Sunday 28 April 2013

LPG subsidy directly in bank accounts from October 1


The government plans to provide subsidy to 14 crore LPG subscribers directly in their bank accounts from October 1, using the Aadhaar payment platform.

The government, official sources said, has decided to launch "Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) for LPG throughout the country tentatively from October 1".

"This (transfer of LPG subsidy) would require a much larger number of beneficiaries to be covered for opening of bank accounts and linked to Aadhaar and banks have been asked to get ready for the launch," said one official.

A consumer will have to get his or her bank account seeded with Aadhaar number for getting the LPG subsidy. The annual subsidy per consumer is estimated at Rs 4,000. The supply of subsidised LPG cylinder has been capped at 9 cylinders per year for a consumer.

While about 32 crore Aadhaar cards have been issued by UIDAI, only 80 lakh bank accounts have linked to the unique identity numbers so far.

Under a pilot project for LPG subsidy transfer, 20 districts in the country will be covered by May 15.

While the exact procedure to transfer the subsidy is being worked out, sources said subscribers will have to buy the LPG bottle at prevailing market price (currently Rs 901.50 per 14.2-kg cylinder in Delhi) and subsequently the subsidy amount will be transfered to the bank account.

The Finance Ministry has asked the public sector banks to speed up the process of linking accounts with Aadhaar.

The government expects that the DBT will eliminate all ghost LPG connections and diversion of cylinders.

Under the DBT scheme, subsidies and other benefits are transfered directly into the Aadhaar linked bank account of the beneficiary.

Saturday 20 April 2013

India's Sumit Dagar invents world’s first smartphone for blind people



AHMEDABAD: Blind people will soon be able to read SMSs and emails on their smartphones. Innovator Sumit Dagar, whose company is being incubated at the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) based on the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A ) campus, has developed the unique device.

Send this unique smartphone an SMS or email in any language and it converts it into blindfriendly braille. Dagar, who holds a postgraduate degree from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, had always been passionate about making technology more usable. He is now collaborating with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. "We have created the world's first braille smartphone," he said.

"This product is based on an innovative 'touch screen' which is capable of elevating and depressing the contents it receives to transform them into 'touchable' patterns." Dagar started the project three years ago while studying interaction designing at NID.

After working with a couple of companies, he gave up his job to concentrate on his technology, formed a team of six people and started his venture Kriyate Design Solutions. Currently, the venture is being funded by Rolex Awards under its Young Laureates Programme, where they select only five people from across the world every two years to fund their projects .

Braille SMART

The smartphone uses Shape Memory Alloy technology, which is based on the concept that metals remember their original shapes i.e expand and contract to its original shape after use This screen will be capable of elevating and depressing the contents to form patterns in braille The phone's 'screen' has a grid of pins, which will move up and down as per requirement.

The grid has a braille display, where pins come up to represent a character or letter

Friday 19 April 2013

TCS aims to increase campus hiring in US




 IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which is confident of beating Nasscom estimate of 12-14 per cent industry growth this fiscal, today said it plans to increase campus recruitment in the US.

However, the quantum of hiring is likely to remain the same as that of the past financial year, said the Mumbai-based company, which announced its results yesterday.

"Last fiscal, we had hired 1,600 people in the US of which 100-150 were through campus recruitments. The hiring number for this year will remain similar but we want to increase campus hiring," TCSBSE -0.58 % Executive Vice-President and Head of Global Human Resources Ajoy Mukherjee told reporters during a post-earnings media round-table here.

"In the domestic hiring, the top software company is trying to maintain 60:40 ratio (60% trainees and 40% laterals)," Mukherjee said, adding the future recruitment will depend on the growth of business.

Justifying the drop in in-take target for FY14, which at 45,000 is less than the last fiscal, he attributed this to higher retention rate. "We had the best retention rate in the last 27 quarters at 82 per cent. We would like to take it up to 85 per cent this year."

Constant engagement with employees, challenging job opportunities and compensation were the main reasons for such a high retention rate, Mukherjee maintained.

He said the wage hike this year will be averaging 7 per cent in the country. "So based on performance, they (employees) will see a wage hike of 5-10 percent plus."

Salaries of employees in developing countries will go up by 4-6 per cent, while those located in developed nations will see hikes ranging between 2-4 per cent, he said.

The wage hike cycle will start this month. TCS has already given offers to 25,000 trainees and they will start joining from Q2 onwards, he said.

Stating that the joining ratio was also up at 74-75 per cent in FY13 as against 60-70 per cent in FY12, Mukherjee said the ratio in the current fiscal is expected to remain at the last year's level.

Country's largest software exporter TCS yesterday eported a 22.1 per cent jump in net profit at Rs 3,596.9 crore for January-March quarter, meeting market expectations.

Microsoft most attractive employer followed by HP Google in India: Survey




 IT and software major Microsoft has emerged as India's most attractive employer for the third straight year in 2013, according to a survey by HR service firm Randstad.

The company was followed by Hewlett Packard and Google India in the second and third positions, respectively.

Others in the top 10 most attractive employer list included -- IBM (4th), ONGC (5th), Sony (6th), Larsen & Toubro (7th), Steel Authority of India (8th), SBI (9th) and Tata Consultancy Services (10th).

Special recognition awards were also given to Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in the energy sector, Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) in the manufacturing sector and Larsen & Toubro in the infrastructure sector.

The survey further noted that in a market like India, where there is high attrition levels, employer branding is very important as it provides an advantage to attract and retain top talent.

"In the current competitive business environment, attracting and retaining the right talent are vital to organisation success. We are extremely happy to see an increase in Indian companies focusing on Employer Branding," Randstad India Chairman Paul Van De Kerkhof said.

According to the survey that covered 7,000 respondents, Indian workforce prefer competitive salary and job security.

Compared to last year, there is a significant increase in the importance given to salary and employee benefits and this has become the most important factor for potential employees, followed by job security.

"The findings show a preference for competitive salary and high job security, and these are in line with current market sentiments," Randstad India MD & CEO E Balaji said.

Besides, competitive salary and job security, the other factors that featured in the top five are pleasant working atmosphere, work-life balance and career progression opportunities.

"Understanding the pulse of what the workforce wants is the best route to building a strong employer brand and remain an attractive employer," Balaji added.

Astronomers find most Earth-like planets yet




NEW YORK: Astronomers working with NASA's Kepler planet-finding spacecraft said on Thursday that they had found the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1,200 light-years from here in the constellation Lyra.

The newly discovered planets are the two outermost of five worlds circling a yellowish star slightly smaller and dimmer than our Sun, heretofore anonymous and now destined to be known forever in the cosmic history books as Kepler 62. These planets are roughly half again as large as the Earth and are presumably balls of rock, perhaps covered by oceans with humid cloudy skies, although that is at best a highly educated guess.

Nobody will probably ever know if anything lives on these planets, and the odds are that humans will travel there only in their faster-than-light dreams, but the news has sent astronomers into heavenly raptures. William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, head of the Kepler project, described one the new worlds as the best site for Life Out There yet found in Kepler's four-years-and-counting search for other Earths in the stars. He treated his team to pizza and beer on his own dime to celebrate the find (this being the age of sequestration). "It's a big deal," he said.

Looming brightly in each other's skies, the two planets circle their star at distances of 37 million and 65 million miles, about as far apart as Mercury and Venus in our own solar system. Most significantly, their orbits place them both in the "Goldilocks" zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.

Goldilocks would be so jealous.

Previous claims of Goldilocks planets with "just so" orbits snuggled up to red dwarf stars much dimmer and cooler than the Sun have been beset by uncertainties in the size and mass and even the existence of these worlds, said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, an exoplanet hunter and member of the Kepler team.

"This is the first planet that ticks both boxes," Dr Charbonneau said, speaking of the outermost planet, known as Kepler 62f. "It's the right size and the right temperature." Kepler 62f is 40 percent bigger than Earth and smack in the middle of the habitable zone, with a 267-day year. In an interview, Mr Borucki called it the best planet Kepler has found

Its mate, known as Kepler 62e, is slightly larger — 60 percent bigger than Earth — and has a 122-day orbit, placing it on the inner edge of the Goldilocks zone. It is warmer but also probably habitable, astronomers said.

The Kepler 62 system resembles our own solar system, which also has two habitable planets: Earth and Mars, which once had water and would still be habitable today if it were more massive and had been able to hang onto its primordial atmosphere.

The Kepler 62 planets continue a string of breakthroughs in the last two decades in which astronomers have gone from detecting the first known planets belonging to other stars, or exoplanets, broiling globs of gas bigger than Jupiter, to being able to discern smaller and smaller more moderate orbs — iceballs like Neptune and, now, bodies only a few times the mass of Earth, known technically as super-Earths.

Kepler 62's newfound worlds are not still not quite small enough to be considered strict replicas of Earth, but the new results have strengthened the already rabid conviction among astronomers that the galaxy is littered with billions of Earth-size planets, perhaps as many as one per star, and that astronomers will soon find Earth 2.0, as they call it — our lost twin bathing in the rays of an alien sun.

"Kepler and other experiments are finding planets that remind us more and more of home," said Geoffrey Marcy, a veteran exoplanet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kepler team member. "It's an amazing moment in science. We haven't found Earth 2.0 yet, but we can taste it, smell it, right there on our technological fingertips."A team of 60 authors, led by Mr Borucki of Ames, reported the discovery of the Kepler 62 planets in an article published online in the journal Science on Thursday.

As if that weren't enough, a group led by Thomas Barclay of Ames and the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute also reported the discovery of a planet 1.7 times as big as the Earth in the Goldilocks zone of Kepler 69, a star almost identical to the Sun, 1,040 light-years distant. The group's paper is destined for The Astrophysical Journal.

And in another paper submitted to the same journal, a group led by Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, took the first stab at trying to model conditions on the Kepler 62 planets. That is a tough job because Kepler 62, like the other Kepler stars, is too far away for astronomers to measure the masses of these planets, which would allow them to pin down their densities and composition.

Scaling up from the properties of the Earth, Dr Kaltenegger and her colleagues concluded that both of them were probably ocean worlds with humid, cloudy skies. Any life on them would probably be aquatic, she said, but "it might even be cooler life than we have here. Looking at the oceans, we find a lot of interesting life-forms there."

Dr Kaltenegger said she envisioned the pair as a kind of Darwinian test tube and wondered in an e-mail if life would evolve on both worlds and, if so, "Would life evolve 'the same' way or would there be very different life?"

"This is huge for the overall life-elsewhere question," said Sara Seager, a planetary expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not part of the work.

Kepler, launched in March 2009, hunts planets by staring at 150,000 stars in a patch of Milky Way sky, monitoring their brightnesses and looking for blips caused when planets pass in front of their home stars. To date the spacecraft has identified 115 planets and has a list of 2,740 other candidates. (Over all, the world's astronomers now know of some 800 exoplanets.)

But Kepler, which had its mission extended for another three years last spring, is only now coming into its prime. A minimum of three blips is required to register a planet, and so planets like the Earth that take a year to make an orbit are only now coming into view in the Kepler data. Indeed, the new Kepler 62 planets each registered just three transits, as they are called.

But there is a hitch, Dr Seager and others cautioned. Because the Kepler stars are all too far away — hundreds or thousands of light-years — to be reliably weighted, astronomers will never be quite completely sure what any particular planet is made of or whether anything can or does live there.

In the case of Kepler 62, said Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University, a Kepler mission scientist, the astronomers had determined the composition of the new planets by comparison to three earlier objects that had similar sizes and turned out to be rocky.

"Mass by association," Dr Batalha called it in an e-mail message.

Which is fine if all you want is the statistics of the cosmos. As Dr Seager pointed out, "Kepler was not designed to tell us which planet to go live on, only how common Earth-like planets are."

Wednesday 17 April 2013

Centre to ban sale of junk food and fizzy drinks near schools after summer vacation




The junk is being taken out of school education across the country. After summer vacations are over this year, children will begin their new academic session in schools that do not have junk food outlets within 500 yards in any direction. This revolution in the making was revealed in the Delhi High Court on Wednesday when the Centre said that draft guidelines on regulating sale of junk food and aerated drinks in and around school premises would be ready by July.

Additional Solicitor General Rajeeve Mehra, representing the Centre, told the court that private firm AC Nielsen ORGMARG Pvt Ltd is in the process of framing norms to regulate availability of junk food and carbonated drinks within 500 yards of schools. The senior law officer assured the court that the draft guidelines on making quality and safe food available in school canteens would be in place by July 21. These guidelines will be crucial because there is no official definition of junk food now.

This has created much ambiguity among schools over what food products it should make available to children within its premises. The guidelines will thus clear the confusion and define what food is healthy and what is not healthy.

"We would seek the opinion of food processing companies after making the draft guidelines and prepare the final guidelines soon,"Mehra said.

Most, if not all, schools are kindly disposed to the proposed move. Principal of Laxman Public School Usha Ram said, "We are all up for banning junk food in school premises. We don't sell junk food in our school. In fact, we were the first one to introduce a Mother Dairy stall in our campus which offers health milk products. "Principal of Apeejay School, Pitampura, D. K. Bedi echoed this view, saying: "It will be excellent if junk food is totally banned in schools. Schools should only offer healthy food like juices and milk products to children. "After recording submissions of the Centre's counsel, a bench comprising Chief Justice D. Murugesan and Justice Jayant Nath posted the next hearing in the matter for July 22. The Delhi government also displayed urgency in taking 'unhealthy food' off the shelves of city schools. The counsel representing the Delhi government, Anjum Javed, said that the Lieutenant Governor has the power to issue directions to city schools but that can be done only after the Centre frames guidelines on the issue.

Status report Meanwhile, the Centre also filed a status report in court, explaining why it has taken so long to complete the study in the matter. It told the court, however, that all the research has been completed now.

Assuring the court that all the fieldwork has been done and now it would not take much time, Mehra said, "We are pleased to share with you that we have been able to incorporate date from Meghalaya and Assam, due to which the study had to be extended. We have now completed the survey in both North-Eastern states, which was quite difficult due to the prolonged closure of schools in these regions."In January last year, the court had given six months to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to frame guidelines on banning sale of junk food and aerated drinks in and around educational institutions.

The court was hearing a PIL filed in 2010 by Rakesh Prabhakar, a lawyer for an NGO called Uday Foundation, seeking a direction banning sale of junk food and aerated drinks in and around schools. The petition said, "It is time we change the way kids eat in schools. Such a ban will set new standards for healthy food. On one hand, children are taught in classroom about good nutrition and on the other hand we continue to make junk food available to them."

A welcome idea The schools also welcomed the idea of banning junk food and carbonated drinks in and around school premises and advocated only the sale of healthy foods in school premises.

Earlier, the court also asked the FSSAI to consult the All India Food Processors' Association (AIFPA) and restaurant associations for

framing the guidelines. AIFPA, in its application, had said that it deals with processing of fruits and vegetables, meat and fish, milk and milk products and also the manufacturers of biscuits and confectionery products. It also said that it may give some advice to the FSSAI.

 



16 injured in blast outside BJP office in Bangalore, police suspect terror attack


At least 16 people, including eight policemen, were injured when an "incendiary bomb" placed in a motorbike exploded near the Karnataka BJP city office buzzing with activity ahead of the May five Assembly polls.

The policemen were on security duty as part of the bandobast arrangements for the BJP office in view of the polls when the explosion ripped through the crowded area damaging two vans, a Karnataka State Reserve Police vehicle and a motorbike, top police officials said.

"Due to the blast, 16 people are injured -- eight policemen on duty and eight civilians. Nobody is critically injured. All are being treated at hospital," State DGP Lalrokhuma Pachau said.

A National Investigative Agency team has arrived here, he said, adding, forensic experts would also be joining them.

"As of now, we do not know what is the material of the bomb blast. We will know after examination," he said.

The blast occurred around 10.30 am when the BJP office is normally brimming with party workers and candidates. Today is the last day for filing of nominations.

City Police Commissioner Raghavendra Auradkar, citing preliminary investigation, said, "It is an explosion", adding a motorbike with an "incendiary bomb" was used. The bike was planted in the midst of cars, he said.

"At this stage, I can't say what kind of explosion it was", the police chief.