Here is the link to the top five science blogs and top ranked 50 science blogs noted by www.Technorati.com blot site.

Long on to fathom the story.

Posted BY:  Dr.Y.Bala Murali Krishna.

Bangalore, July 30 (UNI): Indian Space Research Organisation’s ambitious project ‘Chandrayan’ is not aimed at just landing an Indian on the moon, but to explore the vast mineral resources and ambundant energy potential the earth’s natural satellite had to offer, ISRO Satellite Centre Director, K N Shankara, has said.

“We are aiming to make ‘Chandrayan-I’ mission a success in the next 20 years, and this was being done not to just take a man to land on the Moon, but to explore and exploit in future, the huge mineral wealth and future needs of energy,” he said delivering the Dr H Narasimhaiah memorial lecture titled ‘Innovative Space Technologies and Applications’, at Bangalore Science Forum here, recently.

He said the planetary mission launched by the country would explore the mineral wealth and energy sources, like Helium-3, which had the potential of solving future energy demands of the world.

Dr Shankara said the Chandrayan-I would see the Indian satellite orbiting 100 km above the moon and its terrain mapping stereo camera, with a high resolution of 10 metres, explore the surface of the moon.

A deep space-tracking station was coming up near Bangalore to track the satellite, he added.

He said the time had come to adopt ‘space as a solution’ for future needs energy and drinking water. The gap between the energy needs of the world and the production was increasing and ‘power from space’, which was earlier thought economically not viable, was now increasingly believed by the scientific community as achievable, he added.

He said the energy source on earth would not be enough to meet the need of growing population and the economies.

Eighty per cent of energy was being produced from fast depleting fossil fuel that had led to serious environmental problems.

With the demand rising every day, the annual demand of energy in the world had risen to 12 terra watts per annum. The energy shortfall would mount to 15 terra watts by the end of the century and new sources of clean energy to fill the gap had to be explored seriously.

As present system of technology would not address the energy demand in the coming decades, alternative sources had to be explored.

In India, energy shortage had already assumed serious proportions and hence, ISRO had launched plans to explore alternative energy sources, he added.

Posted by: Dr.Y.Bala Murali Krishna

A wonderful resource  for science and environment writers,particularly related to Tsunami can be found in the www.cseindia.org.  You can directly enter into details of the resource persons with this link of natural disasters.

Wsh you all the best.

Dr.Y.Bala Murali Krishna 

 Narrowing the digital divide; the story of Pantiya village

 By: Brij Bhushan Sharma

Pantiya Village(Gujarat),July 23-2k6(UNI) Children in this remote  village have shown that they are no less capable than the city slicks  in their knowledge of computers.

   Even a six-year-old child in the primary co-ed school in the  Pantiya village, with a population of just 600, can use the computer. The school, upto seventh standard, has a total of 127 students but only three teachers.

   This correspondent, who visited the school, found the students highly disciplined and extremely talented. Their versatility was reflected in their paintings which adorned the walls of the school.

   Pantiya, near Anjar (Kandla) houses 150 families owning land which has poor fertility due to salinity.

   To make the desert land cultivable and for undertaking other developmental activities in this remote area, Indian Farmers  Fertiliser Co-operative Ltd. (IFFCO) has adopted this and another  village Sugaria of Anjar Block.

   The public sector fertiliser cooperative major is part of the growing tribe of corporates who believe the profit alone cannot be the objective of a company, but they have an equal responsibility in developing the world around them.

   ”IFFCO is a success story of Corporate Social Responsibility,” says Mr S Srinivasan, General Manager, Kandla Unit of IFFCO.

   Village Sarpanch Karsanbhai is actively participating and overseeing the developmental works in Pantiya.

   The uniqueness of the developmental experiment in Pantiya is that the entire labour for building the Community Hall and a ‘Gau Shala’ has been provided by the villagers free of cost. IFFCO, however, provided material worth over Rs 5 lakh.

   The training of farm women on canning products like pickles,’murabbas’, squash and other agro products is provided by Mr M G Mehta, Vice Principal of the Co-Operative Rural Development Trust  (CORDET).

   The Trust has been floated by IFFCO for training villagers to make them earn sufficient income to become self dependent as well as undertaking development activity.

   CORDET also imparts training in other fields like embroidery, tailoring and making of handicraft products.  It is also involved in the onerous task of organising training  programmes, seminars, crop competitions, agricultural fairs and  exhibition for farmers.

   While the land for the Pantiya school was provided by the State Government, infrastructure facilities, including computers, were donated by IFFCO which contributes Rs 2 per tonne of its fertilisers production to the Trust for developmental activities.

   The key objective of the CORDET is to provide an integrated development of the remote villages. CORDET undertakes demonstration of modern horticultural farming system by using advanced farm  management technology in the desert soil.

 The total farm area of Pantiya is 74 hectares, out of which 31.40 hectare is under cultivation and 42.60 hectare area is still undeveloped land due to  the rocky nature of the land.

   CORDET distributes farm implements, biofertiliser, saplings of fruit plants, seeds of vegetables, IFFCO NPK,  micronutrients, mango saplings to the farmers of Pantiya and Sugaria villages free of cost or at highly subsidised rate every year.

   The part of the rocky land is developed by the Trust and growing wheat, groundnut, bajra, castor and arhar throughout the year. The plantation work in most of the area in Phase-I and II has been completed.

   As wind velocity is high in Kutch district, so, CORDET has
planted wind break forestry on boundary of its adopted farm.

   The farm has an orchard of 5,090 fruit plants of 11 varieties and 13,841 forest plants of 20 varieties at Pantiya Farm. The mango plants this year yielded more than 6000 kg of mango fruits (Kesar mango). //EOM//

Note:  A good example of development reporting from a rural village. Small paragraphs, straight forward sentences that needs powers of observation and legwork to do the job right.

Posted By: Dr.Y.Bala Murali krishna.

Dear friends,

Please log on my another blogsite www.popularsciencewriting.blogspot.com for more popular science stories with pictures.

Your precious comments and suggestions are most welcome. 

You can also send your stories for editing and posting them in either of my blogsites. 

Dr.Y.Bala Murali krishna. 

By Sudhir Kumar

New Delhi: Lying in a state of disarray in Srinagar’s
Oriental Research Library, priceless manuscripts in Sanskrit and Persian, including the Mahabharat and the Bhagavad Gita, are being digitised at a furious pace to protect these from the ravages of time and a possible terror threat.

”There are a total of 8200 manuscripts in Sanskrit and Persian languages comprising 21 lakh pages. A vast majority of these manuscripts belong to the 13th-14th century and mostly pertain to the Ayurveda, Shaivism and Tantra.

Capturing them in digital form will be an invaluable legacy for the posterity,” Mr Pratapanand Jha, Director (Cultural Informatics), Indira Gandhi National Centre
for the Arts (IGNCA), told UNI.

Among the documents in the Library are the Yogavasistha in Sanskrit and the Mahabharat and the Bhagavat Gita in Persian, and are in a crying need for preservation. Of the 8200 manuscripts, 4800 are in Sanskrit and the remaining ones are in Persian.

There are also some folios of the famous Gilgit Manuscripts (7th century) in the Central Asian section of the Iqbal Library in Srinagar. These are also to be digitised. A major portion of these manuscripts is in the National Archives and the government does not want to send it back to the Oriental Research Library because of the
apparent threat perception.

Mr Jha, who is leading a 25-member team for digitising the manuscripts, said during the first phase of the work spread over September-November 2004 and April-November 2005, 1400 manuscripts comprising six lakh pages were digitised.

”The second phase will commence later this month. We plan to digitise the remaining manuscripts in 8-10 months. Unlike the first phase when work was stopped during the winters, this time round, we will work during cold months as well. The idea is to accomplish the job at the earliest,’’ he said, adding that the terror threat to the
famous library had always been there.

The work is being carried out by the IGNCA as part of the Central Government’s National Manuscripts Mission (NMM).

The Secretary, Education, Jammu and Kashmir government;
Director, Libraries; and the Vice Chancellor, Srinagar University are assisting the team by providing logistical facilities.

Mr Jha said his team would work a minimum of 12 hours a day to complete the job. ”We have procured two scanning machines. If we work for 10 hours a day, in one month 4000 pages can be digitised.

Since there are two scanning systems for the second phase, we hope to digitise 8000 pages in a month on an average.”

He said the IGNCA itself had 2.5 lakh manuscripts in
microfilms at its headquarters in the national capital, and these were also being digitised in itslaboratory.”Everyday we are digitising 10-12 microfilms — 300 films every month — and it is an automatic and continuous process,” he said, pointing out that these were documents of great historical importance.

Mr Jha said his team was also engaged in digitising 14,200 manuscripts, which are in the custody of the National Museum. ”So far we have digitised 1500 of these manuscripts and work is going apace to finish it on time,” he added.

Another project for the team, he said, is to train the staff of the National Library, Mongolia in digitisation expertise.

”Several important Kanjur and Tanjur Buddhist manuscripts are lying in the Mongolian library. We will train their staff to digitise these vital historical documents.”

The Tanjur and Kanjur manuscripts were taken from India to Mongolia via Tibet in the medieval times. The project has been entrusted to IGNCA by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR). Once the project is completed, Mongolia will present a set of the digitised work to the Indian government.

An initiative of the Central Government’s Department of Culture,the NMM was launched in February 2003 by the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to safeguard India’s treasure of hand-written manuscripts. The IGNCA was declared as its national nodal agency.

An ambitious five-year project, the NMM seeks not merely to locate, catalogue and preserve the country’s rich wealth of manuscripts but also to enhance access, spread awareness and encourage their use for educational and research purposes.

India possesses more than five million manuscripts, making her the largest repository of manuscript wealth in the world.

The NMM is creating the National Manuscripts Library to be housed at IGNCA headquarters, which will contain digital resources on manuscripts collected from around the country.

NMM chief Sudha Gopalakrishnan points out that the surveys,being undertaken in different states, will be dovetailed in an ambitious pursuit of creating a Manuscripts Map of India.

”The aim of the survey is to identify and catalogue
manuscripts and offer help and technology to preserve them. With the affiliation of prominent institutions across the country as Manuscript Resource Centres and Manuscript Conservation Centres and the safeguarding of manuscript knowledge through a pilot digitisation programme, the NMM has placed the protection and dissemination of manuscripts on a firm footing,” she says.//EOM//

Posted By: Dr.Y.Bala Murali Krishna

Women more vulnerable to AIDS, bear burden of HIV+ in families.

BY: Annapurna Jha

New Delhi, July 23(2k6):Women and girls are not only more
vulnerable to HIV, they also have to bear an additional burden when someone in  the family is infected with HIV and the situation of HIV positive women is the most deplorable, according to a recent study.

The study on the ‘Socio-Economic Impact of HIV and AIDS in India,’
conducted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research
(NCAER) and supported by the National AIDS Control Organisation
(NACO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), found
that not only does women’s workload at home increase, but they are
also required to take up employment to supplement the lost earnings.
They, moreover, face discrimination on several counts.
The burden of caring the People Living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA)
is proportionately higher in the case of women, whether or not they
are themselves HIV positive, it pointed out.
The study also found that out of 882 caregivers in the families it
surveyed, 627 were women, 91 per cent of them in the 15-59 age
group. 20 per cent of the caregivers were themselves HIV positive,
against 16 per cent in the case of men. One-third of the caregivers
are employed, which means the burden can be extremely taxing.
In a clear indication of the gender gap in treatment seeking
behaviour, close to 9.7 per cent of illness episodes were left
untreated in the case of HIV and AIDS affected women, the study
found, nearly double the case of men.
Also, women were more likely to get treated in health facilities
run by the government or non-government organisations in comparison
to a greater proportion of men being treated at private nursing
homes. Only 29.8 per cent of the women surveyed went to private
health facilities for non-hospitalised illnesses, against 41.3 per
cent in the case of men. A similar picture can be seen in the case
of hospitalised illnesses.
”Improving women’s legal position relating to inheritance and
property ownership as well as maximising their access to credit and
their income-generating ability are needed to empower women,” the
study argues.
While HIV and AIDS have a negative impact on children from
affected households, it is the girl child who is more likely to be
withdrawn from school to cope up with household chores or supplement
the family income, it pointed out.
Though all PLWHAs face stigma and discrimination, the women face
the worst forms of discrimination. The study found that though the
attitude of families was quite encouraging, the percentage of women
reporting support from their families (70 per cent) was lower than
in the case of men (74 per cent). More women than men faced
discrimination like neglect, isolation and verbal teasing in both
urban and rural areas.
Households headed by HIV positive widows were found to be
economically worse than other HIV households, with an average income
at Rs 32,993 and Rs 51,111 respectively.
The average per capita expenditure by HIV positive widow
households was Rs 790 against Rs 1023 in the case of other HIV
households. Moreover, the savings of the HIV positive widow
households was lower and indebtedness higher than other HIV
ouseholds.
The study is based on a survey spread over six states- Andhra
Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Manipur and Nagaland.
It covered 2068 HIV households and 6224 non-HIV households. A total
of 2386 PLWHA were interviewed in the course of the survey.
//EOM//

Posted By: Dr.Y.Bala Murali Krishna.

Ban on blogging lifted, bloggers rejoice

BY: Y Bala Murali Krishna

Panaji, July 21-2k6:  With the Indian Internet Service Providers
(ISPs) lifting the ”total blockade” imposed on blogs since July 14
on the directive of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in
the wake of the recent serial blasts on Mumbai suburban trains,
thousands of bloggers are rejoiced over the decision.
The DoT sent a directive to the ISPs yesterday seeking
explaination for the blanket blockade instead of blocking specific
listed unintended websites/web pages as per its July 13 circular.
Blogs — a type of website where entries such as in a journal or
diaries are made often providing commentary or news on a particular
subject and may also contain text, images and links to other blogs
or websites pertaining to the said topic — were banned by the DoT
to prevent the bloggers from venting their ire against the blasts.
The DoT also asked the ISPs why no action should be taken
against them for not adhering to its circular. This was followed by
a furore over the issue with the ISPs blocking sites like the
Google’s blogger.com, yahoo’s geocities.com and typepad among others.
Country’s main information technology trade group National
Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) president
Kiran Karnik observed that the blockade was neither desirable nor
possible to impose censorship on the Net.
The bloggers had formed a group called ‘Bloggers Against
Censorship’ (BAC) and also considered of moving a public interest
litigation (PIL) against the Centre for the ‘arbitrary ban’ which it
said was an infringement on the freedom of speech and expression
under Article 19(1) of the Constitution.
Significantly, the www.censorship.wikia.com which champions the
cause of the victims of censorship world over, had become a resource
base for documenting the internet restrictions in India and voices
of the BAC community highlighting various aspects of the blockade.
The organisation is known for its readiness to sense the
censorship of any kind in any part of the world and highlights it in
its publications including the website. It had even documented the
infamous 1975 Emergency in India and the happenings.

Human Rights organisation Amnesty International also launched a
fresh global campaign against such blockade as reported in India and
China which, it feels, is violative of the fundamental rights of
citizens.
The campaign aims to claim back the web as a force for change in
the face of an increasing willingness on the part of technology
companies to aid censorship and repression.
From Iran to the Maldives and Cuba to Vietnam, governments are
both cracking down on the internet users from communicating their
views and denying them access to its wealth of information. Web
users are locked up, internet cafes are shut down, chat rooms are
policed and blogs deleted. Websites are blocked, foreign news banned
and search engines filter out sensitive results, the Amnesty
International averred.
”The internet can be a great tool for the promotion of human
rights — activists can tell the world about abuses in their country
at the click of a mouse. People have unprecedented access to
information from the widest range of sources,” said Amnesty
International statement.
Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Yahoo! and
Google are among the companies implicated in helping governments
censor the internet or track down individual users.
In 2004, Microsoft released information about Israeli nuclear
whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu to the Israeli authorities without
his knowledge or consent. The data was initially used to prosecute
Vanunu for having contact with foreign media.
”We are calling on internet users across the world to go to
http://irrepressible.info and sign a pledge calling on all
governments and companies to respect internet freedom,”  the AI
said.
”Internet companies often claim to be ethically responsible –
these pledges will highlight how their co-operation against
repression will make them complicit in human rights abuses and may
cause damage to their credibility,” the agency said.
The online pledges will be collected and presented to a key UN
meeting on the future of the internet in November 2006, it added. //EOM//

Cradle to Grave-IT initiative to develop information super-highway  in Goa
BY: Y.Bala Murali Krishna
Panaji, July 23-2k6:  “All Government services from the cradle to the grave.”

This is what the Goa government wants to offer to the citizens hrough its ambitious information technology initiative as part of ts drive to promote e-governance and transparency in dministration, approved by the Centre.

Interestingly, the government does not spend single paise for
investing in the ambitious Rs.70 crore project that aimed at
developing its broadband based information super-highway with connectivity to all its villages by December 2007.

“We facilitate promotion of the unique project through
private-public-participation, first of its kind in the country,”
says the government chief secretary Mr.J.P.Singh.

Be it getting a birth certificate, admission to schools and
colleges, study and caste certificates, examination results,
employment services, vehicle registration and driver’s licenses,
land records, marriage certificate, property registration, payment of taxes, municipal services, old age pensions, health care and death certificates.

The citizens could avail all these and other services through what they called -Mahiti Ghars (kiosks) – that work on the lines of the e-seva or citizens service centers run by private entrepreneurs like in Andhra Pradesh that provide the customers with a cluster of services including purchase of rail and cinema tickets.

At present, there are 30 such Internet service kiosks in the state and the number would reach 240 as the project advances providing the services to all 80,000 villages in the state.

“Goa will be a trail blazer and perhaps the first state in the
country to have the broadband facility reaching every nook and corner of the state using optical fibre cables and hi-fi wireless network by a service provider,” Mr. Singh told UNI.

Another unique feature of the project, he said, was that it provides a host of value added services such as video and movie on demand, and online games, through the Internet, thus avoiding the dish TV and Cable TV connectivity.

Other services included telephony, e learning, distance live
classroom education, preventive health care and telemedicine and diagnosis – that the services available in the most modern states of the developed countries like the US and Europe.

The basic charge to the household is about Rs.400 to Rs.500 per cent month and it could be as low as Rs.250 per month for all the basic services through what he termed as the “State Wide Area Network (SWAN)”

“In fact, we want to go beyond the concept of SWAN now in vogue in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, and Jharkhand while the process is underway in Rajasthan, Karnataka and Kerala to reach the villages.
But we want to reach all the villages in a short time with the
connectivity where the beneficiaries could run even a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) from his house,” he said.

The network, he said, initially contemplates providing the customers with 60 services, including to the business houses such as hotels, banks for their ATM network and hospitals, leave alone BPO’s and cyber cafés.

Nine of the 11 companies responded to the Expression of Interest for
the prestigious project had been short listed on the basis of the
minimum eligibility criteria. One of these companies would be
finalized for undertaking the task for which the pre-bid meeting is
slated to be held here on July 26.

The government would by September this year would finalise the
financial bids to be submitted by the bidders by August 16. The
short listed companies included  Airtel,Tata Consultancy Services,
Reliance Infocom, Tata Teleservice, Finolex Cables, Global
Teleservices, Aircel(Dishnet),UTL and ITI.

Christened Goa Broadband Project, it aims at building Information
Technology (IT)-enabled, efficient, accountable, transparent and
citizen-friendly government with a global thinking approach, says IT
advisor to the Government Mr.M.N.Rao.

Mr.Rao with rich experience in the IT sector in Andhra Pradesh, told
UNI that the IT initiatives of Goa government would make a
significant impact on the government, its people and the businesses
enterprises.

The short listed ISP would collect revenue from the government for
the services it had utilized for using the bandwidth, besides
business houses and the household.

Initially, the agreement provides for operating and maintaining the
services for 10 years with adequate provisions in the agreement to
check monopoly tendencies and violations of the agreement. The
infrastructure would be transferred to the government after the
10-year period.

The Hyderabad-based National Institute of Smart Governance had been
chosen as consultant for the entire SWAN project that envisages
provision of Data, Voice and video connectivity to government,
semi-government and academic institutions.

It provides 10 GBPS bandwidth for 55 offices at the state level, and
35 offices at the district level, 1GBPS bandwidth at 65 sites at
Taluka and Panchayat level and 240 sites at village level to start
with. The bandwidth ranges from 10 to 100 MBPS for 55,000 urban and
25,000 rural households besides business houses.

The first phase of connectivity from the state to Taluka level would
be completed by this year-end and upto village level by March 31,
next and upto household level by December 2007.

This project may trigger some protests from the local cable TV
operators, who collect huge “non-returnable initial security
deposit” of Rs.1000/- even as they had been charging the customer
with exorbitant monthly rental for minimum services, the officials
admit.

“After all, service to the citizens is our priority and ambition,
not a few cable operators who are known to be fleeing the customers
for a ransom. Thanks to the people-friendly technology,” they
averred. UNI/BM/1300hrs

The sole objective of this blog is to promote popular science writing- by journalists, students and scientists for the media – in a bid to promote science and technology and scientific temper which India needs in this globalised era.

This, I suppose, will also be an interactive tool for the participants of various science writing workshops being conducted under the aegis of the National Council for Science and Technology Communication(NCSTC) under the Union Ministry of Science & Technology.

Various other contributions could also be seen at my other blog http://popularsciencewriting.blogspot.com .

Unfortunately, the blogger.com had been blocked these days by the Government of India which claims to be the champion of free flow of information and Right to Information Act, even as respective governments failed to provide constitutional guarantee to the freedom of information as has been demanded by the journalist fraternity since India attained Independence. This reminds us of the dark days of the Emergency in 1975 when Censorship was official.

Dr.Y.Bala Murali Krishna