HC stays G.Os on new health insurance scheme for transport staff

Madras High Court today stayed operation of three Tamil Nadu Government Orders (GOs) pertaining to new health insurance scheme for employees of state transport corporations in the state. Justice N Paul Vasanthakumar granted the stay on a petition filed by Tamilnadu State Transport Employees Federation seeking to restrain the government from altering, annulling or modifying the existing Special Medical Assistance Scheme in any manner and from implementing the new Health Insurance Scheme announced and introduced by the government by GO Ms No 430, GO Rt No 65 and GO No 174. The petitioner submitted that the transport corporations had introduced the Special Medical Assistance Scheme for the employees based on a settlement reached under Section 12 (3) of the Industrial Dispute Act on September 28, 1995.

As per Clause 79 of the minutes of the settlement, every workman had to contribute Rs five every month towards the scheme and the corporations have to make an equal contribution.

The petitioner contended that the Special Medical Assistance was a better scheme than the new scheme introduced by the state government. The government has no power to do away with the existing scheme framed under the settlement, the petitioner added.

The state government had recently introduced the new health insurance scheme for government employees in collaboration with a private insurance company.

IBM deploys supercomp to boost cancer research

The new system will aid in the search for more effective cancer treatments and facilitates analysis of millions of images of proteins.

IBM has announced the deployment of Canada's fastest research supercomputer at the Ontario Cancer Institute in the University Health Network.

The new system will aid in the search for more effective cancer treatments and facilitates analysis of millions of images of proteins.

Through automation, high resolution imaging and sophisticated computer-based image classification, researchers are attempting to more quickly identify the structure of disease-related proteins, and thus improve our ability to design new treatments for cancer.

The new IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer incorporates its recently announced DCS9550 disk storage system, as well as deep computing visualisation to create high-resolution images required for the research analysis.

The system includes 1,344 processor cores in the Linux cluster running at 12.5 teraflops (trillion calculations per second) with 150 TB of storage, making it one of the fastest research clusters in Canada.

“We need to better understand the specific function and interactions of proteins that cause cancer,” Igor Jurisica of Ontario Cancer Institute said, adding that this research will enable to diagnose cancer earlier, before symptoms appear, to have the best chance of treating disease.

The supercomputer was made possible by grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation and an in-kind donation by IBM for the hardware, software and services.

The computing complex also houses a custom-built data centre, which has been adapted to fit into Toronto's historic MaRS research building.

In November 2007, Jurisica's research was added to the World Community Grid as a Help Conquer Cancer project. The grid works on a network of approximately one million PCs and laptops using donated processing time.

The Ontario Cancer Institute's new supercomputer will allow data to get on the Grid for complex analysis, and enable faster and more detailed analysis of results from the Grid computation.

In simple terms, this supercomputer can do more calculations in one second than every Canadian doing one calculation per second for four days without stopping.

West Bengal to introduce insurance for bus passengers

The state government has taken this initiative to make long-distance bus travel much more safer in the state.

In an effort to make long-distance bus travel much more safer in West Bengal, the state government is planning to introduce insurance benefits for the passengers of long-distance state transport buses.

“We have decided to take Rs 5 from the passengers travelling within 300 km and Rs 10 for those travelling more than 300 km by the state transport buses,” the state Transport Minister Subhas Chakraborty said.

He added that the surplus would be charged on the tickets of the passengers who would avail long-distance government buses.

The Minister said the money will be used to provide them with insurance benefits worth Rs 50,000 in case they meet with fatal accidents during travel. The amount would be handed over to their nearest relatives.

Chakraborty said that if anyone is killed in a road accident by government buses, the nearest relative of the deceased will get the same insurance benefit.

“The amount collected from every long-distance passenger would be deposited to a state government-owned corporation,” he said, adding the facility would come into effect from September.

Initially, the state government is implementing this facility only for the long-distance buses, and later plans to introduce the scheme in all government-run buses in the state, he said.

Following the fuel price rise, fares of buses, mini-buses and taxis in the state have also been hiked, reports IANS.

The minimum bus and mini-bus fare has been increased by 50 paisa and the taxi fare by Rs 2. The new fare structure is likely to come into effect from July 11.

AIDS bomb ticking in Asia - India accounts for roughly half the HIV-infected population of Asia

About 10 million Asians are expected to be infected with HIV by 2020, an independent commission on AIDS in Asia warned on Monday.

The commission comprising nine of Asia's leading development economists, scientists and policymakers working on AIDS, urged Asian countries to chart a new response to AIDS. India accounts for roughly half the HIV-infected population of Asia. About 2.5 million Indians were estimated to be living with HIV in 2006.

Its 236-page report on ‘Redefining AIDS in Asia, crafting an effective response' was released by India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh here today, reports IANS.

“Many Asian countries are lagging behind in their response to AIDS. At current levels of response, 10 million Asians are expected to be infected with HIV by 2020. By then, AIDS is also expected to claim an estimated five lakh lives annually if governments do not change policies,” the report sponsored by UNAIDS, Unicef and UNDP said.

India accounts for roughly half the HIV-infected population of Asia. About 2.5 million Indians were estimated to be living with HIV in 2006.

Twenty-six countries have been covered by the report.

Almost five million Asians are currently infected with HIV, some 4.4 lakh people got infected with HIV and three lakh people died of AIDS-related diseases in 2007.

Regionally, AIDS is estimated to be the single largest cause of death and morbidity due to disease for adults aged 15-44 years.

“AIDS has emerged as the single-largest cause of disease-related deaths and work days lost among 15-44-year-old adults in Asia,” the report said.

Expressing concern over the alarming situation, the Commission Chairman and PM's Economic Advisory Council Chirman said that these numbers indicate the seriousness of the problem the region faces.

The report noted that India has managed to slow down the epidemic in some states like Tamil Nadu, which provides an effective and focused HIV response.

“Asian leaders in places such as Thailand, Hong Kong, Cambodia and Tamil Nadu in India has the foresight to recognise the threat of AIDS early on; they provided leadership that proves vital for reversing their epidemics,” it said.

Noting that Asia's response approach neither matched nor kept pace with the unfolding realities of the HIV epidemic, it recommends that policies must prioritise on focused and scaled-up interventions towards unprotected commercial sex, unprotected sex between men and the sharing of contaminated needles and syringes.

With an estimated 10 male clients for every sex worker in Asia, the commission noted that men who go for unprotected commercial sex are probably the single most important determinant of the size of HIV epidemics in most of Asia.

By pragmatically focusing prevention programmes to the sex trade and on drug use, it suggested that governments would make considerable progress in halting and reversing the epidemic.

Experts found that existing resources are not only inadequate but are also currently not being spent on priority interventions that produce an impact.

Rangarajan emphasised that countries which are at the early stages of the epidemic needed to spend an average of 50 cents per capita to reverse the epidemic.

Every US $1 spent on early prevention would save US $8 in treatment costs later. Yet, the money spent on HIV programmes from national budgets decreased over the past decade in countries surveyed by the Commission, the only exceptions being India and China.

The commission has estimated the resource need of the region to halt and reverse the epidemic at US $3.1 billion per annum. For a long-lasting and comprehensive response, however, the resource need would be US $6.4 billion a year.

Noting that stigma against HIV patients remains a major issue in Asia's health care systems, including in India, the commission has recommended a more meaningful role for civil society and community-based initiatives.

It emphasises the need for strong political will across Asia. If leaders implement a largely scaled-up priority response right away they could save more than two lakh lives each year and succeed in reversing the epidemic.

What is the Community wise Compositionof Top 500 Rankers in Tamil Nadu

Counseling for Admission to MBBS / BDS in Tamil Nadu starts from 04.07.2008 and Director of Medical Education, 162, Periyar Road, Chennai has releasted the counselling schedule The Community of the Top 500 Rankers can be seen from that

Of the Top 500 Rankers in Tamil Nadu

• Forward Community - FC - 55 Students - 11 %
  
• Backward Community - BC - 293 Students - 58.6 %
  
• Christians - BCC - 29 Students - 5.8 %
  
• Muslims - BCM - 20 Students - 4 %
  
• Most Backward Community - MBC - 70 Students - 14 %
  
• Scheduled Castes - SC - 32 Students - 6.4 %
  
• Scheduled Tribes - ST - 1 Student - 0.2 %
  

Opinion Welcome :) :)

Cuba intros performance-based salary

The Government of Cuba has introduced performance-based salary for its employees, ending the system of equal pay for its workers.

The country’s President Raul Castro has given all state enterprises a deadline of August 1, 2008 to comply with the new system, reports IANS.

“The correct implementation of the new policy would enable Cuba to conform to the socialist principle of distribution, wherein each person receives according to his or her contribution,” Deputy Labour Minister Carlos Mateu Pereira said.

Raul Castro, who became Cuba’s President in February after holding the job on a provisional basis since older brother Fidel fell ill in July 2006, says performance-linked pay will boost efficiency and productivity.

“The overhaul of the compensation package for the employees is part of the improvement model that Raul as the then Armed Forces Minister had established in the military and defence-related activities 20 years ago,” Pereira said.

Earlier the President, while relaxing restrictions on Cuban citizens on buying consumer goods like computers and mobile phone, acknowledged the need to increase the average pay of the workers who earned the equivalent of US $17 a month.

Reach govt officials via online: Austria

The Government of Austria has added ‘Help’ feature in its e-Government site, which is a directory of the names, addresses and phone numbers of officials throughout the federal administration.

The new directory covers the Presidential Chancery, the Federal Chancellor’s Office and four federal ministries, reports ePractice.

Users would be able to search people of the federal government by entering any of the search criteria which include providing surname, organisation or telephone number in the ‘search by person’ function.

Furthermore, in order to narrow down the search, more criteria can be entered in one single go.

In the new feature, for each official, an e-mail address is given, together with clickable links to the institution concerned and the department or sub-department within that institution. In most cases, a phone number is also shown.

It also comes with ‘extended search by person’ option, which will produce further details, notably about their functions, but there is a greater range of possible identifiers.

The third search function is ‘organisational units’, which can be used to find out which unit of which ministry is responsible for a particular issue.

Industrial growth slows down in India

The sluggish expansion in the manufacturing sector has led to the slower growth of industrial production at seven per cent in April 2008 as against 11.3 per cent in the same month of last fiscal.

The growth in manufacturing was just 7.5 per cent in April, as compared to 12.4 per cent in the corresponding month of 2007, as per data on Index of Industrial Production (IIP) released at the Planning Commission here.

For the year as a whole, industrial production was 8.3 per cent higher for fiscal 2007-08, as against 11.6 per cent in the previous fiscal.

The worrisome news came against the backdrop of India’s central bank hiking its short-term interest rates to eight per cent on Wednesday in a bid to tame inflation—a move that experts feel could, in turn, trigger interest rate hikes by commercial banks.

“Monetary policy has to respond proactively to immediate concerns,” the Reserve Bank of India said.

The central bank was forced to take the monetary measure as India’s annual rate of inflation jumped to a 45-month high of 8.24 per cent for the week ended May 24, against 8.1 per cent for the previous week.

Rating agencies like Moody’s predict that India’s central bank may hike interest rates further to keep a check on spiralling prices, while predicting an economic slowdown.

“Amid tight monetary policy conditions which weigh on household consumption and business investment, the Indian economy looks set to slow this year,” Moody’s Economy said in a report.

The biggest challenge facing central banks across Asia is to cool inflation without hurting economic growth; the RBI is no exception, the agency’s report said.

Chinese President goes online

Now citizens of China can directly interact with their President without taking the pain to meet him. The Chinese President Hu Jintao has become online to chat with citizens through a major news portal of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The ‘Qiangguo Forum’, launched by the mouthpiece of the CPC, has been a big hit since the news of the President going online surfaced.

The news has led thousands of people post their queries and write-ins on the forum.

“The Internet is a major channel for public opinion,” Hu said during the chat, and added that he has squeezed his time to go online, though he would not be able to surf the net daily due his busy schedule.

The President logs on to the website to view domestic and foreign news, to learn what interests people on the Internet and to solicit their advice and opinions about the work of our government.

The Qiangguo Forum, meaning ‘powering the nation’, has more than 23,000 daily postings and the highest simultaneous web page visits exceeding 1.4 million.

ICT: DNA for modern warfare

India needs to develop appropriate communications technology and anti-technology to ensure faster response time and information dominance over its adversaries in the future.

Calling the information and communication technology (ICT) the DNA of modern day warfare, the country’s Minister of State for Defence MM Pallam Raju said that the armed forces need to collaborate with the domain experts to tackle the challenges of the modern day battlefield.

“It’s imperative to modernise the armed forces through synchronised efforts by domain experts from the defence forces alongside the industry and academia and to ensure guaranteed information assurance in the present day battlefield which is becoming more and more digitised,” he said.

Speaking on the occasion Army Chief Gen Deepak Kapoor said that a paradigm shift in warfare called for even shorter response time for which the critical communication networks needed constant upgrading.

“This also makes these networks increasingly vulnerable,” he said stressing on the need for a dialogue amongst all stakeholders in the segment.

According to Indian Army’s Signals Officer-in-Chief Lt Gen SP Sree Kumar, the armed forces were looking forward to finding ways to merge the industry’s capabilities with the army’s requirements to move ahead.

Talking about the role of the private sector in modernising the Indian armed forces, Infosys Technologies CEO and MD S Gopalakrishan said that Army-industry collaboration was on the threshold of a new era.

“The industry is seeing many positive signals from the Ministry of Defence,” he added.

This is the seventh year in the running when DEFCOM India has brought, industry, academia and the Defence on a common platform.

Four hundred delegates, including representatives from a 100 companies, are attending the two-day deliberations that have been divided into six technical sessions that focused on the challenges of technology and anti-technology.

100% e-ticketing for airlines

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has launched a new era in air travel as it bids farewell to the paper ticket with the industry’s conversion to 100 per cent electronic ticketing.

“Today we say goodbye to an industry icon. The paper ticket has served us well, but its time is over,” IATA’s Director General and CEO Giovanni Bisignani said.

The achievement was due to four years of hard work by airlines around the world, which marks the beginning of a new, more convenient and more efficient era for air travel.

Over four years, IATA deployed a global team of 150 people to work with airlines and system providers around the world to facilitate implementation.

“We made 100 per cent e-ticketing a reality everywhere—from our largest hubs to small remote island airports with no electricity. It is an incredible industry achievement,” Bisignani said.

It may be recalled that the first e-ticket was issued in 1994. By 1997 IATA had adopted global standards for e-ticketing. But the evolution was slow and by May 2004, only 19 per cent of global tickets were electronic.

A paper ticket costs an average of US $10 to process versus US $1 for an electronic ticket. With over 400 million tickets issued through IATA’s settlement systems annually, the industry will save over US $3 billion each year, Bisignani claimed.

ETs can easily be changed and reissued without necessitating a trip to a travel agency or airline ticket office, besides 100 per cent ET eliminates lost tickets and enables a wide array of self-service options such as online and mobile check in.

“We are moving ahead with a further revolution—Fast Travel that will provide convenient self-service options from check-in to baggage tracing and re-booking,” the AITA CEO said.

While IATA will no longer issue paper ticket stock, IATA neutral paper tickets issued by travel agents before June 1 remain valid for travel under the conditions they were purchased.

Paper tickets may still be provided by an airline from its own offices or from a travel agent in the USA, although it is anticipated the volumes will be very low.

To complete the conversion, IATA has contacted 60,000 travel agents in more than 200 countries to collect the remaining unused paper tickets in the system—some 32 million worldwide. These will be securely reclaimed, destroyed and recycled, IATA stated.

Shortage of doctors hits India’s health mission

The ambitious National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) launched by the Government of India to provide medicare facilities in villages has failed to yield results due to shortage of doctors and paramedics.

“The multi-billion-dollar NRHM was launched three years ago, but India’s 6.5 lakh villages continue to face a shortage of doctors and paramedics,” the Planning Commission said.

An assessment report of the commission revealed that there was still a yawning gap between the requirement and availability of human resources in the rural health units at various levels.

The report said against the requirement for 21,490, there were only 5,910 specialist doctors were available at community health centres across the country.

The plan panel will shortly review the flagship rural health scheme, which was launched April 12, 2005 to provide effective healthcare facilities to the rural population.

The union Health and Family Welfare Ministry, the nodal agency for NRHM, has earmarked over Rs 120 billion for the mission in the current fiscal.

The country’s primary health centres (PHCs) are also understaffed. The plan panel said there were 31,381 doctors at these centres by the end of December 2007 as against 20,308 doctors engaged there before the flagship scheme was launched.

“There is a need to accelerate the process of appointment of doctors and nurses at a greater pace. Against the requirement of 66,059 nurses and midwives for the health centres, only 41,313 appointments have been made as against 29,139 such nurses already on the rolls,” the commission said.

As per details with the plan panel, 159,181 auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) have been appointed under the mission for sub-centres in rural areas against the need of 197,488. There were 133,194 ANMs when the NRHM was launched.

The health mission puts special emphasis on 18 states with weak public health indicators and infrastructure. Some of them are Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Orissa, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh.

However, health and family welfare ministry officials are satisfied with the progress made under the NRHM so far.

Some of the key goals of the mission are reducing infant mortality rate to 30 per 1,000 live births and maternal mortality rate to 100 per one lakh against 450 per one lakh live births by 2012 through promoting institutional delivery in the countryside.

An official estimate says half of India’s women still deliver babies at home and accounts for the world’s 20 per cent child mortality.

The mission has several projects—Janani Suraksha Yojana (save the mother project) and accredited social health activists (ASHAs)—to promote safe delivery and newborn safety.

India’s medical tourism to earn Rs 8,000 Cr

Easy access to visa facilities permitted by India to overseas patients coupled with the best emerging medical infrastructure in large and tertiary towns will fatten the country’s forex earning to an estimated Rs 8,000 crore by 2012, a new study has said.

Releasing the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) estimates, its President Venugopal N Dhoot pointed out that, currently, the earnings accrued through medical tourism annually are estimated at Rs 3,500 crore.

“The primary reasons as to why medical tourism would flourish in India include much more lower medical costs for various ailments such as bone narrow transparent, bye-pass surgery, knee surgery and liver transplant as compared to western countries,” Dhoot said.

As a result of higher and very e