pore's People's Association, a statutory board under Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, to provide annual Application Management Services for two years.
Under the agreement, TCS would develop and maintain People's Association's business and citizen centric applications including mission critical applications. It involves consolidating its multiple vendor environment allowing for reduced maintenance costs and simplified system administration, said a press release.
This system would enable higher process efficiency and staff productivity across the organization. All these would contribute towards lower costs spent on application maintenance, while improving end user satisfaction and enhancing citizen experience with the agency.
Girija Pande, EVP and head, TCS Asia Pacific, said, "Our expertise in AMS, combined with our ability to deliver certainty of results would provide sustained value to People's Association."
He added that they installed strict quality control procedures and continued to drive more value for their Singaporean clients through increased service quality provided by their team of highly qualified people with local knowledge of culture and processes.
TCS bags multi-million dollar deal
Bharti Airtel gains over 1 per cent in afternoon trade
MUMBAI: Telecom major Bharti Airtel rose 1.22 per cent on the Bombay Stock Exchange amid looming uncertainty over its proposed deal with the
South African entity MTN, for which the exclusive discussions period is ending today.
Shares of Airtel climbed 1.22 per cent to Rs 424 on BSE and on the National Stock Exchange the scrip made a decent gain of 1.10 per cent to touch a high of Rs 423.75.
On the volume front, over 17.95 lakh shares of Airtel changed their hands on the two bourses.
Even though the exclusive talks period between the two companies ends today, a clear picture is yet to emerge on the proposed deal, which would create a combined entity having over 200 million subscribers.
Meanwhile, the government yesterday said it has a positive approach toward the proposed USD 23-billion deal between Bharti and South African MTN, even as the time for exclusive talks between the two companies ends on September 30.
Join duty now or face action: Air India tells pilots
NEW DELHI: Air India on Wednesday said a section of pilots had not reported for work even after their strike was called off and threatened
"severe action" against them.
A section of the pilots continue to be rigid over pay cuts and are not willing to join duty, an airline official said.
"Severe action would be taken against the pilots who refuse to join their duty by evening. The strike has been called off," the official said.
"We would even recommend the DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) to cancel their pilot licenses or dismiss them from service."
Earlier Wednesday, the pilots ended their five-day strike following assurances from the civil aviation ministry that there would be no salary cuts.
The strike began Saturday with 180 Air India pilots going on sick leave to protest the cut in their productivity linked incentives.
Till Tuesday, day four of the strike, 100 flights had been cancelled. On Wednesday, 28 flights were chopped.
IIT students design helmet that alerts kin, hosp about mishaps
CHENNAI: The Techmet, a helmet that will inform the wearer's family as well as the emergency services in case the former is involved in an accident and also give the location of the mishap site, is one of the products made by the students of Indian Instiute of Technology-Madras to be showcased at Shaastra. The 11th edition of the institute's technical festival, to be flagged off on Wednesday, will focus on sustainable development.
Shaastra 2009 aims at showcasing the sustainability of the projects. Participants in the SOS Cycle project can use the cycle as a means of transport rather than the bus inside the institute. SOS Energy will see the various hostels vying with one another for a month to save as much energy as possible to offset the extra use of electricity during the event, while SOS Recycle will attempt to make Shaastra a zero-waste festival. There will be an energy audit done during the four-day event.
A symposium has also been planned to formulate practical and feasible solutions to tackle sustainability, energy, urbalisation and financial issues. Speakers include urban strategy magaer of World Bank Abha Joshi Ghani, chairman of the Centre for Policy Research K C Sivaramakrishnan and associate director of Teri Akansha Chaurey.
Is the Mysterious Facebook Bug a Virus?
A bug that seems to change some information in your Facebook account has been making rounds since yesterday. The "Vidyartha" bug, as it is known, seems pretty harmless. But, is this bug really a virus? That's still being researched.
In the meantime, we did our own little research and found out that while the name "Vidyartha" may sound Indian, the Vidyartha College is actually an institution down south in Sri Lanka and apparently, if some reports are to be believed, some users have seen their school name being changed to that of this institution - automatically. And so far, that is precisely what this virus has been doing.
All this seems to be just sketchy information as of now. Having checked a few Facebook accounts, we did not find anything amiss. However, if you have been affected by this issue, all you can do for now is to wait and look for an official statement from Facebook regarding this. As of now, we are unsure if this is an attack or a simple bug. This "issue" as mentioned earlier was first yesterday and has since then spread its wings quite fast.
Thankfully, not all Facebook accounts have been affected and since we are unsure how widespread this issue is, all we can say to wait and watch how this one actually ends up. Watch this space for more!
IE8 is 10 times faster with Google plug-in
Computerworld conducted the tests, which showed that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) with the plug-in is 9.6 times faster than IE8 on its own. The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite was run three times each for IE8 with Chrome Frame, and IE8 without the plug-in, then averaged the scores.
Released on Tuesday, Chrome Frame lets IE utilize the Chrome browser's WebKit rendering engine, as well as its high-performance V8 JavaScript engine. Google pitched the plug-in as a way to instantly improve the performance of the notoriously slow IE, and as a way for Web developers to support standards IE can't handle, such as HTML 5.
The extra speed and HTML 5 support are necessary if IE users are to run advanced Web applications such as Google Wave, a collaboration and communications tool.
IE8's SunSpider scores with Chrome Frame running equaled Google's Chrome browser, a solid indication that the plug-in effectively turns any version of IE into the speed equivalent of Chrome itself. The Chrome Frame plug-in works with IE6, IE7 or IE8 on Windows XP or Windows Vista. It's available for download from Google's site.
Toll rises to 41 in Bihar boat tragedies
PATNA: The death toll in Bihar's twin tragedies, when two boats carrying Durga Puja revellers capsized in the Kosi and Bagmati rivers, has gone up to 41 with 11 more bodies being recovered, officials said on Wednesday.
"Eleven more bodies have been recovered," Khagaria District Superintendent of Police Indranand Mishra said. Till Tuesday evening, 21 bodies were recovered from the Bagmati river in Khagaria, about 200 km from here.
Thirty-two bodies have been recovered from the Bagmati, but over two dozen are still missing. "The search is on to recover the missing people," Mishra told IANS.
The incident had taken place on Monday evening, about the same time when another overloaded boat capsized in the Kosi river in Darbhanga district, about 150 km from here, killing nine people.
In Khagaria, over 80 villagers returning from a fair to mark the end of Durga Puja, packed into a boat that had a capacity of 30.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has announced a compensation of Rs.150,000 for the families of victims.
Opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad and Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan expressed shock over the incidents. Both Lalu Prasad and Paswan are expected to visit Khagaria on Wednesday.
'Chandrayaan Mission a Complete Success'
He was addressing media persons who were quizzing him regarding the "historic" discovery of water on the moon by NASAs (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a small instrument aboard the Chandrayaan. Apart from calling the discovery of water historic, he added that his earlier statement of the Chandrayaan completing 95 percent of its objectives can now be enhanced to 110 percent because the detection of water on the lunar surface was one of the primary objectives of the mission.
Madhavan said he was very proud of the fact that India was able to make such a significant contribution to science. "All over the world people are applauding the Chandrayaan's achievement. The discovery of water on the moon has been acknowledged as a significant discovery. The main aim of the Chandrayaan1 mission has been achieved," he added. During Chandrayaan's almost year-long rendezvous with the moon, it has been able to collect lots of data, which run into a few thousand Gigabytes, all of which are still in the process of being decoded. In fact, the data is so huge that scientists expect six months to three years before all of them are decoded.
To make things clearer for the layman, Madhavan said that the finding of water on the moon doesn't imply that the moon is filled with lakes and ponds or there is water in the form of a drop. The detection of water is in fact in the form of embedded molecules on the surface and in the lunar rocks. While there are positive signs about the presence of water on the moon, scientists are still perplexed as to how it got there in the first place. A plausible explanation is the effect of asteroids and meteors that might have crashed onto the moon - all of which had some water content in them