Day: August 23, 2012

Wage Disbursal Scheme under MGNREGS
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was notified in the remaining 274 districts of India from 1st April, 2008. The Act is now effective in the entire rural areas of the country covering 638 districts and has been renamed “The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)”. The objective of the Act is to provide for the enhancement of livelihood security of the households in rural areas of the country by providing at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment in every financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.
The scheme of disbursement of NREGS wages through post offices is operational in 19 postal Circles of the country (except Delhi, J&K and Tamilnadu Circles). Till 31st March, 2012, 5.59 crore MGNREGS accounts have been opened in post offices and wages amounting to Rs. 7,860 crore have been disbursed to MGNREGS beneficiaries during 2011-12 through 98,491 post offices across the country.
Main Features of Payment of Wages through Post Offices
Payment to be made through Savings Bank accounts of post offices (zero balance workers wage account).
Disbursement of wages within the prescribed time frame.
Provision for advance deposit of one month’s wage in the Head Post office of the District Headquarter.
Co-ordination meetings between Department and State Government authorities.
Data Collection for Rural Consumer Price Index
A mechanism has been worked out to calculate and disseminate the consumer price index with the help of data being collected for 1,181 villages through selected post offices throughout the country. The first set of consumer price indices was brought out in February 2011. India Post is thus playing a crucial role in providing Infrastructural support to enable the concerned government departments to design and implement policies to improve the well being of all the citizens of India.
Mail Network Optimization Project
Department of Post had initiated Mail Network Optimization Project in March 2010 with a view to streamline mail operations and to improve the quality of mail related services offered to the people. It involved optimization of the erstwhile mail network, standardization of processes and development of an effective performance monitoring system. As part of this project, the operational network for Speed Post and other categories of mail has been restructured leading to optimized network and simplified operations.
Speed Post is a premium product offered by the Department with time bound delivery and tracking facility. As part of the project, a major emphasis has been laid on providing complete tracking information for Speed Post items on the website (www.indiapost.gov.in) for the benefit of the people using Speed Post. As a result, in the last two years, the number of items having complete tracking information on the website has gone up from 63 lakhs to 2.78 Crores per month. Speed Post transit has improved by more than a day on an average across the network.
A comprehensive online monitoring system for Speed Post operations has been developed and performance of operational units is monitored in terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on a day-to-day basis.
(PIB Features.)
Inputs from the Department of Posts.

Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/utilization-of-postal-network/

M.V.S. Prasad Joint Director, PIB, Chennai.
Bioinformatics is attaining greater significance in the life sciences research and industry and hitherto unexplored areas of biology. Research in biotechnology, which is highly knowledge and capital intensive, has generated a deluge of information in this decade. To make use of this information effectively, there is a need for high speed and large bandwidth network.
Towards this end, the Department of Biotechnology has successfully established a high-speed and high-bandwidth network in the form of Virtual Public Network (VPN) named as BIOGRID INDIA. Eleven nodes have been established in the first phase, which are actively pursuing bioinformatics activities such as human resource development and R&D in bioinformatics besides, dissemination of biotechnology information to researchers in the country. This resource sharing helps in enhancing the value and usefulness of the BTIS, the only true resource sharing network in India.
BTISnet in a Nutshell
BTISnet a potential scientific network in the country comprises of more than 165 institutions having capable human resources and state of art infrastructure to carry out intensive research in bioinformatics and computational biology. More than 100 subject specific databases are currently available on the BTISnet.
Centres of BTISnet are networked and now some of them are being networked through National Knowledge Commission network. Eight new centres have been added to the BTISnet. NEBInet which comprises of 27 bioinformatics centres in North East states has opened up great opportunities in biotechnology for the North East Region of the country. Through this network it is now much simpler to generate and implement programs like biotech hubs, overseas associateship etc. Three major consortium projects on bioinformatics in TB, rice and mango have shown excellent progress during the last year.
Centres of Excellence
Six Centres of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology have been established as part of BTISnet. These Centres are well equipped with state of art infrastructure to support research. Each centre is responsible for developing a database in the identified thrust areas. Some of these efforts have received international recognition. The CoE at the Bose Institute, Kolkata is specialising in the areas like genome analysis, regulatory RNA stem cells, genomics and structural bioinformatics. The CoE at JNU, New Delhi is a part of the School of Computational and Integrative Sciences, with a major objective of development of human resource through teaching and research in the frontier area of computational biology, bioinformatics and systems biology.
The CoE at Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai is specialising in the areas like structural bioinformatics, proteomics, data mining and computer aided drug design. The Centre at the University of Pune, conducts M.Sc. course in bioinformatics. The Centre has developed 3 major databases namely viral protein structural database, antigen antibody genomics and viral genome resources.
R&D
The bioinformatics centres are being extensively used for intensive research by the hosts and neighbouring institutions. In addition scientists at bioinformatics centres have carried out research in gene analysis, protein structure prediction and engineering, modelling, macromolecular assembly, evolutionary biology, developing tools for peptide vaccine, new tools for data mining etc.
The Department of Biotechnology is also supporting long-term teaching programs on bioinformatics and BIOGRID will be useful in sharing teaching materials, to deliver lectures through video conferencing-virtual classrooms besides synergizing research in biotechnology and bioinformatics. The mirror sites of internationally recognized genomic databases such as Protein Data Bank (PDB), Plant Genome Data Banks, Databases of European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and public domain bioinformatics software packages are also available on the BIOGRID. The advantage of mirroring these databases in India is to provide unhindered mining of high quality data from well established primary and secondary information sources. The BTISnetwork will act as a knowledge pathway for discoveries in biotechnology and bioinformatics.
(PIB Features.) with inputs from the Dept. of Biotechnology.

Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/biotechnology-information-network/