India Budget 2015-2016

Here are the highlights of 2015-2016 Budget:

• Rs 150 Crore for the World Class IT Hub
• Atal Pension Yojana - Defined pension scheme 50% from Government
• Rural Infrastructure Development fund - 25000 Crores
• Micro irrigation allocation- 5300 Crore

Cleaning up India:

• Building 6 crore toilets
• Swacch Bharat Abhiyan
  Other nice things to be pursued per FM:
• Tracking down black money and bringing it back to India our prime focus: FM
• Promotion of make in India, removal of black money, min government max governance, benefit to tax payers, swacha bharat taken care of in tax propsals: FM
• National Skill Mission to be launched, to develop employability of youth, especially below 25 years of age: FM
• Propose to set up in IIT in Karnataka, AAIMS in Dhanbad : FM
• 150 countries to be included in Visa for arrival facility: FM
• Aimed at security of women, we have decided to prove 1000 crore for Nirbhaya fund: FM
• New scheme called Nayi Manzil to enable Minority youth without school leaving certificates to get the employment
• Growth for 2015-2016 expected to be at 8-8.5 per cent: FM

I would love to see some of these happen. I do not see much about relieving traffic congestion and air quality of the cities, I do not see specific items targeting new born and children from low income families (probably they are all there in the detailed budget).

Picture is from the web site below. This post is an excerpt from the same site
http://www.msn.com/en-in/money/unionbudget

http://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/union-budget-2015-finance-minister-says-no-change-in-individual-tax-rates/ar-BBi4pg5

Health and Fitness App really motivates people

Health is number one that people think about. People may not act rationally when it comes to taking care. Otherwise how can you justify doctors smoking but advising patients not to or doctors  abusing drugs.

The apps have jumped on this bandwagon. First appeared the fitness wrist bands from Nike, Fitbit and others. Soon smart phone vendors started creating Health and Fitness apps for Smartphones such as Samsung, Microsoft and soon Apple.

The Microsoft Nokia phones such as Nokia Icon and others have all the necessary sensors like accelerometers, GPS and in the case of Windows Phone8.1 special programs like SensorCore make it easy to measure or track physical movements like walking,jogging, etc without draining the battery.
Here  are some screen shots:

The Health and Fitness app for Windows Phone 8.1 can be downloaded from the Windows Store. Just right click to launch the app.

Here is a screen shot from tracking:

 GPS Tracking

More on this app here:
http://winsupersite.com/windows-phone/bing-health-fitness-app-updated-pedometer-functionality-nokia-lumia-630-and-635

The app can also be used with Microsoft's wrist band.

Apple will be coming with a watch that can be used to monitor Health and Fitness soon

http://mashable.com/2014/06/02/apple-health-healthkit-app/

@travel: Legendary restaurant in Bengaluru -Vidhyarthi Bhanvan

Do you have to pay a fortune to eat good food in Bengaluru? No. If you are in Bengaluru, India, and if you are not averse to tasting vegetarian delicacies you should try the legendary restaurant called 'Vidhyarthi Bhavan' which is approximately rendered as 'Student's Restaurant'. It is so popular (always has been) that overseas mysorians (people from the former Mysore State and in particular folks from Bangalore) when they return home they go directly to 'Vidhyarthi Bhavan'.

The main specialty here is called 'Masala Dosei' in the local language. It may probably be described as a 'spicy vegetable-filled crepe' which is a very loose way of describing it and not at all appropriate.

It is made from rice and 'Urad Dhall'. Wikipedia gives a reasonable description of Dosa or Dosai (Kannada) and in particular Masala Dosa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosa#Masala_dosa).

"Vidhyarthi Bhavan" is in the locality called 'BasavanaGudi (Bull Temple)' in Bengaluru, Karnataka India. It is one of the oldest landmarks in Bengaluru. It is nestled behind a row of flower shops an Indian temple and religious goods vendors who occupy a major portion of the sidewalks. The walls of the restaurant are decorated with pictures of Kannada artists, poets, and novelists.

In order to get a seat you must reach there well ahead of their opening time and wait for the restaurant to open. When they open they are all ready to serve you this delicious food. Besides 'Masala Dosa' they offer many other strictly vegetarian dishes.

Here are some pictures taken during my recent visit. My brother-in-law takes me to this restaurant very religiously every time I visit.

 

 

Street scene near 'Vidhyarthi Bhavan'

 

Religious products vendor

 

 

Staffer carrying a number of dosas balancing on his forearm. The yellow triangular pile is the 'masala', a vegetable preparation from potato and onion with 'South Indian' spices.

 

 

Bon Appetite: Masala dosa being served to us

For more pictures search on Bing for images with these keywords 'Vidhyarthi bhavan Bangalore'

@travel: Bengaluru needs a massive clean-up

So do most of the cities in India. Things really pile up as you move north. I once lived in Kanpur an old town with lots of history and the seat of some great educational institutions like the IIT. The filth was unimaginable.

No matter where you go in India, you see filth piled up and scattered around the streets and boulevards.

I am sure Prime Minister has a great goal to clean up the cities and towns. This is great. In my view even if nothing is achieved, if only he can put all the effort to clean up India then his election has been justified.

I am not sure who designed the side walks in India they are literally death traps for the unwary. Well, they are used by the two wheelers mostly and not the pedestrians. The pedestrian has the only option of dodging them and offer a prayer if they are not hit.

Coming to Bengaluru, my dear town, which has gone down the drain in the past 30 years or so: there has been a great deal of demographic movement from other parts of India; displaced people from Bangladesh, Tibet and other places. It has become richer no doubt but the city has lost its character. Different ethnic people have different perception of cleanliness and filth.

The traffic in the city is horrendous. For any visitor to Bengalur this is the most conspicuous thing that hits him like a cold draft. The two wheelers and the auto-rickshaws dominate and together with the larger vehicles that have appeared due to the recent prosperity makes the traffic a living hell.

Here are pictures from a recent visit:

At the top, notice a dead dog that has just shriveled up as the city has not cared to remove the carcass. It is right in front of Oracle near Shoppers Stop and Gopalan Mall in Bengaluru upscale shopping centers

Near an intersection in Sadashiva Nagar in Bengaluru where some of the richest people live. Notice the novel accommodation around the tree used as a minor dump and the dangerous side-walk

This one is from Chennai, but you can find even bigger dumps in Bengaluru

Side walk in Sadashiva Nagar. Notice thee reasonably built portion and the adjoining death trap. They build and build but not maintain. There are even more dangerous ones. This was taken on a holiday when the traffic is lean. Normally two wheelers will be running here.

Airport melee at Delhi. Announcements are poor.

Traffic at our back as seen in the rear window.

How these can be mitigated (I am focusing on Bengaluru)?

The short answer is, very difficult or impossible. However few things can make things a little more livable:
1. Make separate lanes for two wheelers and auto-rickshaws
2. Do not allow cars to enter certain key parts of the city.
3. Clean up the debris from construction works. Make construction companies pay for their management.
4. Give warning to businesses not to add to the filth and then make them pay fines (make sure fines go to the cities coffers). Bring a law to tax them for the up keep of the environment around their businesses
5. Manage stray dogs effectively, treat them with more respect.
6. Employ more traffic police.
7. Make traffic lanes and as Bengalurians do not care for lines drawn on the road, make some permanent fixtures (sounds crazy isn't it? I mean to)
8. Make waste disposal a major priority
9. Fire the public civil engineers and outsource side-walk designers. It is not just important to build something, but it is more important to maintain them
10. Get some support from the multitude of International corporations who are benefiting by doing business in Bengaluru, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Accenture and a 100 more.

I am sure my readers will be able to add more to the list. Let us bring up this list up to date please leave your comments.

Namaste

One more idea to locate someone or something in a large enclosure

There are many map apps supported by GPS that helps you figure out where you are or where you want to go. The World is shrunk to the size of your  smart phone and you can pretty well figure out by just a few clicks.

However, there are places where you cannot locate objects/people inside a enclosure by just GPS such as inside buildings, big box businessess like SAM's Club, Costco,etc.; museums, exhibititions and convention centers like Javit's in New York and many, many places.

This Finnish company IndoorAtlas has come up with a unique solution by providing a positioning service powering location-based app.
It is hardware agnostic;
works on iOS and Android phones;
Cloud-powered (what is not these days);
and accurate.

It uses unique magnetic signature of a building (steel reinforced) and the resulting distortion of the Earth's magnetic field. This distortion would be specific to a geo-position as well as the structure that distorts this field. In a way it provides a floor plan of a building which you can easily map as Geometrical data-type. Once this is done navigation can be done with an app that you run on the smart phone.

However one has to get the details of a building's magnetic fields to use the app.

Here is a demo video from IndoorAtlas on YouTube.



Read more here.
 

Probing nature with X-Rays at ESRF

ESRF stands for European Synchrotron Radiation Faccility is Europe's X-Ray light source situated in Grenoble France with support from 21 countries.

The Video says it all but the heart of the facility is a large highly evacuated tubular ring (like a doughnut) called the Storage ring. Very high energy electrons circulate by means of bending magnets that surround the the ring and X-rays are emitted tangential to the ring where they are guided out to use in the experiments to probe nature.

The storage ring has a circumference of 844.4 meters and stores GeV electrons circulating.

Here is a video on YouTube:



You can do lots of stuff using these X-rays. This is from the ESRF site as to how it is used presently,
"At more than 40 specialized experimental stations on our beam lines, physicists work side by side with chemists and materials scientists. Biologists, medical doctors, meteorologists, geophysicists and archaeologists have become regular users. Companies also send researchers, notably in the fields of pharmaceuticals, consumer products, petrochemicals and microelectronics.