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Aiming to provide `international' education, the company is assessing locations like Kolkata, Guwahati, Siliguri, Burdwan, Durgapur, Asansol and Kharagpur in Eastern region of India to set-up schools on franchisee model.

Exploring franchising options in the region, Edify Education has already established two `Edify Kids' schools at Salt Lake and Nagerbazar in Kolkata for academic year 2010-11.

Edify Education, promoted by DRS Group, commenced its operations in 2010 - 11 academic year by setting-up 3 schools in Ranipet (Tamil Nadu), Nagpur and Amaravati (Maharashtra).

Source: Sify.com Edify to set up schools in WB, NE

It outlines how climate change and global warming are pushing these areas "to the brink of civic disaster".

This first-of-its-kind study was conducted in some of the major cities in the country and identified Kolkata's environment as the most vulnerable and has a grim forecast for the Kolkata of 2050.

The study warns that those who have either bought or plan to buy homes along EM Bypass and other areas of the eastern fringes, like Tiljala, Topsia, Tangra and Pagladanga (Wards 58, 59, 65, 66) could be the worst hit by environmental degradation because of rapid real estate growth sans a matching improvement in civic amenities.

State chief environment officer Debal Roy said the World Bank study factored in Kolkata's social, economic and environmental circumstances. While identifying areas vulnerable to climate change, the team considered the state of a locality's drainage and sewerage systems and its hygiene standards. They were alarmed to find that ponds in eastern fringes are being filled up to make way for buildings that are being constructed in an unplanned manner in an area without a proper drainage system. Repeated waterlogging and accumulation of garbage is slowly degrading the environment.

Source: Times Of India Kolkata On Brink Of Civic Disaster: World Bank Study

In times of cut-throat competition for seats, every mark slashed will cost students dearly. One who scores 90% in aggregate might end up with just 70% on his marksheet. The school authorities believe it will be a stronger deterrent than corporal punishment.

In fact, from the next session, St James' is introducing 'discipline' as a subject in the curriculum -- perhaps a first in the city. The thumb rule: behave like a brat and get docked, behave well and get grace marks.

Offences have been placed under two categories. A major offence will be punished with the deduction of 15-20% marks from the aggregate and for minor offences, a student will lose 5-10% marks.

Stealing, misbehaving with teachers, cheating in examinations, bullying other kids frequently, using abusive language inside the classroom and damaging school property will also be treated as major offences. The harshest punishment will be denial of promotion to the next class.Minor offences, that include bunking classes, lying to teachers, habitually coming late to school, irregular attendance and not bringing books according to the time table. Habitual offenders will get 'compound

Documents with TOI reveal that the land is spread over two mouzas Ganragari and Mahisbathan in North 24-Parganas. Canopy Projects Private Ltd had this land under possession, close to Olive Garden, an upcoming property, for all these days till the Vedic Village case. The recovery of arms from this high-profile resort exposed the land grabbing by realtors in the once-remote areas of Rajarhat, outside the New Town area.

The land department has asked Canopy Projects officials to "appear before the block land and land revenue officer, Rajarhat, on August 23 and furnish a statement describing which portion of the land under ceiling area the company wants to retain and specify the stretches of land it opts to surrender." Buying land from farmers by floating a company has been going on in the suburbs in collusion with politicians both from the ruling party and the Opposition till the government chose to mend its ways after being rebuffed by farmers in the panchayat, municipal and Lok Sabha polls.

The benami plots identified at Ganragari and Mahishbathan point to a controversial property under Canopy Infrastructure Development.

Source: Times Of India Realtors slapped benami notice

For improving rural connectivity in 18 districts of West Bengal, an amount of Rs.279.89 crore has been sanctioned for 100 rural roads (68 village roads, 24 other district roads and 8 major district roads), according to a release. A total road length of 702.34 km is expected to be created under these projects. Non-recurring employment generation is expected to be 104.91 lakh man days. The projects are likely to benefit 2083 villages.

For the Sundarbans area, an amount of Rs.4.62 crore has been sanctioned for a rural bridge project in South 24 Parganas. The total span of the bridge is 67.20 m. Non-recurring employment generation is expected to be 1.73 lakh man days and the project would benefit a population of 1.30 lakh in 14 villages.

Since inception of the RIDF, NABARD has sanctioned 32,998 projects with a loan component of Rs.6600.75 crore to West Bengal.

Major projects which received financial support from NABARD for creation of infrastructure in the State include rural connectivity Rs.3463.89 crore (52 per cent), irrigation and flood protection Rs.1490.42 crore (23 per cent), social sector Rs. 325.86 crore (5 per cent) and other sectors Rs. 1320.58 crore (20 per cent).

"There is ample scope for handholding between the CMC and the private sector in not only alleviating the housing shortage, but also to ensure better safety and security in old residential building blocks," mayor Sovan Chatterjee said after inaugurating the Credai-Bengal property fair Home Front 2010 on Saturday.

The new mayor, who also sought greater private participation in affordable housing and slum redevelopment, was presented by Credai's state chapter the Mumbai model being followed by Maharashtra Chamber of Housing Industry -- a public-private initiative with the Maharashtra government to redevelop the Dharavi slum.

Promising to find a replica for Calcutta, Chatterjee said: "There are many housing schemes being implemented by the CMC under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission for the weaker sections of society. Private developers should come forward to help us in this cause."

Source: Realty Plus Calcutta Mayor's call to realty

Admissions are done on the basis of Common Admission Test (CAT) or depending on chosen specializations, alternative tests in lieu of the CAT as specified in the table given below, followed by an interview to be held in late March/early April 2011. Applicant is required to have taken the appropriate test(s) no earlier than January 24, 2009, and the test score(s) should be valid on January 24, 2011.

Date of Exam
CAT Date - October 27, 2010 till November 24, 2010 (Candidates with the following qualification are exempted for appearing CAT: an applicant who is a graduate of any one of the two-year full-time Postgraduate (PG) programmes of any one of the Indian Institutes of Management with a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of no less than 6.00/9.00 (or its equivalent), or a degree-holder of the PGDBM Programme of IIM Calcutta with a CGPA of no less than 6.5/9.00 does not need to take any Admission Test. Applicant has to pay the application fee, and meet the application deadline. After submission of application forms, the selection procedure followed for such a candidate will be the same to that of all other candidates).

Test Centers
N/A

Fee
See the prospectus

How to Apply
Interested candidates can download the application form from the IIM Calcutta's official website: http://www.iimcal.ac.in/programs/FPM/. One can obtain the same in person from the Fellow Programme Office, IIM Calcutta, Diamond Harbour Road, Kolkata 700104. The duly filled forms must be submitted along with a crossed DD of Rs 300 payable to Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, in a bank of Kolkata. SC/ST/OBC applicant need not pay the application fee. They have to send an attested photocopy of his/her SC/ST/OBC certificate. For each area of specialization applied for, two letters of recommendation in the prescribed format are required. Blank forms for recommendation letters, and instructions on how to return them, are contained in the application forms. For further details one can visit the institute's official website: http://www.iimcal.ac.in/.

Note: Candidates applying for two areas of specialization are required to submit two separate application forms. However, a single payment of the application fee of Rs 300 will be sufficient for each applicant, as long as they submit the two application forms at the same time.

Last Date of submitting Application Form
January 24, 2011

Contact address:
IIM Calcutta
KolkataWest Bengal

Dr. Abdullah said that the Punjab and Haryana governments alone had spent Rs. 6,500 crores as diesel subsidy to farmers for running sets to pump out ground water for irrigation. He said that his Ministry was exploring the possibility of using solar power to generate energy to be used by these pumps.

"Apart from bringing down the spending on diesel subsidy, this would also reduce the use of fossil fuel," Dr. Abdullah said at a function organised by the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce and Industry on `Opportunities and Scope of Renewable Energy in west Bengal'.

Dr. Abdullah also said that his Ministry had invested in a project to run 100 telecom towers on solar power.

"There are 8,000 telecom towers in the country that have generator sets running on diesel....If the project is effective, it will gradually be extended to develop others," he said.

Describing the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission as the "most important" of the eight missions in the National Action Plan for Climate Change, Dr. Abdullah said that expertise had to be found to achieve the mission's goal of producing 20,000 megawatts of power by 2022.

Source: The Hindu By Ananya Dutta `Solar power to run telecom towers, agricultural pumps'

"We are talking to the health ministry. The IIT-K proposal will be presented before the Cabinet for the approval of an amendment to the IIT statute. It could take 2-3 months," said Pratima Dikshit, director of technical education, Union HRD ministry.

"We are waiting for the permission from the central government. Union HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, is very keen on this. Now, it will go to the Union Cabinet for its approval," said AK Majumdar, deputy director of IIT-K.

The existing IIT Act that governs the Indian Institutes of Technology does not allow the institutes to branch out into other streams. "The Act has to be amended by Parliament, which we hope, will be done at the earliest," said Majumdar.

Source: Business-standard By Goutam Ghosh IIT-Kharagpur hopes to get Cabinet nod for medical school

The Aviva Great Wall of Education, presented by The Telegraph, will be built at City Centre (Salt Lake) from September 1 to 5.

Schools and citizens can donate books at the site to be built into a wall and then distributed among children who can't afford to buy them.

The first time Calcutta got to hear about the event was at The Telegraph School Awards for Excellence on Saturday, a fitting platform for the announcement of an initiative to support the pursuit of education against all odds.

Barry O'Brien, the convener of the awards, announced the Aviva Great Wall of Education and appealed to schools to donate books for the cause. "The Telegraph Education Foundation supports the endeavour," said O' Brien.

The book donation drive for underprivileged children was launched by Aviva India in Delhi on November 11, 2009, national education day, and a wall with over 1,23,000 books was built.

Source: The Telegraph By CHANDREYEE CHATTERJEE Build A Great Wall of Books

Not quite test tubes or petri dishes; geo tubes are the new panacea. Stacks of geo tubes filled with sludge dredged out of a muddy river will be part of the process of manufacturing that most contentious and presumably precious of commodities -- land. The politics of land acquisition has reached a point in India of which West Bengal is a part that infrastructure creation is stalled, investors are wary and the land losers, their advocates and patrons prefer obstruction and agitation.

With land as a stumbling block nothing much can happen. Therefore, the Kolkata Port Trust desperately in need of a deeper port than is currently available has hit upon the idea of enlarging Sagar Island, at the tip of the Sundarbans to set up a port. Land will be created out of the silt that is dredged from the Hooghly and with the new land where there are no land losers, the port authorities can develop the infrastructure needed to serve sea-going vessels with a draft of nearly 11.5 m. The extension will be able to handle about 60 million tonnes of cargo every year.

So urgent is the need that the port authorities have also planned to manufacture another 200 acres of land at Shalukhali in East Midnapore for the extension of the Haldia docks. This stands on its head the age-old belief that land cannot be produced out of thin air. In other words, necessity is the mother of inventions.

Source: The Pioneer By Shikha Mukerjee Manufacturing Land To Avoid Controversy

The policy decision has been taken and it awaits approval of the cabinet on September 22, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today said while inaugurating a Haj House-cum-Empowerment Centre at Kaikhali near Kolkata airport.

"If SC and ST population can come under reservation, why not the minorities like Muslims?" he said adding that the state government was encouraged by recommendations of the Ranganath Mishra Commission in this regard.

The Rs 10-crore Haj House is the second of its kind in the state after the one situated near Park Circus in the city, which made West Bengal the only state to have two Haj Houses for the benefit of Haj pilgrims, he said.

Bhattacharjee said there was need for such a facility to cater to the growing number of Haj pilgrims in the state. While 1,410 pilgrims went to Haj in 1985, the number rose to 10,272 in 2010.

Built by the state government's PWD department, the G-plus-seven-storeyed building can accommodate pilgrims for three months during the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Source: dnaindia.com Backward Muslims in Bengal to get OBC certificates soon

"It is a massive step in helping the city towards the game," said Saurav Ghoshal, India's highest ever ranked squash player and currently holds 26th position in the world.

"This event will take the Indian squash forward and make us perform well at important events," Saurav remarked.

The East Zone Tournament will be played at the Calcutta Racket Club in Kolkata between Aug 30 to Sept 4 for both boys and girls.

Source: www.indiablooms.com Inter School Squash tournament launched in Kolkata

SAFE chairperson Dipayan Dey said this will be the first project of its kind to preserve a Ramsar site through a private initiative. "We are working to kick off the project, possibly from next month. The total project cost will be around `35 lakh," he said.

The first project will be to cultivate and harvest medicinal plants in the wetland area on a massive scale. The main focus of the project should be on motivation, training, information dissemination, technical and financial assistance for raising nurseries, cultivation, harvesting, storage, processing and marketing with collectors and farmers. The second project will be to conserve the endangered fish species.

As it talks tough with Research in Motion (RIM) -- the makers of BlackBerry -- to provide access to the encrypted data flowing through its network, the government is contemplating measures to ban Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Google, Skype and Yahoo if they don't up their servers in India and give access to intelligence agencies.

 Recently, agencies had problems retrieving data from servers of some of these ISPs located abroad while tracking mails of terror suspects and, in some cases, of those involved in money laundering.

Designated agencies such as Intelligence Bureau, National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) or Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) monitor mails of suspects on a routine basis. However, they are hamstrung when such mails are deleted from the mailbox of a suspect. Such messages can only be retrieved through imaging at the mother server.

ISP servers have images of all deleted mails for a certain period. Even if you delete mail from your mailbox, such messages can be retrieved from the server through imaging. India now wants all ISPs to set up at least one server each in the country for all domestic traffic so that intelligence agencies can have direct access to such deleted data through imaging whenever they want.

Source: Times Of India By Pradeep Thakur After BlackBerry, Govt Turns Heat On Internet Service Providers (ISPs)