Group items tagged

National Income 1.0 Gross Domestic Product 1.1 State Domestic Product 1.2 Input- Output Table Agriculture * Land utilisation statistics * Area under principal crops * Production of principal crops * Average yield of principal crops * Availability of food grains * Net and gross area irrigated Transport * Railways- General statistics * Total road length by surface, Number of registered motor vehicles * Civil Aviation- Domestic services-International services * Shipping Industry * Production of selected items of major manufacturing industries * Index number of industrial production (Base:1993-94=100) * Annual survey of industries: Employment and value added -Statewise :Factory sector - 2003-04 & 2004-05 * Performance of Small Scale Industries Sector Energy * Primary source of energy (production) * Electricity: Generated and sold * Rural electrification in India Communication * Posts Telegraphs and Telephones Employment * Employment in public and private sector * Employment in Railways, Insurance * Factory employment * employment in banking,plantation Poverty & Employment Tourism * Number of foreign tourists to India by country of nationality * Prices * Index number of wholesale prices (By major groups and sub-groups) (Base: 1993-94=100) * Index number of consumer prices - Industrial workers (Base: 1982=100) * Index number of consumer prices - Agricultural labourers (Base: 1986-87=100) * Index number of consumer prices - Urban non-manual employees (Base: 1984-85=100) Social Statistics Balance of Payments * Overall balance of payments - Current account. * Overall balance of payments - Capital account. * Financing of payment deficits by plan periods * Foreign exchange reserves * External assistance - authorization and utilization classified by source Public Finance * Overall budgetary posit

"While the ban of Chinese mobiles has discouraged the growth of the shanzhai handsets in India, they still stand a chance if they provide proper IMEI numbers and if they partner with companies like Karbonn. Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst, Gartner, said, "Established global device manufacturers are losing ground due to fierce competition from local and Chinese manufacturers in the low-cost segment." He added, "Price remains the main criteria when buying any consumer electronic device in India, including a mobile device. Carrier strategies, lower tariffs and/or third-generation (3G) data plans will continue to shape the mobile device market in India." This is really encouraging for the shanzhai players."

The National Election Watch (NEW) is a nationwide campaign comprising of more than 1200 NGO and other citizen led organizations working on electoral reforms, improving democracy and governance in India. National Election Watch is active in almost all states of India and has done election watch for all states and Lok Sabha elections since ADR, along with couple other organizations, won the PIL in Supreme Court in 2002 to making disclosure of educational, financial and criminal background of electoral candidates mandatory. Mapunity is a partner.

Asha Achuthan has an interesting series of posts over at the CIS website, a work in progress that she writes will: * lay down the historical and geo-political contexts for the use of technology in India * engage with existing concepts like context, postcoloniality, organicity, and exclusion that have come into use with the critical responses to technology in India * offer a conceptual vocabulary that explains the tools being used to engage with the question, and * suggest strategies for testing of the hypotheses being set forward in the paper, as well as parallel modes of generating 'critical debate' on them.

Smita Srinivas is Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia University, Director of the Technological Change Lab (TCLab), and a Faculty Associate of the South Asian Institute (SAI), Columbia University. Current and past projects include primary research in India and Finland, and comparative and collaborative work in the USA, Brazil, South Africa, and elsewhere. She advises students for their M.S. and PhD. dissertations on diverse settings: Yemen, Kenya, S. Korea, Mexico, Spain, Germany, USA, Uganda, India, and others.

According to department of telecom (DoT) sources, an inter-ministerial group meeting has been called on August 20 and will be attended by senior officials from DRDO, the Cabinet secretariat, security agencies, National Technical Research Organization (NTRO), Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT ) and DoT, to review the internet monitoring systems deployed nationwide by C-DOT . It seems there are new requests from the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and National Investigation Agency (NIA) for internet monitoring systems. Internet traffic in India is monitored at international internet gateways using C-DOT systems. Unlike mobile voice and data traffic, the government does not issue specific warrants for intercepting and monitoring messages on specific targets in case of internet services. The government has access to these through CDOT-deployed systems and can use them to access messages based on the needs of security agencies. Internet traffic monitoring also raises some serious issues of consumer privacy, because unlike mobile telephones , the operator has no role in carrying out specific interceptions.

"Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has not issued any orders/guidelines in respect of ban of mobiles manufactured in China and operating in the country for want of valid International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. However, Department of Telecom (DOT) has issued instructions to Telecom Service Providers that calls from mobile handsets with any IMEI number which is not available in the latest updated IMEI database of Global System for Mobile Association (GSMA) alongwith without IMEI or all zeroes IMEI are not processed and rejected with effect from 24 Hrs. of 30th November 2009. This information was given by the Minister of State for Communications & Information Technology, Shri Sachin Pilot in written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today. "

The Act contains some contentious provisions - such as Clause 79, which has been widely criticised as being "draconian". Some provisions recommended by the Parliamentary Committee had been rejected by the Union government - particularly Clause 73 relatin g to cyber cafes maintaining a registry of persons and Web sites logged into. The Bill has been passed in some undue haste, for reasons not very clear. In this regard, the points raised by the Opposition are valid because the Act lacks clarity in many re spects, and seems to have been drafted without adequate legal and, more important, technical inputs. It must be emphasised that the optimistic projections by organisations such as NASSCOM (the National Association for Software and Service Companies), that the Act would boost the volume of e-commerce in India from the current Rs.450 crores to over Rs.2,5 00 crores and to Rs.10,000 crores by 2002, are quite misplaced. First, in the Indian context, much of the e-commerce involves neither business-to-client (B2C) transactions nor business-to-business (B2B) transactions but largely revenue from advertising o n the Web. Therefore, it becomes difficult to term precisely what e-commerce is and to quantify its value. Secondly, the Act itself is not going to alter greatly the situation because, for one, as legal experts point out, even in the absence of the Act t he judiciary would not have dismissed an evidence just because it is in the nature of an e-mail or an electronic document. It would have been treated as circumstantial evidence to the case at hand, and the provisions in the Indian Penal Code and the Crim inal Procedure Code have sufficient interpretative room to provide for prosecution if such evidence is conclusive.

"Google India Elections Centre". Provides constituency stats, HT news, quotes from politicos, map of "Bangalore Central" constituency, etc.

"The country's existing information framework is scattered, with each state establishing its own data centre for automating land records, transport and municipal applications, among others. The PII plans to host all software applications on a cloud (internet), increasing efficiency and speed as well as slashing costs. "Government schemes costing about Rs 130,000 crore annually exist in silos. There is no single delivery point for citizens," said a presentation highlighting the PII's need. "The PII will consolidate about 100 schemes of India, spread across 75 departments and 35 states into a single information infrastructure." Mr Pitroda said duplicity in data will thus be removed. "Each department in the country wants to make its own software, even if it does exactly the same thing," he said. "

"First of all, keep in mind that it's not only stickers-or, for that matter, PCs and dishwashers and insurance policies and designer coffee-that become commodities. Every organization faces the challenge. IBM is discovering that even its traditional discrete consulting services are slowly becoming commoditized, a term IBM itself uses. Companies like Wipro-based in Bangalore, India-are replicating some of IBM's consultative offerings at much lower prices, which is why, to IBM's chagrin, companies like Louis Vuitton and Target are turning to Wipro for basic information technology and data-management expertise."

This part of the report is false: "Noting that many countries have complained about the Google Earth application, he said that pursuant to the controversy the internet company had agreed to "fuzzy and low-resolution or distorted" images of sensitive military and scientific establishments on the web."

Examples of Indian government using social media tools.

The latest debate in the legal world is that intellectual property right (IPR) laws, meant to protect original creations, are serving private and not public interest. In order to highlight this fact, two students from Gujarat National Law University (GNLU), Gandhinagar, have authored a book on IPR laws. The book, Copyright Law Deskbook Knowledge, Access and Development, by Akhil Prasad and Aditi Agarwala examines the growing significance of IPR in today's knowledge-based economy. "In the chapter 'Debunking the Myth,' we have argued that the term intellectual property is a misnomer and should be replaced with the term intellectual asset. The term 'property' is tilted more towards private interests," says Prasad. The duo has also drawn attention to the fact that currently converting any book into Braille comes under copyright infringement and should be changed. "Whenever you convert a book into any other form without the author's knowledge, it is infringement of the copyright law and this holds true for books converted into Braille as well. Since it is difficult to take permission for each book before it is converted into Braille, we have drawn attention to the fact that this issue needs to be addressed," says Agarwala. Both Prasad and Agarwala started taking interest in IPR laws while pursuing their internship in Mumbai. "We had prepared an exhaustive 70-page petition on IPR during our internship. When we showed it to our former registrar he suggested we convert it into a booklet. However, we soon realised that there was a lot to write about and many issues needed to be addressed. So, we decided to author a 400-page book instead," says Agarwala.

Recently, countries from China and Brazil to Malaysia and South Africa have passed laws promoting the patenting of publicly funded research [1,2], and a similar proposal is under legislative consideration in India [3]. These initiatives are modeled in part on the United States Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 [4]. Bayh-Dole (BD) encouraged American universities to acquire patents on inventions resulting from government-funded research and to issue exclusive licenses to private firms [5,6], on the assumption that exclusive licensing creates incentives to commercialize these inventions. A broader hope of BD, and the initiatives emulating it, was that patenting and licensing of public sector research would spur science-based economic growth as well as national competitiveness [6,7]. And while it was not an explicit goal of BD, some of the emulation initiatives also aim to generate revenues for public sector research institutions [8]. We believe government-supported research should be managed in the public interest. We also believe that some of the claims favoring BD-type initiatives overstate the Act's contributions to growth in US innovation. Important concerns and safeguards-learned from nearly 30 years of experience in the US-have been largely overlooked. Furthermore, both patent law and science have changed considerably since BD was adopted in 1980 [9,10]. Other countries seeking to emulate that legislation need to consider this new context.

* Datum Conversion Package * Tool to generate Metadata as per NSDI standards in 'XML' format * Tool to load Metadata Records from XML file into PostGreSQl Database * NNRMS Viewer

"Where then do solutions lie? Not in seeing any particular tool, movement, struggle or law as the magic wand. That only takes us to the same mindset which has resulted in our democratic institutions becoming perverted versions of what they were meant to be. Democracy in the last 50 years has been manipulated so that democratic participation has been reduced to a vote once every five years. Asserting one's right to participate in decision-making in an everyday sense, rather than once every five years, carries with it the responsibility of using that space. The dispossessed are always prepared to seize any new space. Indian democracy will only reflect the peoples' voice if it changes its emphasis from the present representative character to a genuine participation of the people themselves. And here lies the burden on all of us. The battle is for more than a right to ask, more than a right to monitor; indeed it is an important first step in an assertion to be heard and to call the bluff of a democratic system. By the people? Of the people? For the people?"

"In fact, more than combating corruption, the RTI campaign can serve as an effective tool to control the arbitrary use of power, and combat the failure of regulatory mechanisms in maintaining the rule of law. In all arenas - whether in economic policy or human rights - the need to make the matter public can act as a constraint on misgovernance. In this framework, the right to information is both a basic principle and a tool to enhance the political participation of ordinary citizens, where ethics and accountability work both ways - for the government to inform and people themselves to be more ethical in public life. By reinserting public ethics into our political discourse, it reinforces a position that no real alternative politics is possible without firmly establishing public ethics."