Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has approved Jairam Ramesh’s Rs 46,000 crore project to increase India’s forest cover. The plan, called ‘Green India’ Mission, aims to add 10 million hectares of “high quality” forest cover to the existing 40-45 million hectares, the ministry of environment and forests said. “The mission aims to achieve annual CO2 sequestration […]
With its latest Precise Pangolin release, Ubuntu — the most popular open source operating system — has become the first Linux-based operating system to support the latest desktop version from the Gnome community. The Gnome community project makes the look-and-feel software used by majority of operating systems based on open source software, such as Ubuntu, […]
You may soon get your Bisleri water through a pipeline. After telephones and power supply, it looks to be the turn of water supply and sewerage services to be privatized. Responding to a question in the Parliament, the Water Resources ministry has said that the draft new water policy recommends handing over of the water […]
It was the result of much effort and pain by the mobile operators in India, but going by the latest signs, the uptick in average call rates in the industry may not have lasted more than a quarter. According to the latest industry numbers, everything went up in the December quarter of 2011- right from […]
India’s crude oil import bill zoomed 40% in the last financial year, due to the rising crude oil prices, numbers revealed. According to government data, India imported crude worth Rs 3.58 lakh crore in the first ten months of the last financial year, 2011-12. The number excludes the crude oil imported for processing and re-export. […]
It looks like Japanese companies cannot have enough of India. Even as the Indo-Japanese mega industrial corridor between Delhi and Mumbai remains in early stages, the Japanese are pushing for a similar ‘corridor’ between India’s IT hub Bangalore and its export-manufacturing hub Chennai. Industrial corridors are comprised of newly constructed mini and mega cities that […]
With the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee moving a motion to set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) in the Parliament today the deck is now clear for the formation of a parliamentary committee to look into the telecom policy pursued from 1998 to 2009. The period of reference includes the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government […]
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India or TRAI has revamped the entire regulatory structure of the broadcasting, cable TV and DTH industry in India, dealing with issues such as carriage fee, channel prices and channel availability. Once digitized, all channels (pay and free-to air) have to be offered on a-la-carte, or individual, basis to subscribers, […]
India’s finance minister Pranab Mukherjee may like to complain about how selling diesel and LPG ‘below cost’ is bankrupting the government, but the numbers tell a different story. According to data submitted by the government in the Parliament today, the state and central governments earn much more from the sale of diesel, petrol, LPG and […]
India Against Corruption, the umbrella organization led by activists Arvind Kejriwal and Anna Hazare, has said that it seems to have foiled a ‘sting operation’ when it discovered Mufti Samoon Qasmi allegedly recording its meetings on his phone. It claimed that Qasmi’s reaction to the media — in which blasted the leadership for ‘turning communal’ […]
India’s biggest industry bodies urged the government of India to get moving on the stalled reform process, responding to global ratings agency Standard & Poor (S&P) cutting its outlook on India’s financial health. S&P also cut its outlook on at least six Indian companies, including Infosys Technologies, TCS and Wipro, following the country-wide cut in […]
Dish TV, the direct to home arm of the Zee group, announced it has crossed 1 crore (10 million) customers, becoming the first DTH player to do so in Asia and commanding an almost one-third share of India’s 32 million DTH market. Most of Dish TV’s growth happened in 2010 after the firm scapped its […]
Al Jazeera English, the Qatar-based news channel considered the best source of information on the Middle East, has tied up with DTH-operator Tata Sky, five months after it entered India with a tie-up with Dish TV. The channel was in the news recently after a ‘unfriendly broadcaster’ list submitted by the government in the Parliament […]
80% of LPG users in most parts of India do their cylinder booking through SMS, going by what the junior minister for petroleum and natural gas told the Parliament today. According to RPN Singh, in most of the cities, “more than 80% of the customers are using the system successfully whereas, it is more than […]
The western Indian state of Gujarat has pulled well ahead of others, including the long-time favorite Rajasthan, in investing in solar technology and projects. According to the latest industry numbers, Gujarat alone has a solar power production capacity of 200 million watts (200 MW) at peak (noon.) In comparison, India as a whole had a […]
India’s telecom regulator the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has refused to recommend any special consideration to telecom operators who wish to “surrender” their license and get their money back. Under the terms and conditions given in the telecom license, there is no provision for refund of the initial payment of Rs 1658 crore […]
Blackberry’s new Blackberry Curve 9220, priced at just Rs 10,990, will help the Canadian smartphone maker RIM to further increase its presence in India, Cyber Media Research said. Earlier in the day, Research in Motion announced that it was launching the Blackberry Curve 9220, targeted at the ‘mass’ market. Unlike the usual Blackberry, the Curve […]
Google Plus has expanded its ‘update and track via SMS’ feature to most of the countries in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. The feature, which lets you update and follow others’ updates on SMS on mobile phones, was initially available only in the US and India markets. Others like Facebook and Twitter already […]
Call it the 3G effect, or the result of a relentless and ruthless assault on call rates by leading operators in India: today, the contribution of call revenues to overall sales has fallen below the 50% mark for most Indian telecom operators. An analysis of numbers crunched by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of Inda (TRAI) […]
Worldwide unified threat management (UTM) revenue reached $1.2 billion in 2011, a 19.6 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $972 million, according to technology market intelligence firm Gartner, Inc. UTM is a primary network gateway defense solution for organizations. UTM combines traditional firewall into one single appliance: network firewalling, network intrusion prevention and gateway antivirus […]
