Day: September 20, 2012

MNS:- Defence Minister Shri AK Antony has said that the role of fishing community is vital in strengthening of coastal security mechanism. Inaugurating the three-day long, 31st Annual Coast Guard Commanders’ Conference here today, he said that community interaction programme is to be given impetus in order to sensitize the fishing community on the prevailing security situation and to develop them to be the “eyes and ears” for intelligence gathering.
Highlighting the expansion and strengthening of the Coast Guard, he said, the Coast Guard Development Plan have been approved and adequate funds have been provided. Shri Antony said, “The service is on course to double its assets and capacity building in the next four-five years. A Coast Guard Regional Headquarters (North East) and five Coast Guard Stations have been established. By the end of the current financial year, another six sanctioned stations are also likely to be established”.Adding further, he said that the phase-I of the Coastal Surveillance Network project is nearing completion. He said the system will indeed provide additional measures towards electronic surveillance.
“We aim to achieve near-gap-free electronic surveillance along our coasts and towards this end, Phase-II of the project will be started soon after the completion of the first phase”, he remarked. He commended all the Coast Guard personnel for their commitment, courage and involvement while discharging their duties and said “maritime security infrastructure, as it stands today, is quite robust and capable of handling various security challenges at sea”.
The Director General, Indian Coast Guard, Vice Admiral MP Muralidharan, in his address highlighted the progress made by the Coast Guard in acquisition cases of various types of ships and aircrafts, development of infrastructure, induction of manpower in the service and enhanced efforts for surveillance of the coast and the sea areas. 01 Pollution Control Vessel, 04 Inshore Patrol Vessels, 02 Air Cushion Vessels, 01 Interceptor Boat and 04 Interceptor Crafts have been inducted into the service. He said that the Coast Guard aims to achieve a force level of 150 surface platforms by the year 2018.
One Dornier Squadron has been established at Porbandar since the last Commanders` Conference. Establishing of 02 Air Stations, 05 Air Enclaves and 04 Dornier Squadrons has also been prioritized.
The conference will help the Coast Guard Commanders in analysis of the operational capabilities, deployment of forces and preparations for the future challenges. It will also provide an opportunity to the Commanders to introspect the standards achieved in the wide spectrum of Coast Guard responsibilities.

Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/antony-inaugurates-31st-coast-guard-commanders-conference/

MNS:- After the launch of NRHM, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has taken several steps for strengthening health care facilities by integrating AYUSH systems in national health care delivery systems. The integration is facilitated by appointing or co-locating AYUSH doctors & supporting staff and creating infrastructure according to local needs.
There were 640 districts, 6431 blocks and 638588 villages incorporating 605 District Hospitals (DHs), 4535 Community Health Centres (CHCs) and 23673 Primary Health Centres (PHCs) till March 2011. Out of these, AYUSH facilities had been co-located with 416 District Hospitals, 2942 Community Health Centres and 9559 Primary Health Centres during 2011. About 68.76% District hospitals had been co-located with AYUSH facilities till 2011. All the District hospitals existing in the states and union territories of Goa, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Mizoram, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Lakshadweep and Puducherry had been co-located with AYUSH facilities, whereas, the states having more than 50% of the District hospitals co-located with AYUSH facilities were Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttarakhand., There had been no co-location of AYUSH facilities in the Districts hospitals of the remaining 12 states and union territories.
Nearly 65% Community Health Centre’s had been co-located with AYUSH facilities till 2011. All the CHCs existing in the states and union territories of Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Nagaland, Orissa, Manipur, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu, Lakshadweep and Puducherry had been co-located with AYUSH facilities., whereas, the states having more than 50% of the CHCs co-located with AYUSH facilities were Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Punjab, Tripura and West Bengal. The states having more than 25% but less than 50% of the CHCs co-located with AYUSH facilities were Arunachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The states having less than 25% CHCs co-located with AYUSH facilities were Madhya Pradesh only. No co-location of AYUSH facilities had been observed in CHCs in the remaining 8 states and union territories.
About 40.4% Primary Health Centre’s had been co-located with AYUSH facilities till 2011. All the PHC existing in the Union Territory of D&N Haveli, Daman & Diu and Puducherry, Jammu and Kashmir, A& N Islands, and Lakshadweep have been co-located. The States/ Union Territories having more than 50% of the PHCs co-located with AYUSH facilities were Goa, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Manipur, Orissa, Rajasthan, Tamilnadu and Tripura, States having more than 25% but less than 50% of the PHCs co-located with AYUSH facilities, were Karnataka, Meghalaya West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. The states and union territories having less than 25% of the Primary Health Centres co-located with AYUSH facilities were Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/integration-of-ayush-in-health-care-system-under-national-rural-health-mission/

MNS:- The Vice President of India Shri M. Hamid Ansari re-launched the “Frontline” magazine at a function here today. He commended the editors and publishers for this initiative aimed at retaining relevance in changing times for a newer readership. He wished ‘Frontline’ continued success in the service of discerning readers.”
Following is the text of the Vice President’s address :
“I may be forgiven for admitting that I am moderately conservative and tolerably radical – conservative in habits and radical in thinking. For this reason, I was less than enthused when the Shri Venkitesh Ramakrishnan met me with the suggestion that I attend today’s re-launch function.
I could not help recalling the old maxim don’t fix what is not broke. To me personally, ‘Frontline’ has always been a stimulant to the mind apart from providing good reading on most matters that I care to spend time on. The need for a remix in Bollywood terms therefore did not arise. Nor was there a need to replace persuasion with titillation. I was assured that the change would be conservatively radical rather than explicitly so! The presence here of Mr. N. Ram and Professor Romila Thapar provides further reassurance.
Having jettisoned my misgivings, I am happy to be here today for the re-launch of the ‘Frontline’. I understand that in its new avatar the magazine would have attractive photo essays on art, culture, heritage, wildlife, environment and land & people. It will also have new columns on media and literature, snapshots on developments in India, a science notebook, apart from in-depth analyses of the social, political and economic issues of the day.
This audience knows that the ‘Hindu Group’ has a rich legacy, and current practice, of sustaining its foundational motto of ‘fairness and justice’. ‘Frontline’ subscribes to it in full measure and will, I am confident, continue to do so. The theme of the debate scheduled for today, on some of the core values of our Constitution, is sufficiently serious, focused and relevant, and testifies to it.
In today’s age, the audio-visual media has emerged as a dominant medium for quenching the thirst of the target audience for real time news on current affairs, culture and entertainment. Despite this, there remains a real and popular demand for serious publications on topical issues which cannot be substituted by the ‘breaking news’ culture and short-attention span snippets in the domain of the electronic media.
I commend the editors and publishers for this initiative aimed at retaining relevance in changing times for a newer readership. I wish ‘Frontline’ continued success in the service of discerning readers.”

Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/vice-president-re-launches-frontline-magazine/

MNS:- The Dept. of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Min. of Communications & IT has doubled Raj Bhasha fortnight celebrations by gifting further technology support to Indian languages. Sh J Satyanarayana, Secretary, DeitY, launched here today SANDHAN, the Indian language search engine for tourism domain. This will fill the wide gap that exists in fulfilling the information needs of Indians not conversant with English- estimated at 90% of the population.
Unveiling the search engines for Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, the Secretary said six years of research has resulted in this milestone but this is only the beginning. He said for making the search engines successful, it is equally important to develop and promote content in Indian languages. Sh Satyanarayana said the real success would be when even village level e-services would be available in local languages.
SANDHAN has been developed by 120 researchers of 12 institutions over a period of 6 years led by Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharya under the supervision of TDIL DeitY. The project aims at satisfying the user information need through text documents present in the web. This search engine captures the information in the form of a query in one of the 5 Indian ‘query’ languages— Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. The query is processed to retrieve a set of relevant documents of the same language from crawled data in tourism domain from the World Wide Web (WWW). These retrieved documents are presented to the user in the form of an ordered list based on the relevance of the document.
Although designed mainly for tourism, sectors such as business and academia would also benefit from SANDHAN. It can also be deployed as part of e-governance and e-learning.
The following are the salient features of SANDHAN
• System is developed to satisfy the user information need in tourism domain.
• User has the facility to submit a query either with the help of in-script keyboard or phonetic keyboard. In case of in-script keyboard, user can type using the keyboard or onscreen keyboard can be used to submit a query to the system.
• It has the capability to process the query based on its language and retrieves results ONLY from that language.
• Snippets generated for each of the retrieved document helps the user to understand the context of query terms in that document.
• Summary is generated for each retrieved document. This feature helps the user to get an idea about the overall content of the document without opening the same.
• An additional URL based semantic search facility is provided for Tamil language.
• A set of ten results are displayed at a time to the user to increase the readability.
• Many of the Indian language web pages are in custom fonts that make the system difficult for retrieving documents. SANDHAAN uses a font transcoder that converts the custom fonts into Unicode fonts for processing.
SANDHAN is a mission mode project of a consortium of academic & research institutions, and industry partners. The institutes involved are IIT Bombay (Consortium leader), CDAC Noida (Co-Consortium leader), IIT Kharagpur, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology Gandhinagar, Anna University-Centre for Electronics, Anna University-Knowledge-based Computing Centre, CDAC Pune, Gauhati University, Indian Institute of Information Technology Bhubaneswar, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, ISI Kolkata and Jadhavpur University. It is conceptualized, evolved and funded as a National-level project in the emerging area of Information Retrieval and Access in Indian Languages by Dept of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY).
SANDHAN project has been put together by Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL), a flagship programme of DeitY involved in research, development, standardization and proliferation of Language Technology in India in 22 Constitutionally-recognized Indian languages. TDIL Programme is also associated with international standardization bodies like the Unicode Consortium , W3C , IETF and ELRA.
The link for SANDHAN is www.tdil-dc.in/sandhan
Senior officers of DeitY and other stakeholders were present on the occasion.

Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/search-in-hindi-bengali-marathi-tamil-and-telugu-enabled-for-tourism-sector/

MNS:- Union Rural Development Minister Shri Jairam Ramesh said that if the issue of land rights of tribals would have been handled effectively in the country, the naxal menace could have been tackled in an effective fashion. Addressing the State Revenue Ministers Conference on Modernization of Land Records here, Shri Ramesh said that he also favoured the idea of Fast Track Courts to settle the land rights of tribals in a speedy fashion. He said that this issue will be taken up with the Law Ministry soon. He also called for the replication of the Andhra Pradesh model, where para-legal army helps the tribals to fight court cases. In many instances, the land belonging to the poor tribals were being grabbed forcibly by the powerful vested interests and therefore there is need for the proper survey of the land and modernization of the land records. The Minister also promised flexibility in spending of funds by the state governments and said that a detailed guideline will be issued soon in this regard and added that productivity of land is also an important issue. Referring to the Bhoodan Land, the Minister said out of the 5 million hectares of such land only 2.5 million hectares got distributed to the poor and the needy till date and a detailed survey is needed to ascertain the facts in this regard.

Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/jairam-pitches-for-fast-track-courts-to-settle-land-right-issues-in-naxal-areas/