The long awaited Garib Rath air-conditioned train between Bhubaneswar and Ranchi will be inaugurated on March 10, railway officials said on Sunday.
While the special inaugural run would be flagged off on March 10 7 from here, schedules for the regular service of the train, proposed to be provided thrice a week, were being finalised, a senior railway official said.
The Bhubaneswar-Ranchi Garib Rath would effectively have eight 3-tier AC coaches, each having a capacity of 78 berths, sources said adding though the train had been announced in the last rail budget, its introduction was delayed because of various reasons.
Perceived as the poor man’s AC train, Garib Rath passenger fare is around 50 per cent less than the three tier AC coach fare in other trains, they said.
There has also been a demand from some political parties and section of public for a long time to extend the Garib Rath train currently running between Secunderabad and Visakhapatnam upto Bhubaneswar, they added.
In regards to the last sentence, how can there be a long standing demand, when the announcement of Secunderabad-Vizag Garib Rath was only made 5 days back. In any case, it is better to extend it before the introduction of the train than after, as the later will create more resentment from the people in Vizag.
Take the case of Bhusan Power & Steel (BPSL), an integrated power and steel plant set up at Thelkoloi in Sambalpur district.
The Orissa Pollution Control Board (OPCB) on 16 February issued a closure notice to BPSL for violating the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act and Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act.
BPSL was asked to stop all production until further orders, failing which stringent penal proceedings would be initiated against the company.
According to sources though the company is producing power for more than 2 years is has no designated site to dump fly ash released from the plants.
In absence of a proper place the company authorities were dumping in nearby places like Laripalli, for which villagers raised hue and cry.
Now they are dumping in Khinda, said a source.
Secondly BPSL filled up the river bed of the Bheden River by dumping earth.
These, according to environmental norms are serious offences.
OPCB had been asking BPSL to conform to environmental norms for the past six months, said the source.
However, the company allegedly did not pay any heed to it, added an official.
OPCB waited for six months and finally decided on closing down the unit.
… On 1 March OPCB has lifted the closure notice.
… Months ago when Dr. Hrushikesh Panda was at the helm of Forest & Environment Department, Tata Refractories Limited (TRL) at Belpahar, was accused of pollution.
He impressed upon the OPCB to issue closure notice to the company.
OPCB issued closure notice and the Chief Minister announced the closure of TRL in the floor of the House.
So unrelenting was he that the State Government was to shift Dr.Panda to provide relief to TRL.
With so many pollution prone large mineral based industries coming up in Orissa, the soft approach of the Government’s Green Authority bodes ill for the state, feel an environmentalist.
The Centre has proposed to set up an Integrated Marketing Project for the development and promotion of handicrafts and handloom of Orissa with a special focus on Tribal and Fibre Crafts.
The project is proposed to be executed by Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) of Export Promotion Council for Handicrafts (EPCH) and IL&FS. It will involve an investment of approximately Rs.100 crore.
In order to make it a reality, Executive Director of the Export Promotion Council for Handicrafts, Rakesh Kumar along with other senior officials called on Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik at Orissa Bhawan in New Delhi on Saturday and apprised him about the project.
Kumar informed the Chief Minister that the project will include various components like human resource development, design & product development, national & international marketing, setting up of a state of the art Crafts Complex at Bhubaneswar and Puri as well as setting up of showrooms abroad.
It has been widely reported that the total money sanctioned for railway projects in Orissa in the 2008-09 Railway budget is 972.34 crores. This amount comes from adding up the items in the pink and the orange book.
Many people wrongly interpret that "total money sanctioned for railway projects in Orissa in the 2008-09 Railway budget is 972.34 crores" means that the amount is of new money. That is NOT true. This amount may include money that was sanctioned in earlier budgets but has not yet been spent.
See the two attached sheets: one from the pink book of 2007-08 and another from the pink boom of 2008-09
Lets take the last item in both: Rajathagarh-Barang doubling
In 2007-08:
Anticipated cost – 240 crores
Outlay expect to end of 06-07 – 102.7 crores
Outlay proposed for 07-08 – 86 crores
Balance to complete work – 51.3 crores
In 2008-09:
Anticipated cost – 240 crores
Outlay expect to end of 07-08 – 96.7 crores
Outlay proposed for 07-08 – 125 crores
Balance to complete work – 18.33 crores
Most papers have reported that the budget as 125 crores for the doubling of Rajathagarh-Barang.
Yes, but not all of that is new money.
This year’s budget only adds 33 crores of new money to this item. (The rest is from previous years’ budget).
(Below, a slightly edited version of a posting in IRFCA gives the difference between the Pink book, the Orange book and the green book used in earlier years.)
Green book lists the works sanctioned under SRSF(special railway safety fund). All these works are to be completed by 31.3.2008 .Therefore this year a green book was not published. Green book was prepared as a 5 yr plan in 2003 to renew overaged assets chargeable to the SRSF of Rs 17000 cr.
Orange book contains those works which are justified for enhancing the carrying capacity of Route (i.e., throughput enhancement work in railway terminology). It contains those gauge conversion, doubling & traffic facility works which are sanctioned for the enhancement of throughput. Railway gives higher priority to complete them.
Pink book is the main book of budget & contains all sanctioned (new as well as work in progress) works except those which are in the green or orange book.
Update: It could n’t come up on the 26th (item 17) as the Lok Sabha was adjourned after the Railway budget. It was scheduled to come up on the 27th (page 4), but the Lok Sabha was again adjourned following protests by NDA and others raising the issue of the farmer’s plight. Its scheduled to come up again on the 28th. But again the house was adjourned till the next day just about when this item was supposed to come.
Maytas Infra Ltd (MIL) is an infrastructure development, construction and project management company with more than two decades of experience in execution of complex & challenging landmark projects across the country. The company recently forayed into segments such as airports, seaports, oil and gas pipelines. MIL plans to diversify into new verticals like mining and related activities, manufacture of construction material and providing advisory & consultancy services.
… MIL’s new projects include railway siding project for Vedanta Industries in Orissa, Chennai MT Project & Hyderabad MRTS project.
… Its current projects include Vedanta Aluminium’s, Residential Township in Orissa worth Rs. 232.7 crore …
… MIL in JV with other firms is currently working on setting up 464MW Gas based Gautami Power project in AP, 100MW Sorang Hydro Power Project in Himachal Pradesh, 300MW KVK Nilachal thermal power project in Orissa and 56MW coal washery reject based SV Power project.
The NSC has transformed itself from the usual non-profit-earning PSU into a vibrant entity.
Private sector seed companies have, till now, had a virtual monopoly over the production and sale of seeds, mostly hybrid seeds, of high-value crops. This was chiefly because the public sector seed producers, besides being fewer in number, remained focused right from the beginning on the production of seeds of low-value but high-volume crops (basically cereals), where profits were low though the quantities to be handled were large. Besides, public sector units (PSUs) made little attempt to keep pace with time.
However, the much-needed change in the public seed sector is coming about now with the largest player, the National Seeds Corporation (NSC), adopting a corporate culture and deploying state-of-the-art technology to produce seeds even of high-value crops and hybrids.
Indeed, as could be expected, this change in the work culture has transformed the NSC from the usual non-profit-earning PSU into a vibrant entity striving to find a place among the mini-Ratnas, if not the Navratnas. The headquarters of the NSC and four of its regional units in Bhopal, Jaipur, Secunderabad and Bangalore, have already acquired the ISO 9001-2000 certificate and the remaining regional units are in the process of doing so.
… Indeed, the man behind this incredible transformation is the present chairman and managing director B B Pattanaik." I would be able to declare a much higher dividend for the current year, "asserts an enthusiastic Pattanaik. He has not only motivated the aging employees of this 45-year-old corporation for better performance but has also taken several new initiatives to be in a position to rub shoulders with the well-run private sector seed companies, many of which now have business tie-ups with the NSC.
… The NSC’s tissue culture unit with a capacity to churn out annually about two lakh test tube-raised plantlets for propagation of the banana is coming up in Bhubaneswar and may become operational by the next month. For research and development back-up, the NSC gets support from the vast agricultural research network of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the state agriculture universities. This helps the NSC to add, on an average, around 20 new varieties and hybrids to its product range every year.
IT consulting firm MindTree Consulting Ltd would the start construction of its proposed development centre here from April, official sources said.
MindTree Consulting is one of the four major firms which had proposed investment in Orissa’s IT sector, the others being Genpact Limited, ICICI Eastern Regional Hub and Wipro Limited.
According to Orissa’s Information Technology Minister S N Patro, MindTree Consulting Limited had proposed to invest nearly Rs 200 crore in its project here.
"While Wipro will invest Rs 100 crore in its project, ICICI Eastern Regional Hub proposes to spend Rs 500 crore here," the Minister said, adding that Genpact had proposed to invest Rs 200 crore.
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