Sunday, February 28, 2010

MHRD Budget 2010 provides for BESU upgrade to IIEST

Hisdustan Times news, quoting PTI, February 28, 2010
Centre to take over Bengal's premier engineering institution
Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU), one of the pioneer institutions in engineering education in the country, is set to be taken over by the Central government.
The Centre has allocated Rs 15 crore in the budget for 2010-11 as it has decided to take over the institution following a proposal from the West Bengal government.
Established as a college in 1856 to meet requirement of trained engineering personnel, the institution became a university in 2004 and will now be a central technical institute.
The university, which was started on November 24, 1856, in three rooms in Writers' Building and got affiliation from the Calcutta University in 1857, will be renamed as Indian Institute of Engineering, Science and Technology (IIEST).
It became a deemed university in 1992.
An HRD Ministry committee in 2003 recommended IIT status for seven institutions, including BESU. However, another committee of the ministry later did not support IIT status for it, but suggested the status of IT-BHU.
A bill to confer IIEST status to BESU is ready and will be sent to Cabinet soon by the HRD Ministry, sources said.
BESU, which has a campus spread over 49 acres, offers B.Tech programmes in all the branches of engineering education.

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Here's a 27 Feb news item from The Telegraph (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100227/jsp/nation/story_12158503.jsp):
Excerpt:
Besu funds signal
The Centre has allocated Rs 15 crore for the first time in the budget for converting the Shibpur-based Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) into an Indian Institute of Engineering, Science and Technology.
The allocation represents the first occasion that the Centre has made a budgetary allocation for the project that has survived several scares, and was almost called off last year after unrest on the campus. The allocation confirms that the human resource development ministry finally plans to take over Besu this year.
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Here's another news item from Orissalink(http://www.orissalinks.com/archives/3940) February 26th, 2010:
Item 69 of the MHRD Department of Higher Education budget has 15 crores for IIEST. The explanation later says the following:
69. Setting up of Indian institute of Engineering, Science & Technology (IIEST): A State University, namely, Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur is proposed to be converted into a Central Government Institute, namely, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST).
Odisha must continue to push the conversion of VSSUT Burla to an IIEST.
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Aparently Orissa's academic community is also pushing for upgrading the Burla institute to IIEST.
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Tuesday, February 09, 2010

All Tagore’s works to be available online

The Hindu, Date:07/02/2010
Tagore’s works to be available online
Indrani Dutta
KOLKATA: The completed works of India’s Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore will now be available free online along with the notations of songs that he composed.
The project, conceived and implemented by the State Information Technology Department, was launched by Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee earlier this week.
When told about a powerful search engine that will be part of the project, Mr. Bhattacharjee enquired about certain songs of his choice, which were then promptly searched for and displayed on a giant screen put up for the launch.
As part of the 150th birthday celebrations of Gurudev, as Tagore was reverentially called, the notations of all 2,200 songs written and composed by him and numerous letters will be made available online. Currently, some 100 songs and their notations will be available on the site, www.rabindra-rachanabali.nltr.org. State Information Technology Minister Debesh Das said that while the Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU) helped with making the entire project compatible with UNICODE — the global platform that improves accessibility of the Bengali language for an international viewer — the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur helped create the search engine which will allow the reader to locate a song, line or even a film based on a Tagore novel.

Friday, February 05, 2010

In the race of being youngest mother

Nine year old Chinese girl;gives birth to a healthy baby boy.
February 2, 2010
A nine-year-old Chinese schoolgirl has become one of the world's youngest mothers after giving birth to a healthy boy.
The unnamed girl had been brought in to Changchun hospital gynaecology department in the north east of the country when she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, a Chinese newspaper has reported.
Two days later, she apparently gave birth to the 6lb boy by Caesarean section.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1247889/Girl-9-gives-birth-health-baby-boy.html#ixzz0eNSSBZTd

11 Year Old Gives Birth
February 5, 2010
The latest news to hit the headlines is that an 11 year old pregnant girl has successfully given birth to a son. The girl’s mother said that her daughter as well as her baby are fine. Many experts are concerned about the baby’s birth as it’s a pre teen whose body is not normally developed enough to handle the child’s birth. Some believe that the child’s birth could halt the growth of the mother. An expert told fox that Pre eclampsia is a risk “which is high blood pressure and protein in the urine and could lead to convulsions and/or multi-system organ failure”. Lastly even the liver could get fat at a later stage becoming fatal.
People are wondering and asking what’s the youngest child birth ever. In 1939, Lina Medina gave birth to a child at an age of 6.
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Here is a list of other young mothers at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_birth_mothers