Lessons for first year students in 10 popular subjects will be uploaded on the website www.du.ac.in. "We've enhanced value to the text by adding pictures, addressing common misconceptions and providing questions," says Professor AK Bakshi, director, Institute of Life Long Learning (ILLL). "The idea is to encourage analytical thinking."

Net Gains

• DU is the first university to supplement classroom teaching with e-learning
  
• Video Snippest flash animation, simulation of experiments and graphs will be part of online syllabi

To make syllabi interesting, apart from text, online content will include live examples (java applets for simulation of experiment), flash animation, video snippets and links to related web pages.

A chapter on storytelling for BA students, for instance, talks about the language and vocabulary used by Salman Rushdie in Haroon and the Sea of Stories. "Besides the text, I've put in pictures of the author with links to his biographies and an interview on YouTube," says Sukrita Kumar, reader in English at Zakir Hussain College, on deputation with ILLL.

Mathematical problems are accompanied by illustrations from everyday life. "The paper on Mathematical Awareness is for non-math students. So we've peppered it with a history of famous mathematicians and the subject's applications in nature and life," says Geeta Venkataraman of St. Stephen's.

Besides being uploaded on the site, the content will also be distributed in the printed format.

The Centre has decided to offer the CRPF land to the college, which runs contiguous to it. The decision was recently taken when Union minister for urban development Jaipal Reddy met the joint action committee delegation led by D. Raja of the CPI. Jaipal Reddy had assured the delegation that an alternate contiguous land would be provided to the college.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi also clarified that there will not be any increase in property tax rates in the financial year 2008-09 and the same rates will prevail as were prevalent during 2007-08. Moreover, the rebates and concessions for property taxpayers that were applicable in the last year will continue in the present.

Delhi Mayor Arti Mehra, Leader of the House, Subhash Arya and Standing Committee chairman Vijender Gupta clarified that the age of senior citizens eligible to avail rebate at the rate of 30 per cent of eligible covered area upto 200 sq m will remain 60 years and not 65. A rebate of 30 per cent will also be allowed in the case of any self-occupied residential building owned by senior citizens, women owned property, physically challenged persons and ex-servicemen. The rebate is available for one residential building within the jurisdiction of National Capital Territory of Delhi.

The 30 per cent rebate to senior citizens, women and physically challenged persons on pro-rata share basis will be permissible, even if the co-owner belongs to other than these categories.

The properties belonging to ex-servicemen upto a maximum of 100 sq m of covered space will be exempted from tax, provided the premise in question is in self-occupation for residential use and not rented.

With regard to the exemption for village abadi areas, the leaders said that the exemption in residential single property under self-use in rural villages will be allowed to the extent of 200 sq m. However, to avail the rebates and concessions announced today the property owners will have to file returns manually in the property tax office of the respective zone and not online as the software is still being upgraded. The use of the on-line system will mean that none of the rebates announced will be applicable.

And if thats not enough, the revision of parking charges will also mean that you will have to pay more if you park for a longer time. Suggestions of bringing about a graded and differential parking rate was also made by the Environment Pollution Control Authority recently.

The MCD had a meeting with the trader and contractor associations on Thursday to review the parking situation in the city. The suggestion of revising the rate of parking according to the period of time and place of parking was also mentioned in mayor Arti Mehra's report on parking, according to sources.

Another plan mooted in the meeting was that to allow cars of residents of a colony to be parked in the market areas on subsidised price once the markets shut down in case of constraints of available parking space inside the colony.

Commuters who use the Gurgaon Expressway route regularly and hope to avail of `Smart Tags' to cross the toll barrier without stopping are still queuing up to pay cash or swipe cards. The company responsible for construction and maintenance of the toll road, D.S. Constructions, is running short of the nonstop tolling device.

A shipment of Smart Tags that was to reach from Austria is reportedly delayed and applications have been piling up at the toll plaza offices.

About 50 per cent of motorists are still making toll payment through cash or swipe cards.

According to DSC officials, about 65,000 Smart Tags have been put into circulation from the time the Gur gaon Expressway was thrown open to the public on February 23. About 1,30,000 motorists use the expressway on a daily basis. So, apart from the 65,000, motorists get stuck in cash/card lanes on the toll plazas.

Dharam Sagar, a resident of Sector 4, Gurgaon, said his son had applied for a Smart Tag about two weeks back. "My son continues to visit the toll plaza office where attendants give him false promises of making the Smart Tag available very soon," he said.

Since 2001, no measures for replenishing groundwater in the two zones have worked, with water level falling to 40-70 metre in several areas since then, according to CGWB. Where water levels post monsoon are usually seen to rise, the Board marked out several areas ``where groundwater levels actually were declining''.

``South and southwest zones have always been problematic since the government supply here has been very erratic. Largescale illegal boring also caused the levels to come down drastically. Now there is just no water in the area. Rainwater harvesting projects also won't help much since the situation here already worse,'' said a senior CGWB official.

groundwater development, extraction over available resources, in south Delhi is the highest in the city at 243% while in southwest district it is 214%. ``A lot more water is being extracted over the safe levels. So even recharge systems will fail here if extraction is not stopped,'' said Vinod Jain of NGO Tapas.

The FM station will run a five-week certified training programme in radio jockeying in association with Access Atlantech Edutainment (I) Ltd, which runs the SAE College.

Big 92.7 FM vice president (human resources) Lancelot Cutinha stated: “With the economy on a high trajectory growth, the industry at large has never experienced such a mismatch between supply and demand for talent as exists today.

“This scenario calls for someone to go beyond conventional measures and some out-of-box thinking to address the issue. This is one of our ways leading to the development of the radio category.”

The channel will have its own in-house management programming associates as visiting faculty.

City-based QVC Realty, India’s first venture capital-funded real estate firm, is expanding into retail and will pump in Rs700 crore in its first phase of expansion.

The one-year-old realty firm will build two malls here at Whitefield and Kanakpura Road in three years. It is also constructing another half-a-million sq. ft of retail space in one of its two integrated townships in Gurgaon, near Delhi.

The company says there is great demand for large retail malls in the so-called tier I cities. “We are looking at building large shopping malls, each a million sq. ft and above, in only tier I cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad,” said founder and CEO Prakash Gurbaxani.

“Though many shopping malls may not have been doing good business, retail, if executed and managed well, is a good investment option,” he said.

QVC started off in April last year after it raised $100 million (Rs424 crore at current rates) from IL&FS Investment Managers Ltd, the private equity arm of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd. The firm will launch four residential projects this year.

The company is also looking to build integrated townships in Chennai and Pune.

A Taxi stand near the entrance to South Extension Part II has become an irritant for the residents here. The increasing number of taxis, beyond the permissible limit, is the major reason behind it. The taxis not only block the entrance to the colony but also eat up much of the space in the colony lanes.  

Residents complain that earlier there were only a few taxis and so it was not much of a problem for them. But of late, the number of taxis has increased exponentially causing inconvenience to the inhabitants.

"We have no personal grudge against the taxi owners. But they have become a nuisance for us. A11 the nearby lanes remain occupied even in the dead of the night. We have lost our privacy," says Aruna Raghav, office bearer of the Residents Welfare Association (RWA), P Block.

A bench comprising Justices B N Agarwal and G S Singhvi dismissed the petition of the Delhi Bar Association (DBA) of the Tis Hazari court challenging the government's decision of dividing Delhi into nine judicial districts, with each district having an independent District and Sessions Judge.

The DBA has been opposing the bifurcation of district courts in Delhi on the grounds that it will create more problems for the litigants as well as for the lawyers, who will have to rush from one district court to another for attending their cases.

According to the DBA, such bifurcation will also complicate the matter further, as there will be more and more disputes on the point of territorial jurisdiction of the various district courts.

At present, there is only one District and Sessions Judge in Delhi, who is the head of all the district courts in the national capital.

The government has, however, been backing its decision to bifurcate the district courts in Delhi on the grounds that it will save the litigants long travel and their time.

The government has also taken the stand that the population of Delhi has already crossed the one-crore mark. More judges are required. The pendency of the cases in the district courts was assuming alarming proportions and the litigants have to wait for decades together to get justice.

The first major event since their launch - IYCN's Delhi Youth Summit on Climate (DYSoC) - will be held on May 28 and 29, in Teen Murti Bhawan. Eighty young people will come together to set the agenda on climate change for Delhi.

The DYSoC is in association with UKbased Lead International's India chapter, Fountain of Development, Research and Action, the UNESCO and the Youth Parliament Foundation. Registration forms can be downloaded at iycn.in.

"There has been no real `Indian' youth movement on the issue of climate change. When Kartikeya, a key member of IYCN, attended the UN Cli- mate Change Conference in Bali in De- cember as part of a US youth delega- tion he was shocked that there was no representation of the Indian youth at such an important conference," says Govind Singh, a Ph.d scholar at Delhi University's School of Environ- ment Studies.

And so Kartikeya Singh, a Compton Mentor fellow (a US fellowship) who is working on renewable energy resources in India, and Govind envisioned this youth coalition.

The Urban Development (UD) ministry's perspective is that since the subject of urban transport has been allocated to it, the ministry ought to have entire control of the operations of the Metro rail.

The Railway ministry feels the UD ministry's demand is unreasonable because huge technical and vital aspects of Metro operations are involved.

The UD ministry is the administering agency for the Delhi Metro (Operations and Maintaince) Act, 2002, but the Ministry of Railways discharges responsibilities of safety certification and technical planning. The Chief Commissioner of Railway Safety (CCRS) provides the safety certification for the Delhi metro, but according to estab- lished procedures for ensuring impartiality, he reports to the Civil Aviation ministry.

"Our intention is to strengthen and expand the office of the CCRS; it should therefore be in order that subjects of safety and technical planning are transferred to us," UD secretary M. Ramachandran said.

In its action taken report to the 34th report of the parliamentary standing committee on railways, the government has rejected the idea of transferring the subject of technical planning to the UD ministry since it has "no competence or experience in train operations".

"Things are in a sorry state because of inter-ministerial wrangles and lack of coordination. We have submitted our report, it is now for the government to sort things out", said Basudev Acharya, chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on Railways.

It means only about 0.16 per cent customers from the total of around 30 lakh registered their grievances against the discoms. While the discom BSES (BYPL supplying power in the East Delhi and BRPL supplying power in the West and South Delhi) caters to about 23,00,000 customers, the Tata group owned NDPL supplying power to the North Delhi has 7,00,000 customers.

In the first year the CGRF had received a lot of complaints. Thereafter the complaints have been steadily falling. In the BSES areas the total number of complaints received by the two CGRFs are 3,268. It means that just about 0.14 per cent of the customer registered their grievance against the BSES discoms.

According to sources, there are 1,283 complaints related to metering and billing in the BYPL area, 1,398 in the BRPL area and 1,285 in the NDPL area. As far as the complaints related to the grant of new connections is concerned, 241 such complaints were registered in the BYPL area, 168 in the BRPL area and 349 in the NDPL area.

In regard to the complaints concerning electrification of non-electrified areas, there was no complaint in the BYPL area, 17 complaints in the BRPL area and just one complaint in the NDPL area. In the category of complaints related to the change of name of registered users, there were 13 complaints in the BYPL area, 22 in the BRPL area and 12 in the NDPL area.

There was just one complaint about streetlights in the BYPL area, 13 in the BRPL area and four in the NDPL area. As far as the complaints on frequent breakdowns five complaints were received from the BYPL area, 58 from the BRPL area and just two from the NDLP area.

The Institute offers three courses: Bachelor of Science in Physical Education, Health Education and Sports; Bachelor of Physical Education; and Master of Physical Education. While there are 70 seats for the B.Sc. programme, there are 50 and 25 seats for the B.P.Ed. and M.P.Ed. courses respectively.

"The B.Sc. course can be done after Class XII, while only those candidates who have completed their graduation can apply for the other two. The B.P.Ed. is a one-year teacher training course for school teachers and the M.P.Ed. a two-year degree course for college teachers," said Principal D. K. Kansal.

The last date for applying for the B.Sc. course is June 9, and for the other two programmes June 21.

The entrance examination for the B.Sc. programme has been fixed for June 10 and for B.P.Ed. and M.P.Ed. June 23. Thereafter candidates will have to clear a physical fitness test, playing ability test and interviews to make it to the first list of selected candidates that will be displayed in the first week of July.

The details are available on www.igipess.com

The combined test for candidates seeking admission to B.Tech./ B.Arch. of Aligarh Muslim University will be held this Saturday.

This means that over one lakh shops in DDA flats in areas such as Mayur Vihar, Amar Colony Kalkaji, , East of Kailash, Lajpat Nagar, Munirka, Janakpuri, Rohini, Pitampura, Shalimar Bagh and Dwarka among others, will be spared closure.

In November 2006, the monitoring committee constituted by the Supreme Court had said that no shops would be allowed to run out of DDA flats and group housing societies.

On Tuesday, the ministry wrote to the DDA, asking it to modify the Master Plan 2021 to include these changes. Ministry officials said it would take about a month before the modifications are notified.

In another sop, the ministry has decided to allow all professional activities on ground floors and basements of homes in residential colonies in mixed land use areas. Earlier, only 11 designated professions like engineering, town planning, company secretaryship, etc. were allowed.

So far, apart from professional activities, only shops of area up to 20 square metres were allowed to run from ground floors and basements in residential areas.

Now, offices of property dealers, travel agents, and several other businesses will also benefit.