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FCI to be split into three separate entities CALCUTTA, Sept 5 — For the first time in India’s legal history a US-based non-resident Indian doctor has been granted permission by the Calcutta High Court to depose through a video conference in a case against three Indian doctors. More than two children? No social benefits
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Trigyn Tech plans listing at
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FCI to be split into three separate entities NEW DELHI, Sept 5 — Faced with a problem of plenty after successive bumper harvests, the Union Government is moving to break up the Food Corporation of India (FCI) into three smaller, efficient and profit-driven entities. The three independent entities will be given the task of procurement of bulk grain from farmers, their packaging and storage, and onward distribution and retail, reliable sources said. The Ministry of Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution, which runs the FCI, will place the recommendation before the Cabinet next month. Towards this end, it now awaits a feasibility report it commissioned from the Hyderabad-based Administrative Staff College five months ago. The report is likely to be submitted this month, a senior ministry official told IANS here today. The report is going to detail the mechanism of breaking the FCI up. The college and ministry officials have worked together in preparing this report and it has the ministry’s total concurrence, the official said. “Till now, there has been much scope for corruption within the FCI as every operation, from procurement to retail, is managed by it. But once these are separated and each is made to earn for itself, they will necessarily have to show profits,” he said. The proposal comes at a time when the ministry is looking for desperate measures to deal with an acute problem of plenty in grain. Just wheat and rice procurement tops over 42 million tonnes now, almost 40 per cent more than its needs for its public distribution system (PDS). Stocks piled up have begun to rot around the country as the FCI’s inadequate storage facilities have failed miserably to take care, the official admitted. Having now failed in its bid to sell its wheat even in the foreign markets, where both the price and the quality of the Indian wheat has been rejected, Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution Minister Shanta Kumar wrote to the Prime Minister last week and suggested India’s excess grain stock be either sold for next to nothing or even distributed free in exchange for work among India’s poor. The government has exhausted its efforts to persuade leading wheat buyers to pick up its excess stock, nearly half of its current holding of 28 million tonnes, that it finds impossible to handle. But every country it approached, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even Russia, rejected the Indian wheat for its lower protein content compared with the wheat offered by the USA and Australia, an official said. Secondly, the going international rate for this quality is only Rs 3.40 per kg which was what Russia offered. But the Indian government’s own domestic price offered at its ration shops at Rs 4.15 per kg is higher than this, he said. “It is unimaginable that the government sell wheat at a cheaper price to foreigners than to its own citizens,” the official said. What is more, even the Indian price is subsidised. The actual cost per kg of wheat that accrues to FCI is exactly the double, Rs 8.30 per kg. The Indian costs are, in fact, much higher than the world average because the trade in agriculture products is largely government-manoeuvred, the official said. The FCI, managed by the ministry, has to buy grain at prices pre-fixed by the Agriculture Ministry, called the minimum support price (MSP). “Add to that the taxes we pay as well as the handling costs of packaging, storage and transportation, and the total cost becomes unviable at the international level,” the official said.
— IANS |
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Court allows NRI to depose through video conference CALCUTTA, Sept 5 (IANS) — For the first time in India’s legal history a U.S.-based non-resident Indian (NRI) doctor has been granted permission by the Calcutta High Court to depose through a video conference in a case against three Indian doctors. A division Bench of the court comprising Chief Justice A.K. Mathur and Justice Barin Ghosh has upheld the plea of NRI doctor Kunal Saha that he be allowed to depose before the West Bengal Medical Council (WBMC) through a video conference. Saha petitioned the court after the WBMC had earlier turned down his request for the facility. Saha took three Indian doctors to court over his wife’s death which he alleged was due to their negligence. Saha then requested that he be allowed to depose through a video conference, and similar depositions be allowed for foreign medical experts, whom Saha wishes to present in support of his case. The high court, while allowing the NRI physician to depose through a video conference, did not grant the request for the foreign medical experts. The video conference, which the court has directed the WBMC to hold within a fortnight, will link New York with the office of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL), and will be organised by V-Span Limited. For the WBMC, members of its penal and ethical cases committee will attend the unique conference to hear Saha’s plea against the three city-based doctors, who have been blamed for the death of Anuradha Saha two years ago. Saha and his wife had come visiting India in May 1998, during which the latter fell sick with skin ailments. When her condition deteriorated, she was shifted to Mumbai where she died. Saha filed two suits — one in the Alipore court and the other with the WBMC. The medical council asked Saha to come to Calcutta, but Saha wanted to depose through a video conference. |
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More than two children? No social benefits
then MUMBAI, Sept 5 — Following a directive by the Maharashtra Government, several state departments have decided not to extend social benefits to families with more than two children in an effort to reign in the growing population. According to state government sources, families in which a third child is born after May 1, 2001 will be denied benefits from 50 different government schemes. The additional members will be denied benefits like subsidised rations from the public distribution system and other benefits, sources said. The government departments that will follow this scheme include food and civil supplies, rural development, social welfare, finance, cooperation, school education and animal husbandry. The government hopes the measures will prove to be a disincentive and help curb population in the state, which currently stands at more than 80 million. Schemes which would be affected include housing loan concessions, land allotments from the government, motor vehicle loan schemes for government employees, loans for purchase of shares in co-operative societies. However, several ministers in the state Cabinet have come out strongly against the decision. Cabinet ministers Datta Meghe and Mohammed Arif Khan are preparing to protest the decision. They told the local Press that not including the names of the additional children in the ration card would make them ineligible for domicile certificates.
— IANS |
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Pak hackers deface vital Indian web sites NEW DELHI, Sept 5 (UNI) — Pakistan has taken the proxy war in Kashmir to the cyberspace with renewed offensive managing to deface in August alone as many as 52 strategically vital Indian sites, reports an industry news portal. “Pakistani hackers have begun an all-out assault on Indian websites. From the typical one or two attacks per month, the number rose to 52 in August’’, itspace.com said in its lead story today. It said ‘G force Pakistan’ led the pack with 41 defacement attacks in August while “M0s” (which bills itself Harkat-ul-M0s) tried to wreck eight in the same month. The attacks peaked on August 15 when G force defaced 13 Indian sites. The Indian sites attacked include those of corporates, educational institutions like the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, University of Mumbai and the Walchand College of Engineering and a whole host of government sites. Information about the hacks is now appearing on a few security-related sites like safemode.org and attrition.org. When contacted, attrition.org was convinced that the attacks did indeed take place and that the attributions to G force and M0s were correct, itspace.com said. Pakistani hackers had reportedly defaced some Indian defence sites immediately after the Kargil war. The defacement means replacing a hacked site’s homepage with a page thrown in with expletives and anti-India statements and jokes and strewn with accounts of the “atrocities against the Kashmiris by the Indian forces’’. However, the leading information technology portal said the defacement was a lot more serious than what it appeared to be. “The threat from Pakistan is much more than mere defacement of the site. The guys from G force, typically upload a root kit which allows them to take control of a site. They then proceed to shut down login systems. After that, they can literally do anything’’ The portal quoted hackers who said that G force has defaced sites running on Linux. This proved that most Indian websites were not aware of or simply had not installed security patches for FTP. PHC (Pakistani Hackers Club) is another group that was active in the first quarter this year, though it also took on a few Pakistani sites as well. |
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Trigyn Tech plans listing at Nasdaq NEW DELHI, Sept 5 (PTI) — Trigyn Technologies plans to list its share in Nasdaq next year to raise $ 50 million for part-financing its overseas acquisition and expansion. “We have plans to raise $ 50 million through American Depositories Receipts (ADRs) and get listed at Nasdaq next year,” Trigyn group President Suresh C Rajpal told PTI here today. Trigyn earlier acquired California-based Applisoft for $ 9 million and is looking for more acquisitions and organic expansion, he said adding that the funds raised through the proposed ADR would part finance the acquisitions. We would look for software companies that have a firm toehold in the USA in terms of a marketing and distribution network, Rajpal said. The company would also expand its overseas operations through organic growth. “We will soon open offices in Finland in addition to the existing offices in the USA, Germany, Hong Kong and Malaysia,” he added. The company wants to come up with robust financial results in the coming three quarters before applying to the Securities Exchange Commission of the USA for the listing. Trigyn, formed after Leading Edge Technologies acquired e-Capital Solutions two years ago for a whopping Rs 660 crore, targets a 100 per cent revenue growth this year. The company is working on two e-business projects in China. “We may open offices there depending on the demand from the country,” he
said. Malaysia, the company has formed a joint venture with a local firm for its telecom
software. “We will focus on telecom and wireless software and may patent some of our latest technologies developed in the Bangalore R&D centre,” Rajpal said. Apart from telecom, the company is coming up with e-commerce, financial applications and web-based ERP
software for the manufacturing sector, he said.
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Click mouse to test headache LONDON, Sept 5 (Reuters) — Now you may be able to treat your headache with the click of a
mouse. New research presented on Tuesday showed a web-based headache assessment test can help patients and doctors improve the diagnosis and treatment of one of the most common human ailments. The Headache Impact Test (HIT), developed by US-based QualityMetric Inc and drug giant Glaxo Wellcome Plc <GLXO.L>, is an Internet-based questionnaire that measures the severity and impact of headaches. Four studies presented at the Headache 2000 conference in London found it helped to evaluate the seriousness of the headache in more than 1000 patients and to diagnose migraines. It can also help to track a patient’s progress over time. “I know that many patients with headache are not achieving the quality of life that they should expect and are suffering needlessly,” said Dr Andrew Dowson, of King’s College Hospital in London. “One of the key problems is that many patients with headache find it hard to communicate their degree of disability to doctors. New assessment tools of this kind should improve the situation dramatically,” he added in a statement. The test measures the severity of the headache and how much it limits the patient’s ability to function. The higher the score on a series of questions, the more severe the problem is. HIT can be found on the Internet at www.amIhealthy.com. An estimated 96 per cent of women and 91 per cent of men suffer from some type of headache during their lives. The severity ranges from mild discomfort to crippling pain. luster and tension headache and migraines, which afflict 120 million people in the developed world, are among the most common. Headaches can be the primary problem or an indication of something more serious such as a tumour. “Whilst we won’t find a cure for headache, we will increase ways of understanding disorders that affect to many of the world’s population,” said the conference chairman Dr Timothy Steiner, of Imperial College School of Medicine in London. Britannica opens web site for kids NEW DELHI, Sept 5 (PTI) — Encyclopaedia Britannica today launched a website for kids “stubrit.com” which will have completely Indianised content from alphabets A to Z to supplement the print
edition. We have launched “stubrit.com” for kids up to the graduation level who want to refer to Britannica but may not be able to buy the print set which is about Rs 4,000.” Managing Director of Britannica.com India Aalok Wadhwa told PTI here. The next offering will be a completely Indianised adult set but this will take time even as research work is being conducted by 700 editors across the country. While the present website is in English, he said the Hindi version — with not only translations but also a lot of original content — would be launched next year, followed by Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil in due course of time. The India arm of Encyclopaedia Britannica was set up two years ago to fulfil the twin objectives of building editorial resource and to cater to the Indian students’ needs, Wadhwa said. Stubrit.com offers articles from A to Z covering almost all subjects, select essays and information on careers, he said adding that more than 2,500 articles and about 1,300 images can be accessed online through the stubrit.com website.
KANPUR, Sept 5 (PTI) — LML Ltd has decided to hive off its information technology department into a separate subsidiary to tap the vast potential in this field. At the company’s annual general meeting held recently, it was decided to integrate all the software and hardware businesses of the company into a separate entity, LML’s Managing Director Deepak Singhania told visiting journalists here today. “Initially the IT unit will develop software for the company itself and later do job work for other companies,” he said adding the new subsidiary will have its own identity and its growth would not depend on LML. Mascot bags
$ 20 m orders MUMBAI,
Sept 5 (PTI)— mascot systems ltd has bagged two orders worth $ 20million for providing technology solutions to a global banking major and an international hardware company over a three year
period. The order from the European bank, which amounts to $ 15 million, would require mascot to provide technology solutions and execution/maintenance services, v
Chandrasekaran, managing
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Punjabi face on videos TORONTO: The Canadian police has hit upon the idea of using a very popular interactive trivia game to splash photographs of a wanted Indo-Canadian murder suspect on video screens across the country in the hope of nabbing
him. Since August 30, the police has been using the game to broadcast pictures of the 22-year-old clean-shaven face of Ninderjit Singh, at hourly intervals for 14 hours. Ninderjit Singh allegedly stalked Poonam Randhawa, also an Indo-Canadian, his former classmate, and allegedly shot her in the head in January last year, two days before she was to celebrate her 18th birthday. Reports say Randhawa had tried to escape Ninderjit’s unwanted advances by transferring schools. The police believes that soon after the shooting, Singh fled to Los Angeles, where he has relatives. When the police chased him there, they discovered he had left his relatives place. Ninderjit’s face is seen by a very large audience in 536 bars and restaurants in Vancouver at a time when they are glued to the video screens waiting for the next trivia game to begin. The face is shown every hour the screen. Ninderjit’s mother lives in Calgary. Some of his other family members also live in various parts of Canada, leading the police to believe he may have come back to Canada from Los Angeles.
— IANS His dad weds her mom TIRANA: Talk about love at first sight. At the engagement party of two Albanian teenagers, the groom’s father and the bride’s mother fell in love and eloped. The Gazeta Shqiptare newspaper said the future in-laws called their jilted spouses from their honeymoon in Greece to file for divorce. The teenagers are due to be married shortly, the paper said.
— Reuters Australian wine MELBOURNE: Australian wine company Cranswick Premium Wines Limited has entered into an agreement with an Indian company, Chateau Indage, to bottle and market its products in India. The Cranswick management said its MoU with Chateau Indage would open up the Indian market for Australian wines.
— IANS |
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