exploiting the low carbon (or low emission) renewable energy sector which would be in the “best interest” of the people and the economy, according to Heinz Schandl, a senior scientist at Australia’s national science agency. “The biggest resource India has is obviously its people and investment in education and supporting decent living and working conditions would unlock this resource,” Schandl, a senior principal scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, told IANS in an email interaction. Th is would “support a knowledgebased low carbon development path for which India is better suited perhaps than other countries,” he said in response to a question on utilising India’s resources. Schandl is the chief author of the recently released United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report “Indicators for a Resource Efficient and Green Asia and the Pacific”. For “inclusive human development in the country without accelerating emissions”, he said renewables are the key. India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has set ambitious renewable energy (RE) targets of 100,000 MW of solar power, 60,000 MW of wind power, 10,000 MW of energy from biomass and 5,000 MW from small hydroelectric projects (175 GW of total renewables) by 2022. Currently, India’s clean energy capacity is 33,000 MW. (IANS) sahana.g@ians.in
the past couple of years or decades. It has been building up for more than 100 years, since the West started industrialising. The pace picked up over the past 50 years as incomes and consumption increased and developing countries also started to grow. Between 1965 and 2013, as much as 1.1 trillion tonnes of CO2 was emitted. Europe (including Russia) accounts for 33.3 per cent of this total, while the US has a share of 24.3 per cent. So, the West has been responsible for 57.6 per cent of CO2 emitted over the past 48 years. If China and Japan are included, the combined share goes up to 76.2 per cent, more than three-quarters of all carbon dioxide
emissions over this period. A small set of nations - Europe, US, China and Japan - has been responsible for global warming so far, and continues to account for the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions. India’s contribution is relatively marginal and continues to remain 80 per cent below the world average. How right, then, are leaders from the US and Europe when they urge India to do more to curb emissions? Fact 3: As India develops, CO2 emissions will rise. The reasons for low per-capita emissions from India are obvious: As much as 25 per cent of Indians still don’t have access to electricity. Automobile ownership in India is 13 vehicles per 1,000, compared to 439 in the US, 617 in Japan and 34 in China. Indians fly less than nationals of other major economies - though India has the second-largest population, it is the ninth-largest aviation market. Britain, which has a population 1/20th of India sees more people flying annually. As India industrialises and incomes increase, more Indians will use electricity, drive vehicles and fly, leading to increased carbon emissions. India accounts for just 8.5 per cent of the world’s coal usage, while it has 17.5 per cent of the world’s people. If India chooses more expensive forms of energy over coal, it will contribute to global common good - at its own immediate economic cost. (IANS) (In arrangement with IndiaSpend. org, a data-driven, non-profit, public-interest journalism platform. webmaster@indiaspend.org)
Poor mental health to cost Indian economy dearly: Report NEW DELHI: With one in every five person in India suffering from some form of mental disorder, mental health-related cost would account for 20 per cent of economic loss from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) between 2012 and 2030, says a new report. The “Aarogya Bharat” report by the Healthcare Federation of India (NATHEALTH) and leading management consulting fi rm Bain & Company estimated an economic loss of $6.2 trillion due to NCDs between 2012 and 2030. Among non-communicable diseases, mental health is the largest contributor to economic loss in India. It is estimated that mental health will accord 20 percent of economic loss from NCDs 2012-2030, which is estimated at $6.2 trillion,” said Anjan Bose, secretary general, NATHEALTH, a forum of healthcare providers in India. Mental health illness rate is very high among Indians from ages of 20 to 40, the report said. “Mental health illness’s indirect costs are higher than direct costs,” said Samir Parikh, director, mental health & behavioural sciences, Fortis Hospital, New Delhi. Parikh said that direct cost in mental health care includes costs of care like medication, clinic visits (fees), hospitalisation, diagnostic services, residential care, community services, rehabilitation and non-medical costs like transportation for treatment and care, etc. “These are the value of resources used in the treatment of disease. Indirect costs are value of resources lost as a result of illness,” Parikh added. (IANS)
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
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“Interests of farmers and consumers are high on the agenda of the government,” he said adding that “the government has taken a number of initiatives to improve food-grain management during last one year.” — Ram Vilas Paswan, Food and Consumer Affairs Minister
Fascinating cultural mix P 15
Global tender to construct Nalanda campus Newly revived Nalanda varsity to construct new campus at Rajgir By Imran Khan PATNA: The newly-revived Nalanda International University will take a major step forward when it floats a global tender later this month for constructing its new campus spread over 446 acres of land at Rajgir, 95 km from here, an official said. “A global tender will be floated in the third week of June for the construction of the university buildings after the governing body decided on this,” the official, who would not like to be identified, told IANS, adding: “The construction will begin as soon as possible.” The campus is 12 km from the site where the original Nalanda University, an international centre for learning in Bihar in ancient times, once stood till the 12th century before it was razed by an invading Turkish army led by Bakhtiyar Khilji, a general of Qutbuddin Aibak. The university was established in the 5th century during the reign of the Gupta dynasty. In the first phase, the university’s administrative and academic buildings,
postgraduate and doctoral students, offering courses in science, philosophy and spirituality and social sciences. The university is an initiative of the Indian government and 18 East Asia Summit (EAS) countries. In October 2013, then prime minister Manmohan Singh had inked agreements with seven EAS countries Australia, Cambodia, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand, Laos and Myanmar - that have pledged their commitment to the project. China has committed $1 million for the project. An MoU was signed in this regard during Manmohan Singh’s visit to Beijing in November 2013. Singapore pledged $5-6 million and Australia about AUS$1 million. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen the first chancellor of the university, resigned earlier this year, saying the NDA government wanted him out. Former Singapore foreign minister George Yeo has been named the new chancellor. (IANS) imran.k@ians.in
Buildings will be designed on the ‘net zero’ energy use concept
hostels, staff room and library would be constructed, followed by other buildings in the second phase. “Our target is to complete the construction of these buildings by
September 2016,” the official said. According to university officials, the construction of the entire university campus would be completed by 2020. The cental government has sanctioned
Rs.2,700 crore for the university, to be spent over 10 years. In 2013, Ahmedabad-based company Vastu Shilpa Consultants was roped in for designing the buildings.
Social media addiction affecting sex life of young Indians: Experts Smartphones, tablets are intruding into the bedrooms of young, working couples in India By Nishant Arora NEW DELHI: Is sending ‘kisses’ on WhatsApp or posting intense love emojis on Facebook to your spouse replacing the real act between the sheets? It would seem so, according to leading experts on sex and behavioural sciences. According to them, many young and working couples in India are now getting hooked on to smartphones and tablets, even in the bedroom, and this is having a paralysing effect on their sex lives. Digital intimacy, it would seem, has diluted the physical connection between sexually active partners. “There has been a sudden surge in young couples, especially working professionals, who come to me for consultations after facing weak sexual desire owing to social media addiction that gobbles up night hours,” says Dr Prakash Kothari, the nation’s leading sexologist based in Mumbai. Kothari told IANS that at present he is counselling 20 young couples “who blame late-night social media snacking for their low sex drive.” Kothari is the founder professor of the departments of sexual medicine at KEM Hospital and Seth GS Medical College, both in Mumbai. “Carrying work home and continuous use of smartphone while you are with your partner hinder communication and relationship,” says Samir Parikh, director of mental health and behavioural sciences at Fortis Hospital, New Delhi. He says that for a healthy sexual relationship, a couple needs to spend
The architects have decided to use the desiccant enhanced evaporative (devap) air-cooling system for the buildings, a first in India. The devap system works by using desiccants (a substance that induces or sustains a state of dryness in its vicinity) to remove moisture from air, as also evaporative technologies that cool by using up to 90 per cent less energy than conventional means. The buildings will be designed on the concept of “net zero” energy consumption. The university would generate its own energy through photovoltaics. It would also collect biomass from neighbouring villages to generate its own electricity and also harvest rainwater. Nalanda University has attracted over 1,000 applications from around the world after its revival. The first academic session began in September 2014 with 15 students including five women - and 10 faculty members in a makeshift campus at the Buddhist pilgrim town of Rajgir. The fully-residential university will eventually have seven schools for
more time together “where there is a feeling of undivided attention, sharing and togetherness”. Parikh too is dealing with several young couples who blame social media for their subdued sex life. Among them is a 28-year-old executive who is on smartphone constantly for work-related stuff, not finding enough free time to spend with his girlfriend. A 38-year-old woman who came to see him was always on various social media platforms. “It triggered constant conflicts in the couples’ life, affecting their relationship,” he said. A recent study by Oxford University of 24,000 married European couples found that the more they read about other people’s exciting lives on social media, the more likely they were to view their own with disappointment, leading to a poorer sex life. According to Kothari, the sexual
process has four components: Desire, sexual grounding (how one perceives the stimuli), arousal (whether it leads to lubrication) and finally, orgasm. “So foreplay, emotional touch, fondling and intense feelings count as much as a physical stimulant. With smartphones in the bedroom, the emotional togetherness that initiates sex is gone,” he emphasises. Sex between two married people is not a matter of getting the mechanics right. The emotional interaction is paramount. “With gadgets intruding into our lives, sexual grounding is being affected but not the desire,” he says. Dr Jyoti Kapoor Madaan, senior consultant (psychiatry) at Paras Hospitals in Gurgaon, noted that there is an upsurge of young professionals with low sex drive but they do not always attribute it to the use of smartphones or other gadgets.
Sweet water, milk to quench thirst
Punjab do-gooders provide relief from scorching heat By Jaideep Sarin
“Most people are not even aware that excessive use of social media is causing problems in their relationships, even their bedroom life,” she said. Madaan is handling young professionals who are confused on how to balance social media requirements with their sex life. Take the case of a young 27-yearold female IT professional who visited Madaan with symptoms ranging from low sex drive to disturbed sleep in the past six months. Madaan found that since she got married, she noticed a gradual distancing between her and her partner. Before marriage, they constantly chatted over phone and WhatsApp but since they got married a year back, the virtual communication became minimal. But her hubby continued to stay glued to the smartphone, interacting with several friends and groups on various social media platforms. His defence: Since they were busy with their social media lives before marriage, she should not complain now. “The communication got reduced and sex life suffered. Now she feels depressed and thinks their marriage is a failure,” Madaan points out. “Five years ago, Facebook was rarely mentioned in the context of a marriage ending. But now it has become commonplace for clients to cite social media use as a reason for divorce,” said Andrew Newbury, head of family law at top British legal firm Slater and Gordon. The mantra: limit use of social media at night to reclaim your sex life. (IANS) nishant.a@ians.in
CHANDIGARH: Year after year in the peak of summer, a charitable activity provides a soothing relief all over Punjab. Hundreds of ‘chhabeels’ dot highways where people are offered sweetened water to quench their thirst in the scorching heat. ‘Chhabeels’ are counters put up along roads where water and milk are mixed with essence and sweetener and offered to thirsty people, motorists included. Hundreds of thousands benefit from the largesse. The water is offered to all, irrespective of one’s religion. The tradition has since spread to many other parts of northern India, Delhi included. The ‘chhabeels’ are mostly put up around gurdwaras where young and old people can be seen enthusiastically requesting people to stop and partake the sweetened water-milk combo. “Chhabeel is a religious tradition that has been followed for hundreds of years,” Tarsem Singh, a granthi (religious preacher) in Ropar town, told IANS.
“In peak summers, the event coincides with the martyrdom day of Guru Arjan Dev (the fifth Sikh guru). The concept is to offer the sweetened drink to people who are moving in the scorching heat,” he added. At every ‘chhabeel’, a counter is put up where volunteers offere the sweetened drink in glasses to people. “It gives a very nice feeling to offer sweetened water to people in this burning heat,” Chandan Singh, a private sector employee in his 30s, told IANS. “Motorists and others get a lot of relief after taking it. This is a very good tradition. Even the younger generation feels happy to help out in this activity,” he added. The martyrdom day of Arjan Dev is observed every June. The guru was tortured to death on the orders of Mughal emperor Jahangir in the early 17th century. Ravi Singh, a resident of Amritsar, said when he drove from Amritsar to Chandigarh this week, he saw well over 100 ‘chhabeels’ in the nearly 250 km journey. (IANS) jaideep.s@ians.in
New therapy for spinal injury patients Vol-1* lssue No.: 51 Editor: Yogesh Sadhwani (Responsible for the selection of news under the PRB Act, 1867) Printed and Published by: Shrikant Honnavarkar on behalf of Golden Sparrow Publishing Pvt. Ltd. CIN:U22200PN2014PTC151382 and printed at PRI – Media Services Private Limited CIN: U22222MH2012PTC232006 at Plot No. EL-201, TTC Industrial Area, MIDC, Mahape, Navi Mumbai. Golden Sparrow Publishing Pvt. Ltd. 1641, Madhav Heritage, Tilak Road, Pune-411 030, Tel: 020-2432 4332/33.
NEW DELHI: In a rare surgery, a 35-year-old Australian woman with a spinal injury for 14 long years regained her sensory ability after undergoing a new cell-based therapy at a hospital here, doctors said on Monday. The Human Embryonic Stem Cell (HESC) also proved beneficial for Perry Gross as she gained back her standing capability, which she had lost after suffering a major trauma while playing rugby. Her health deteriorated to an extent that she was on ventilator support through tracheostomy, a
surgical procedure to create an opening through the neck into the trachea. According to the medical reports, the initial condition of Gross, after being admitted to the Nutech Mediworld hospital was her inability to move her upper limbs and complete loss of sensation except on her face. She had no sitting balance and the abdominal reflex was absent with an exaggerated ankle jerk. After doctors at several hospitals abroad claimed that surgery won’t benefit her, Gross’ parents were advised about Human Embryonic Stem Cell
(HESC) therapy in which some Indian doctors have specialised. Gross then came to New Delhi and underwent the HESC therapy, which started improving her spinal injury. Over time, she gained her sensory ability and was able to move her back and even stand on her own. The therapy involves transplanting isolated human embryonic stem cells into the patients to help their spinal cord heal. The stem cell, on entering the body, engrafts to the damaged area and allows for its repair. The therapy has no known side effects and does not
require any immuno-suppressants. Geeta Shroff, the founding director of Nutech Mediworld where the patient was treated, said HESC hold a potential to repair and regenerate and thus were the key to treating most of today’s incurable ailments. Shroff treated three paraplegic and two quadriplegic patients with HESC and saw significant improvement in their sitting balance, control and sensation of bowel and bladder, power and movement of limbs. Shroff has treated over 1,300 patients from 50 countries. (IANS)
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“While we wish for peace and stability in the region, we want Kashmir’s just resolution in the light of UN resolutions and as per the aspirations of the Kashmiri people.” — General Raheel Sharif, Army Chief, Pakistan
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Male flickers are more industrious housekeepers than their mates by NATALIE ANGIER
One of the biggest mistakes my husband made as a new father was to tell me he thought his diaper-changing technique was better than mine. From then on, guess who assumed the lion’s share of diaper patrol in our household? Or rather, the northern flicker’s share. According to a new report in the journal Animal Behaviour on the sanitation habits of these tawny, 30-centimetre woodpeckers with downcurving bills, male flickers are more industrious housekeepers than their mates. Researchers already knew that flickers, like many woodpeckers, are a so-called sex role reversed species, the fathers spending comparatively more time incubating the eggs and feeding the young than do the mothers. Now scientists have found that the males’ parental zeal also extends to the less sentimental realm of nest hygiene: When a chick makes waste, Dad, more readily than Mom, is the one who makes haste, plucking up the unwanted presentation and disposing of it far from home. “It takes away microbes, removes smells that might alert predators, and makes the whole nest much cleaner,” said Elizabeth Gow, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and an author on the new report. “It’s an important aspect of parental care that we often forget about.” The new work reflects a growing interest in what might be called animal sanitation studies - the exploration of
how, why and under what conditions different species will seek to stay clean, stave off decay and disrepair, and formally dispose of the excreted and expired. Nature may be wild, but that doesn’t mean anything goes anywhere, and many animals follow strict rules for separating metabolic ingress and egress, and avoiding sources of contamination. Researchers have identified honeybee undertakers that specialise in removing corpses from the hive, and they have located dedicated underground toilet chambers to which African mole rats reliably repair to perform their elaborate ablutions. Among chimpanzees, hygiene often serves as a major driver of cultural evolution, and primatologists have found that different populations of the ape are marked by distinctive grooming styles. The chimpanzees in the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, for example, will extract a tick or other parasite from a companion’s fur with their fingers and then squash the offending pest against their own forearms. Chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest of Uganda prefer to daintily place the fruits of grooming on a leaf for inspection, to decide whether the dislodged bloodsuckers are safe to eat, or should simply be smashed and tossed. Budongo males, those fastidious charmers, will also use leaves as “napkins,” to wipe their penises clean after sex. Leaves may grow on trees, but serious sanitation work can be costly, as the new study of flickers revealed. Baby woodpeckers, like many nestlings, deposit their waste in the reasonably manageable form of fecal sacs, the mess contained in a gelatinous outer coating “like a water balloon,” Gow said. “It makes for easier removal from the nest.”
Andrew Rae/The New York Times
Nature’s super waste management crews
Scientists are increasingly interested in what might be called animal sanitation studies — how species seek to stay clean, stave off decay and dispose of waste and dead bodies
of the untimely death of a mate, were happy to let the sacs stack up. “When they’re really strained,” Gow said, “and the options are, remove fecal sacs or feed the kids, they’ll feed the kids.” Good hygiene is a matter of context. Luigi Pontieri of the Centre for Social Evolution at Copenhagen University and his colleagues study the pharaoh ant, a tiny, highly successful invasive species that originated in Southeast Asia but in three centuries
Ah, but what prodigious sac factories the little birds can be. Whereas human parents may change a daunting 50 to 80 diapers a week, flicker parents remove the same number of fecal sacs a day, each time venturing some 90 metres from the nest and risking exposure to predators like hawks. Gow determined that father flickers performed about 60 per cent of the sanitation runs, spent up to an hour a day on the task, and, in the event
of piggybacking on human activity has managed to colonize the world. Unlike most ants, pharaoh ants don’t build structured nests or defend territory. “They’ll live wherever they can, in places other ants avoid,” Pontieri said. “They’ll live in trash, in layers of old food, in electric plugs, between the pages of books. You can even find a colony inside a mealworm, which they ate their way into.” Sometimes, Pontieri said, “it can be really disgusting to work with these ants.” Delving into the secrets of the ants’ capacity to stay healthy no matter where they roam, the researchers discovered that the insects seemed to resist disease in part through a kind of vaccination program. As the researchers reported in the journal PLOS One, when the ants were given a choice between nesting in clean soil or soil littered with the corpses of pharaoh ants killed by fungal disease, the living ants chose to nest with the fouled fallen. Uninfected cadavers didn’t hold the same appeal; the pharaoh ants wanted dead comrades with spores. “We think the ants were actively seeking small doses of the pathogen,” Pontieri said. “It might be a way of getting immunised against a disease that could kill them.” Yet stable property can have its benefits. Gene E Robinson, a professor of neurology and entomology at the University of Illinois, said that when formerly free-living honeybees first “took the show indoors” by constructing thermally controlled hives, they gained the power to coddle their young but faced new challenges of hygiene. “Dead bees that once dropped harmlessly to the ground could now accumulate in the hive,” Robinson said. The social insects solved the
problem by establishing a tiny corps of undertakers: bees in late middle age and of a particular genotype that has yet to be decoded. The undertakers tirelessly patrol the honeycomb corridors, lift up any newly deceased bees they encounter, totter off with a payload fourfold heavier than the average pack of pollen, and then dump the bodies some 6 metres from the hive, anywhere from 25 to 100 times a day. Bees are also careful not to soil the hive with personal droppings, and some species even engage in “cleansing flights.” Hundreds or thousands of hive members swarm out to evacuate en masse - a practice that more than 30 years ago prompted Alexander M Haig Jr, who was the secretary of state, to mistake the yellow-brown showers in Laos as an act of chemical warfare. African mole rats, the mammalian equivalent of social insects, cannot risk venturing outdoors to avoid sullying their elaborate underground housing complexes, so they build dedicated lavatories instead. When one toilet chamber is too full, said Chris G Faulkes of Queen Mary University of London, a leading expert in the evolutionary ecology of African mole rats, the workers will “backfill it, seal it up and make a new one.” “They keep the burrows very tidy,” he added. As with its human equivalent, a mole rat toilet chamber is also a place to primp, and a freshly relieved animal will spend time energetically grooming its head, flanks and belly, before marking its recent visit with just a touch of anogenital fluid daubed on the bathroom floor. © 2015 New York Times News Service
Israel’s water strategy keeps drought at bay On same-sex marriage, Catholics are leading the way Becomes world leader in recycling and reusing wastewater for agriculture
said Shaul Ben-Dov, an agronomist at Ramat Rachel. “The price is higher, but we can live a normal life in a country that is half desert.” The turnaround came with a sevenyear drought, one of the most severe to hit modern Israel, that began in 2005 and peaked in the winter of 2008 to 2009. The country’s main natural water sources - the Sea of Galilee in the north and the mountain and coastal aquifers - were severely depleted, threatening a potentially irreversible deterioration of the water quality. Measures to increase the supply and reduce the demand were accelerated, overseen by the Water Authority, a powerful interministerial agency established in 2007. Desalination emerged as one focus of the government’s efforts, with four major plants going into operation over the past decade. A fifth one should be ready to operate within months. Together, they will produce more than 492 billion litres of potable water a year, with a goal of 757 billion litres by 2020. Israel has, in the meantime, become the world leader in recycling and reusing wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86 per cent of its domestic wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use - about 55 per cent of the total water used for agriculture. Spain is second to Israel,
by ISABEL KERSHNER
Look at this list of countries: Belgium, Canada, Spain, Argentina, Portugal, Brazil, France, Uruguay, Luxembourg and Ireland. Name two things they have in common. They don’t share a continent. Or a language. But in all of them, the Roman Catholic Church has more adherents, at least nominally, than any other religious denomination. And all of them belong to the vanguard of 20 nations that have decided to make same-sex marriage legal. In fact, countries with a Catholic majority or plurality make up half of those where two men or two women can now wed or will soon be able to. Ireland is the freshest addition to the list. It’s also, in some ways, the most remarkable one. It’s the first country to approve same-sex marriage by a popular referendum. The margin wasn’t even close. About 62 per cent of voters embraced marriage equality. And they did so despite a past of great fealty to the Catholic Church’s official teachings on, for example, contraception, which was outlawed in Ireland until 1980, and abortion, which remains illegal in most circumstances. Irish voters nonetheless rejected the church’s formal opposition to samesex marriage. This act of defiance was described, accurately, as an illustration of church leaders’ loosening grip on the country. But in falling out of line with the Vatican, Irish people are actually falling in line with their Catholic counterparts in other Western countries, including the United States. They aren’t sloughing off their Catholicism. An overwhelming majority of them still identify as Catholic. But they’re incorporating
religion into their lives in a manner less rooted in Rome. We journalists too often use “the Catholic Church” as a synonym for the pope, the cardinals and teachings that have the Vatican’s stamp of approval. But in Europe and the Americas in particular, the church is much more fluid than that. It harbors spiritually inclined people paying primary obeisance to their own consciences, their own senses of social justice. That impulse and tradition are as Catholic as any others. Catholics in the United States appear to be more, not less, progressive about gay rights than Americans in general. In an especially ambitious survey conducted during 2014 by the Public Religion Research Institute, about 60 per cent of Americans who called themselves Catholic said they approved of same-sex marriage, versus about 30 per cent who didn’t. The spread among all respondents was 54 to 38, and the group that clearly stood in the way of same-sex marriage wasn’t Catholics. It was evangelical Protestants. And yet, interestingly, the qualms that certain public figures have about same-sex marriage are routinely explained - by the media, and sometimes by those people themselves - as ineluctable consequences of their Catholicism. Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, among others, have cited their Catholic devotion as a barrier to embracing same-sex marriage. But this explanation puts these men in the minority of Catholics in the United States. Their stances win them more political favour among Baptists than among Catholics. © 2015 New York Times News Service
Ireland is the first country to approve same-sex marriage by a popular referendum
JERUSALEM: At the peak of the drought, Shabi Zvieli, an Israeli gardener, feared for his livelihood. A hefty tax was placed on excessive household water consumption, penalising families with lawns, swimming pools or leaky pipes. So many of Zvieli’s clients went over to synthetic grass and swapped their seasonal blooms for hardy, indigenous plants more suited to a semiarid climate. “I worried about where gardening was going,” said Zvieli, 56, who has tended people’s yards for about 25 years. Across the country, Israelis were told to cut their shower time by two minutes. Washing cars with hoses was outlawed and those few wealthy enough to absorb the cost of maintaining a lawn were permitted to water it only at night. “We were in a situation where we were very, very close to someone opening a tap somewhere in the country and no water would come out,” said Uri Schor, the spokesman and public education director of the government’s Water Authority. But that was about six years ago. Today, there is plenty of water in Israel. A lighter version of an old “Israel is drying up” campaign has been dusted off to advertise baby diapers. “The fear has gone,” said Zvieli, whose customers have gone back to planting flowers. As California and other western areas of the United States grapple with an extreme drought, a revolution has taken place here. A major national effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts. More than 50 per cent of the water for Israeli households, agriculture and industry is now artificially produced. During the drought years, farmers at Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, took water-economising measures like uprooting old apple orchards a few years before their time. With the new plenty, water allocations for Israeli farmers that had been slashed have been raised again, though the price has also gone up. “Now there is no problem of water,”
Wiser use of water has reduced household consumption by up to 18 per cent
Uriel Sinai/The New York Times
BY FRANK BRUNI
recycling 17 per cent of its effluent, while the United States recycles just 1 per cent, according to Water Authority data. The Israeli government began by making huge cuts in the annual water quotas for farmers, ending decades of extravagant overuse of heavily subsidised water for agriculture. Water Authority representatives went house to house offering to fit free devices on shower heads and taps that inject air into the water stream, saving about a third of the water used while still giving the impression of a strong flow. Officials say that wiser use of water has led to a reduction in household consumption of up to 18 per cent in recent years. And instead of the municipal authorities being responsible for the maintenance of city pipe networks, local corporations have been formed. The money collected for water is reinvested in the infrastructure. In the parched Middle East, water also has strategic implications. Struggles between Israel and its Arab neighbors over water rights in the Jordan River basin contributed to tensions leading to the 1967 Middle East war. Israel, which shares the mountain aquifer with the West Bank, says it provides the Palestinians with more water than it is obliged to under the
Tourists, swimming in a pool overlooking the Ramon Crater at Hotel Beresheet, in Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev desert. With its part-Mediterranean, part-desert climate, Israel had suffered from water shortages for decades
existing peace accords. The Palestinians say it is not enough and too expensive. A new era of water generosity could help foster relations with the Palestinians and with Jordan. Desalination, long shunned by many as a costly energy-guzzler with a heavy carbon footprint, is becoming cheaper, cleaner and more energy efficient as technologies advance. Sidney Loeb, the American scientist who invented the popular reverse osmosis method, came to live in Israel in 1967 and taught the water professionals here. The Sorek desalination plant rises out of the sandy ground about 14 kilometres south of Tel Aviv. Said to be the largest plant of its kind in the world, it produces over 150 billion litres of potable water a year, enough for about a sixth of Israel’s roughly 8 million citizens. Israeli environmentalists say the rush to desalination has partly come at the expense of alternatives like treating natural water reserves that have become polluted by industry, particularly the military industries in the coastal plain. Some environmentalists also say that the open-ocean intake method used by Israel’s desalination plants, in line with local regulations, as opposed to subsurface intakes, has a potentially destructive effect on sea life, sucking in billions of fish eggs and larvae. But Boaz Mayzel, a marine biologist at the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, said that the effects were not yet known and would have to be checked over time. Some Israelis are cynical about the water revolution. Tsur Shezaf, an Israeli journalist and the owner of a farm that produces wine and olives in the southern Negev desert, argues that desalination is essentially a privatization of Israel’s water supply that benefits a few tycoons, while recycling for agriculture allows the state to sell the same water twice. Shezaf plants his vines in a way that maximizes the use of natural floodwaters in the area, as in ancient times, and irrigates the rest of the year with a mix of desalinated water and fresh water. He prefers to avoid the cheaper recycled water, he says, because, “You don’t know exactly what you are getting.” But experts say that the wastewater from Israel’s densely populated Tel Aviv area is treated to such a high level that no harm would come to anyone who accidentally drank it. © 2015 New York Times News Service
MONEY MATT ER S
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
PUNE
“As a public sector telecom operator our aim is not only to earn revenue alone but to provide best quality services to the masses in far-flung and remotest areas at competitive prices.” — Anupam Shrivastava, chairman, BSNL
Signpost First Bangladeshi food processing unit in India In a first, a Bangladeshi food and beverages processing company, the PRAN Group, has set up a plant in Tripura at a targetted investment of Rs 200 crore, company officials said on Thursday. The PRAN (Programme for Rural Advancement Nationally) group — the first Bangladesh-based company to set up its unit in India — will function in the name of PRAN Beverages (India) Private Limited, exporting its products to 114 countries, according to the officials. “We have so far invested Rs 50 crore to set up a processing unit at western Tripura’s Bodhjungnagar industrial growth centre. We will invest another Rs 150 crore in the next two-to-three years to expand the unit,” said Sujon Krishna Roy, general manager of the PRAN Beverages (India) Private Limited. Bodhjungnagar is 25 km north of Agartala. “The unit has already started production and it is expected that it will be formally inaugurated in July,” Roy said.
Rain deficit unlikely to impact food production: Jaitley Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the forecast of deficit rain during the monsoon this year would not have any significant impact on food production owing to geographical distribution of the rainfall. He told media persons that forecast of rainfall appears to be on closer side of normal in south and central India and in the northeast, and there was “slight inadequacy, if at all” in the north-west. Jaitley, however, noted that a large part of north-western India, including Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, has substantial irrigation facility. “On account of geographical distribution, the impact on food grain production may not be very significant. There was similar pattern last year. Advance predictions are somewhat better than last year. In any case, there is abundance of food grains available,” he said.
“In India, Uber is helping create tens of thousands of jobs, empowering drivers with higher earnings potential and providing consumers with a safe, convenient transport.” — Amit Jain, president, Uber
to unclog Dealing with ‘f ’ word Need investment demand: RBI Governor
Scripbox CEO Sanjiv Singhal shares ways to handle finance with complete confidence
BY ANJALI SHETTY-SHIRSATH @shetty_anjali The mere mention of the word investment makes an average investor break into a sweat. The proliferation of half-baked information and multiple sources claiming to be ‘experts’ are the prime reasons for poor investment choices or, worse still, making no decision at all. Bad investment decisions lead to wealth erosion because your mistakes can cost you money. But being complacent can be equally harmful. We all know people who have their money sleeping in a savings account because they keep postponing their investment decisions. Th is money, that appears to be safe in a bank, actually loses value every year because of inflation. Scripbox CEO Sanjiv Singhal says, “At Scripbox, we wanted to create a solution which would help people to invest with confidence. With this in mind, we created an actionable platform that cuts through the jargon and simplifies investment decision-making process. We wanted our solution to be so good that we would not hesitate to recommend it to our friends and family. Anyone and everyone can start
the process of wealth creation by using our platform.” The second and equally important aspect that they wanted to change was the impersonal nature of personal finance. “People trust us with their money and we wanted to make sure that we are there to support them. We ensure that all our customers know at least two people in the company by name and have their individual email ids. When they call, our system tries to connect them to the same person they spoke with the last time. None of our emails, even automated ones, have a ‘do not reply’ warning attached. Any query that we receive from our customers is always replied to personally by a Scripbox team member,” he said. Started in 2012, Scripbox is a platform that automates all the best practices recommended for prudent investing. They have adopted a scientific and rulebased methodology
for recommending funds, making the entire process unbiased. The funds they recommend are selected strictly on the basis of their performance. They also suggest the right number of funds in each category, namely equity, debt and ELSS, for availing the right amount of diversification. “At Scripbox, we empower investors by bridging the gap between advice and action. There is plenty of advice readily available for investors, every book and article tells them the best practices to follow. Some even give a handy checklist of dos and don’ts. But after that, the investor has to find his own way and almost everyone finds it almost impossible to translate that advice into action. At Scripbox, it is all action - ‘I want to invest, click. I want to withdraw, click. I want to do tax-efficient rebalancing, click’. We endeavour to bring the same ease of use to investing what telephone brought to interpersonal communications,” he said. anjali.shetty@goldensparrow.com
MUMBAI: Revival of investment demand will need “unclogging” of stalled investment projects, stabilising of private new investment intentions, and improving sales of commercial vehicles, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said on Tuesday. The statement came as an upturn in capital goods production seems to be underway. “Industrial production has been recovering, albeit unevenly. The sustained weakness of consumption spending, especially in rural areas as indicated in the slowdown in sales of two-wheelers and tractors, continues to operate as a drag. Corporate sales have contracted,” Raghuram Rajan said on the sidelines of the RBI monetary policy review here. He said the “disappointing earnings performance” could have been worse if not for the decline in input costs. “Capacity utilisation has been falling in several industries, indicative of the slack in the economy”, he said. The Eight Core Industries, which comprise 37.91 per cent of the total weight of items included in the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), fell by 0.4 per cent in April 2015 at 162.4 compared to April 2014. It is for the second consecutive month that it has fallen. The ECI index registered a negative at 0.1 per cent in March 2015. Despite the fall in the Eight Core Industries index, coal production increased by 7.9 per cent in April this year in comparison to last year. Rajan said it augurs well for
electricity generation and mining and quarrying in near future. “There is some optimism on gas pricing and availability. The resolution of power purchase processes has to be expedited and power distribution companies’ financial stress has to be addressed on a priority basis,” he said. Talking about the public sector banks, he said some of them will need more capital to clean up their balance sheets and support lending as investment revives. The senior banker said the leading indicators of services sector activity are emitting mixed signals. “A pick-up in service tax collections, sales of trucks, railway freight, domestic air passenger and air freight traffic could augur well for transport and communication and trade,” he said. However, a slowdown in tourist arrivals, railway traffic and international air passenger and freight traffic may affect the hospitality sector and some constituents of transportation services adversely. “The services PMI declined in April 2015, mainly on account of slowdown in new business orders. Community and personal services are likely to be held back by the ongoing fiscal consolidation,” he said. The apex bank has reduced the repo rate under the liquidity adjustment facility by 25 basis points from 7.5 per cent to 7.25 per cent with immediate effect. IANS
HOW DOES ONE USE SCRIPBOX Registering with Scripbox is simple Fill out an online form Courier KYC documents to Scripbox Decide how much they want to invest Decide whether they want to invest monthly or a lump sum amount Rebalance their portfolio once a year The duration of investment is solely the decision of individual investor. We, however, recommend the following while selecting an investment option:
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RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan listed a number of prerequisites for investment revival
AC industry relies on Concern mounts as India sees June for summer killing 12 per cent deficit monsoon BY AVISHEK RAKSHIT
or the projected shortfall in rain turns out to be true, the industry may grow at 15-20 per cent in KOLKATA: With air-conditioner sales the May-June period, with the overall industry adversely hit this year by an erratic and late growth during January-June projected at 10 summer, consumer electronic companies are percent. now counting on June as the best bet to rake in “Monsoons are becoming unpredictable. It the moolah. directly affects the temperature, air pressure and The air-conditioner (AC) segment this humidity,” Sanjeev Bakshi said. summer saw nearly flat growth until AprilHe was confident of a surge in the demand for end. However, sales picked up from May as the ACs in Rajasthan, Gujarat, parts of Maharashtra temperatures across India soared. and central India during the monsoon period “The sales during April were because the temperature would damp. However, the AC market shoot up even in case of normal has started reviving from May AC firms said rainfall. onwards and we hope that sales The AC companies said the the peak during June will be good,” head peak summer season - the Aprilsummer of AC business at LG India May-June fiscal quarter - accounts Saurabh Baisakhaia told IANS. season - the for about 40-45 per cent of total The company, which holds AC sales, which were largely hit. April-Maya 22 per cent market share in Industry sales went down by as the AC segment, has managed much as 18 per cent during April June fiscal to complete 90 per cent of its while the overall growth during quarter target by May-end. However, January-May was stated to be in the Baisakhaia and other industry per cent. accounts for rangeTheof 8-10 players are in anguish over the January-June period, about 40-45% often termed by AC companies sales figures. “With the monsoon H1, accounts for 70 per cent of total sales as expected to hit on time, the of annual sales. LG said post the overall response from this H1 period, besides central and segment is anticipated to be north India, the major growth weak,” Pradeep Bakshi, president and chief was projected in the south. operations officer of the unitary products Interestingly, among all the AC players, business group at Voltas Limited, told IANS. Godrej Appliances and Whirlpool get their Sanjeev Bakshi, COO of the AC division at highest revenue share from south India, the Videocon, is also expecting the growth in the former earning 36 per cent from the region. overall industry during the ongoing summer to “The preference for formats such as Splits be flat on account of the weather. is quite apparent and window ACs continue The industry, however, is hoping its sales to lose ground. Within Splits, relatively new figure targets in the north, northwest and central technologies such as inverter, have begun to India - which contributes over one-third of AC find acceptance and account for approximately sales - during the monsoon will drive the market 10 per cent of the split format”, vice president of in June. “About the performance of the market, I corporate affairs and strategy for south Asia at am cautiously optimistic,” Baisakhaia said. Whirlpool India, Shantanu Dasupta, said. In case the monsoon doesn’t arrive on time avishek.r@ians.in
NEW DELHI: An official forecast of a 12 per cent rain deficit during this monsoon season caused much concern in India over a possible crop failure, drought, inflation and an overall adverse impact on the economy, spooking a key stock index by nearly 2.5 per cent and even prompting a key minister to invoke god. “The latest forecast is bothering me. The rainfall this monsoon is likely to be below normal-todeficient at 88 per cent -- plus or minus four per cent -- of the normal (average) rainfall, which is down from 93 per cent in April,” said Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan. “Let’s pray to god that the forecast does not come true,” he said on the margins of an event in Noida, adding that the likelihood
of a shortfall of rain below the long-term average from 1951-2000 had now risen to 93 per cent from 68 per cent that was predicted in April. Incidentally, when the minister was revealing the latest forecast, Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan was expressing concern over the deficient rains based on an earlier forecast of 7 per cent shortfall. Th is added to the alarm. “For the kharif season, the outlook is clouded by the fi rst estimates of Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), predicting that the southwest monsoon will be 7 per cent below the long period average,” Rajan said. The Kharif season starts in June with sowing when monsoon begins and its crop is harvested in
The Kharif season starts in June with sowing when the monsoon begins
November, while the rabi season begins with sowing in November and the crop, especially wheat, is harvested in April-May. “What is clear is that contingency plans for food management, including storage of adequate quantity of seeds and fertilisers, crop insurance, credit and timely release of food stocks need to be in place to manage the impact of low output on inflation.” As the forecast on Tuesday came over and above an official statement last week of a likely four million tonnes of grain in the just-concluded fiscal year, and the central bank’s assessment of a worsening of the situation, the concern was magnified. The stock markets, accordingly, appeared to have ignored the rate cuts announced by the RBI and the key sensitive index (Sensex) of the Bombay Stock Exchange fell 660.61 points or 2.37 per cent. The importance of the annual weather phenomenon of monsoon can be gauged by the fact that it accounts for as much as 75 per cent of India’s rains and over half of the farm sector’s water needs. It is also singularly responsible for refi lling the reservoirs, so crucial for the daily dose of water. It even kept prevented the central bank from announcing a steeper cut in interest rates. “Going forward, room may absolutely open up if monsoon is better than expected or government action can mitigate potential rise in food prices -- and if energy prices stay contained.
Clearly, it is possible. More room may open up and we will take full advantage of,” Rajan said. Country’s apex industry body Assocham too urged the government to “wake up” and take stock of the looming crisis. “The government should wake up and make necessary preparations to deal with the situation. Co-ordination with all stakeholders is a must to save the farmers from agony,” its secretary general D S Rawat told IANS. Nonetheless, the science and technology minister said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was monitoring the situation closely and has directed all ministries to make necessary preparations and take action to insulate citizens from hardship. Harsh Vardhan said the northwest region, which includes Delhi, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, would receive 85 per cent of the average rain, with an error margin of 8 per cent points, the minister added. He said the probability of monsoon remaining below average -- rainfall between 96 and 104 per cent of the long-term average (the average annual rainfall for the period 1951-2000) -- had risen from 68 per cent in April to 93 per cent now. The minister blamed El Nino, a phenomenon that happens in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, as well as climate change due to global warming, as two of the many other reasons behind the forecast. IANS
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY JUNE 06, 2015
“The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) is planning to set up 12 small garbage disposal plants at various locations in the city with a total capacity of 100 tonne.” — Dattatray Dhanakawade, Mayor
PUNE
“We have asked PMC to focus on developing cycle tracks and strengthening public transport -instead, it chooses to destroy our rich natural heritage like these invaluable trees.” — Dhananjay Shedbale, Environment activist
Flyover construction causing chaos at CoEP The under construction overbridge, road users’ indiscipline, dust and debris makes travelling a harrowing experience for commuters
I commute to Pune Station, and get stuck at College of Engineering Road almost daily. The overbridge construction work there seems to be never ending. The construction has not made any progress in the last six months. The traffic hold-ups last more than 15 minutes, and it is frustrating as I arrive late for work too. The lack of discipline by road users aggravates this problem. Rush hours are the worst. A drive to Pune Station from Dapodi that should take no more than 20 minutes, easilybreaches the hour mark. Driving back home is no better. With so many signals on the way,
Sunil Kasar
my car is at a slow crawl the entire distance. The absence of traffic cops and encroachments all contribute to the snail’s pace we move at. Pedestrians are the worst off. With no zebra crossings, they negotiate their way through across a dangerous road. To add to the pain, most of the vehicle drivers don’t obey traffic rules, and some even use the wrong side of the road, making the situation even worse.
CITIZEN JOURNALIST
The incomplete overbridge is mostly to blame. Commuters face risks all along the road during the day and night, having to deal with a narrowed-down highway. The students from the college have to use the stretch from the CoEP hostel to campus, overcoming unregulated traffic at Sancheti chowk and the T-junction in front of the college. Traffic snarls on both sides of the road after crossing Patil Estate are a daily affair, during peak morning and evening rush hours. The authorities should come up with solutions to reduce the traffic chaos. The road condition is sure to get worse during the monsoons, while the PMC like every year, will just do some patch work. In the rainy season, people prefer four-wheelers, which will cause more congestion. Sixty per cent of four-wheelers are single-driver cars and hence car-pooling is a must. PMC has failed time and again to improve the public transport system to accommodate the increasing numbers of commuters, and to ease the traffic situation. Instead they are concentrating more on constructing roads and f lyovers, spending huge sums on road infrastructure.
Public transport aside, Pune is great Fascinating cultural mix Some move to Pune for their education, others because of a job. And the city welcomes everyone with open arms
Grace Kiptui of Kenya has grown used to living in Pune, and all its virtues and shortfalls
I came to the city four years back because of my husband’s job. Pune is very different from my country. During the fi rst couple of weeks I found everything strange - the culture, people and the food. Communicating with neighbours too was difficult as I didn’t understand the language. Gradually, as the days passed, I settled down. I love the vada-pav, the Maharashtrian thali, and the climate. I have made Pune my home. During weekends, I visit every nook and corner of the city. Every street, every corner resonates with the spirit of the city. What I love most is the meeting of the two rivers, Mula and Mutha, the urbanisation of the city as well as the old Pune heritage structures like Shaniwarwada and the Aga Khan Palace harmoniously existing with modern ones. The lack of infrastructure is one of the downsides of this city. But the mix of conservative, traditional
Grace Kiptui, Kenya
FROM FOREIGN
values and modern, western lifestyles is fascinating. All of these give the city a unique charm. The bureaucracy is also slow to respond to what the citizens desire to make their lives less stressful, such as resolving the traffic indiscipline. The new generation is however fortunate to have such premium quality education available in the city. That is the reason the city is host to such large numbers of foreign students.
SHORES
Karabieeh Patnaik
Pune cit y has been my home since 2005. Coming from Odisha, it was really diff icult to adjust at f irst. But my friends helped me in ever y way. I think I can call myself an ‘assal Punekar’ now! I can speak Marathi f luently, and know each and every lane in Pune. Our college schedule was a little hectic, but I still managed to explore the city as and when we had time. With each passing day, I was falling more in love with Pune and it was the same with my friends. The city has maintained its old world charm, and also has modern commercial complexes with top notch amenities. I can eat vada-pav or misal any time,
because these simple dishes are lipsmackingly delicious. I love Maharashtrian cuisine. I also love driving across to the TJ’s Brew Works and the Hidden Place at Dhole Patil Road. Pune is the safest city I have lived in, even while I am driving at midnight. I have never faced any eve teasing; Instead people have helped me whenever I was stuck or had a problem. The monsoons are a fun time and I love going to Lonavala, Lavasa, Tamhini ghat, Mulshi, and Singhgad that are close by awesome spots for rainy rides.
NON-NATIVE
PAROLE
LETTERS TO THE
EDITOR
Pune is home to some of the best corporate houses, both national and international. The booming IT and BPO industry has changed the profile, attitudes and lifestyles of Punekars. The public transport system in Pune however, is below par as compared to other cities. The buses are dirty and without any indication of timings. The autorickshaw drivers charge whatever they please. So personal transport is a must to survive here. But I will never to trade places with Pune, irrespective of its infrastructure problems and potholes, I believe that Pune is one of the best cities in the country.
Free-for-all on Mumbai-Pune Expressway and force is going to lead nowhere; love is bigger than everything else. It is okay that Ayesha has changed her religion; she has done it at her own will. She is free and can take care of herself. The family has raised her doesn’t mean that they own her. She fears for her life now, and they are on the run. Can’t the family simply come to terms with the fact that they are now married? Instead of widening the divide between the two communities, can’t they simply peacefully accept their daughter? Now this poor girl has shown some courage and asked help from the court. Hope the authorities help her out. — Amit Agarwal
with all the toll money and fi nes, and safety has been ignored. Many a time vehicles are seen coming from the wrong side, but cops are doing nothing about it. —Kritika Shastri
Pune is the best
I travel to Mumbai every weekend, and always wonder how bikers are plying on the Expressway, when they are not allowed. The story ‘Bikes, Buffaloes, Pedestrians, what are they doing on Mumbai-Pune Expressway’ was something I could relate to. The existing ghat is very dangerous in some sections for two-wheelers. I have
seen bikers zooming along the highspeed corridor. There are also many accidents that happen in this area. I think many people are not aware that on the Expressway, two- and threewheelers are not allowed. It is sad that the authorities who should take action against the illegal dhabas and vendors, are busy fi lling their pockets
I felt a sense of pride when I read the story ‘NRIs choose Pune over other Indian cities’. Pune is the best city. It offers a cosmopolitan culture and makes for a comfortable living for everyone. The city has some world class educational institutes, good healthcare facilities and far better climate compared to Mumbai. It is quite evident that jobs drive Pune’s realty market. The city is green and clean as well. The city has surely changed from the pensioners’ paradise to a city that is abuzz with youth. People even come from abroad to settle down here. — Rahul Mistri
A war against love The story on Love Jihad angered me. The family needs to understand that controlling things through violence
Hobby becomes passion
I loved the story ‘When collecting curios becomes a passion’. It was really fascinating to know that people give so much time and attention to their
hobbies. I specifically liked the camera and sword collection, as I am more inclined towards history. Acquiring so many antique cameras, from world war time to the times when there were reels used must have cost him a fortune. Also maintaining swords wouldn’t have been easy. These things take a lot of time. Nevertheless, his passion keeps them going. Also the collection of lapel pins is not easy. Finding out about where to get them, ordering, courier, is a task. Hats off to all these collectors. —Vinit Shah
Write to Us Letters to the Editor may be emailed to editor_tgs@goldensparrow.com, editor_tgs@gmail.com or mailed to The Editor, Golden Sparrow Publishing Pvt Ltd, 1641 Madhav Heritage, Tilak Road, Pune-411030.
SPORTS
THE GOLDEN SPARROW ON SATURDAY PUNE
“My life has always been with football. It’s a passion that I’ve always treated with seriousness and with respect in Brazil and other countries. I should be a candidate for FIFA president post.” — Zico, Brazilian football legend
Signposts Barane Academy win U-10 cricket The Divekar Barane Cricket Academy registered a three-wicket win over Varroc Vengsarkar Cricket Academy (VVCA), to win the inaugural CM International School Trophy under-10 cricket tournament, organised by SKP Campus, Balewadi. Batting first, VVCA were bowled out for 132. In reply, the winners attained the target for the loss of seven wickets.
Triple crown for Vaibhavi Kher Vaibhavi Kher won a triple crown in the recently concluded Le Meridien Players Cup trophy district ranking table tennis tournament at Deccan Gymhkana. Vaibhavi, who was top seed in the youth girls’ category, defeated Fauzia Meherally 11-6, 8-11, 11-9, 11-6, 20-22, 10-12, 11-7, and later won the women’s title by beating the same opponent. Fauzia retired due to a leg injury when she was trailing 2-11, 11-9, 11-13.
Evening Star A win PDMBA tournament Evening Star A edged out The Pirates team 2-1, to win the Elite Group title in Poona District Metropolitan Badminton Association (PDMBA) recently. In the Future Group, PDMBA E team outplayed their F team 2-0, while in the Challenger Group final, Royal Eagle defeated Cock Smashers 2-0.
Mallika on her Road to Wimbledon The 12-year-old is on a winning spree this year, and is eager to make her presence felt at the international level BY ASHISH PHADNIS @phadnis_ashish Pune’s Mallika Marathe is the new kid on the tennis block. The talented youngster has been hitting the headlines with her sparkling performances lately. Last month, she won national under-12 title in Mumbai, and this week she bagged doubles’ title and finished runner-up in singles in the Asian under-14 tournament at Balewadi. Mallika, who was a wild card entrant in this Asian tournament, started her campaign by defeating Lakshmi Shanmugun 6-4, 6-2. Later, she stole the limelight in the pre-quarterfinals, when she dished out a double bagel to seventh seeded Aarya Patil, winning 6-0, 6-0. She got an easy passage to the semifinals, when second seeded Gauri Bhagia retired with an injury, when she was trailing 0-5. Even in the semifinals, M a l l i k a continued her domination, and was f lawless a g a i n s t eighth seed Tanaya Shah, routing her 6-0, 6-0. However, in the final, she couldn’t match the power of
Mubashira Shaikh (6th seed) and went down fighting in the decider. “I have been playing regularly in the last couple of months and I was mentally and physically tired. But I still gave it my best shot against Mubashira. It was a good game and I am happy that I gave her a tough fight,” said Mallika, immediately after her final. The title would have earned Mallika a double crown, as she along with Richa Chougule, prevailed over Sana Khanna and Tanaya Shah in the doubles’ final. Interestingly, Mallika was reluctant to participate in this tournament and was planning for another under-14 tournament. However, Pune District Metropolitan Tennis Association (PDMTA) secretary Sundar Iyer convinced her to take part, and eventually she agreed. “I am glad that Sunder sir urged me to play this tournament. Overall it was great experience, and I
learnt a lot from this tournament. Playing in an under-14 tournament is quite tough and the opponents try to overpower you with their aggression, power and speed,” said Mallika, who is currently ranked 5th in the under-12 category in India. Mallika took up the racquet when she was nine. Initially it was more of a fun experience for her to play in a tournament. However, in 2012, she won a local tournament held at Poona Club, followed by another under-10 title. She also emerged winner at the state-level tournament. “After winning three titles in the fi rst year, I decided to take up the sport seriously and started working hard on my game and fitness. Initially I was training with former Davis cupper Sandeep Kirtane at Deccan Gymkhana, but for the last couple of years, I have been working with Kedar Shah at Law College Road,” she said.
City’s 14-year-old chess player earns 356 Elo points in just a month TGS NEWS NETWORK @TGSWeekly
267.9 Elo points in one quarter (three months). In the process, he achieved the distinction of being the highest point gainer in the world. Deshpande started his point gaining campaign in first week of May. He emerged champion in the Maharashtra state selection rating tournament in Pune. Eventually, he became the second youngest player to win the state open
Singles • 1st round – bt Amritlakshmi Shanmugun 6-4, 6-2 • 2nd round – bt Arya Patil 6-0, 6-0. • Q/F – bt Gauri Bhagia 5-0 • S/F - bt Tanaya Shah 6-0, 6-0 • Final – lost to Mubashira Shaikh 3-6, 6-3, 0-6
tournament. Starting as the 16th seed, he dominated the event with his classic play. He got into a leading position after the 5th round and maintained it till the end. He gained 175 rating points from this event. Later, he participated in the Late Shri Babukaka Shirgaokar International rating tournament in Sangli. Though, he was placed 8th in the rankings, this performance, earned him 102 points. The tournament was immediately followed by 1st TTCA All India Open Fide Rating chess tournament in Goa. Deshpande earned 80 points. “I am thrilled with my performance and would like to thank my parents and my coach Mrunalini tai for their support. Th is performance has boosted my confidence,” said Pruthu. tgs.feedback@goldensparrow.com
City to pioneer Jr tennis league
Kids in the under-10, U-12 and U-14 categories will get a platform to show off their racquet skills, and experience the thrills and excitement of top competition TGS NEWS NETWORK @TGSWeekly Sports leagues are nothing new to India, particularly Pune, as almost every sport fraternity has come up with the league format to promote the game and cash in on its popularity. However, in a novel twist, Pune Metropolitan District Tennis Association (PMDTA) has decided to involve youngsters by launching a unique Junior Tennis League in Pune. The tournament sponsored by Diala-meal, will start in the second week of June and will be played on every weekend till September. “Tennis is becoming an extremely individualistic game, and to inculcate a team spirit, we have decided to start the junior league. Th is is a fi rst-ever junior tennis league in India. In US some minor leagues are conducted, but in India we are the fi rst one to do this,” said PMDTA secretary Sundar Iyer. “A total of 40 coaches of the city will be part of the league, and this will help in building up interaction between them and their wards of different age groups,” he added.
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Tennis is a costly game, and not everyone can afford the high-priced tennis racquets. Therefore, PMDTA has requested players to donate their old racquets to the association. These raquets will be provided to poor kids, and if they excel in the sport, they can return the old ones and can buy new ones according to their requirements. “Our aim is to promote the game mainly in rural areas and this scheme will surely help bring out hidden talent from these areas,” said Iyer.
Eight teams will be seen in action in this league, and the teams’ franchisees are mainly sports enthusiasts and parents. The teams are, Roaring Lions (Sachin Shroff ), Raging Bulls (Arjun Devrukhkar, Rajdeep Automation), Flying Hawks (Sheetal Shah), Grizzly Bears (Umesh Dalvi), Speeding Cheetahs (Ashwin Girme), Striking Jaguars (Navnath Shete, BIPL), Rising Eagles (Sameer Bhambre) and Growling Tigers (Lalit Gosavi). Interestingly, every team has animations of different animals. Each tie will consist of six matches, including under-10 singles (boys/girls), under-12 singles (boys/girls), under-14 boys’ and girls’ singles and doubles. The
A b o ut her plans, the standard VIII student of Symbiosis School said, “Th is is my last year in the under-12 category, so I have already started working for the bigger age group. My plan is to play in the Road to Wimbledon tournament next year, and I am pretty confident that I can win that.” “I am mentally strong, my stamina is good and I can execute my shots well. This helps me in crucial ties and with the help of my coach, I am improving my performance. The last time I played in an Asian tournament, I was placed 22, and this time I am runnerup. I just need to focus on my game and maintain the level of performance,” she said. ashish.phadnis@goldensparrow.com
MALLIKA’S PERFORMANCE IN ASIAN UNDER-14
Deshpande gains record points
City chess player Pruthu Deshpande set a record, gaining a whopping 356 Fide rating points in a month to reach a career high tally of 2084 recently. A standard IX student of DAV Public School, Pruthu has been training with WIM Mrunalini Kunte at Kunte Chess Academy for the last three years. Interestingly, another product of the academy, Roshan Rangarajan, had achieved a similar feat in 2009. He had gained the rare distinction of scoring
“I will use my position to talk to the other boards and the top officials in the ICC to convince them to support Pakistan in revival of international cricket in Pakistan.” —Former Pakistan Test captain Zaheer Abbas
ASHISH PHADNIS
JUNE 06, 2015
eight teams will be divided into two groups, and the top two teams from each will advance to the semifinals. Over 200 players from Pune district will undergo the hammer on Sunday (June 7) “Normally, June to September is considered as off season for tennis, and when the players resume playing in September, they find it difficult to get into rhythm. Therefore, we decided to conduct the league during this period. Secondly, we will be conducting various seminars on anger management, mental toughness and fitness on the sidelines of the tournament. Th is will help the players shape up before the start of the season,” said Iyer. tgs.feedback@goldensparrow.com
Doubles (with Richa Chougule) • 1st round - bt Saniya Masand/Sharon William 6-2, 7-5 • Q/F - bt Gauri Bhagia/Mubashira Shaik 3-6, 6-3, 10-5 • S/F – bt Ishika Agrwal/Nikhita Simhambhatla 6-1, 6-2 • Final - S Khanna /T Shah 6-1, 6-4