Volume III l Issue 1 Pages 4 www.urbannewsdigest.in ` 50 / us $5 March 2014

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Punjab’s transport e-governance project a model for other states

New battery to help renewable energy production

Fraunhofer ISE and India sign MoU to develop solar pilot projects

Devjani Banerjee, an Indian scientist has made a pathbreaking discovery that has the potential to free cit-ies from the menace of plastics. Baner-jee, an assistant pro-fessor of biochem-istry, has identified three species of bac-teria that can degen-erate plastics in days. “We have been able to successfully iso-late three species of highly potent bacte-ria – two from Entero-bacterceae family and another from Microc-caceae. They contain an enzyme that act on the hydrocarbon chain of plastics and breaks them down. The former belongs to the same family that causes gut infec-tion while the lat-ter is omnipresent,” said Banerjee. Dur-ing the experiment,

carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxy-gen rich sources like starch, cellulose and peptone were added as supplements. Also, the degradation process took 60 days in the controlled lab environment, much longer than the team would have wanted to be effective in dealing with plastic waste. Banerjee now wants to isolate the genes

in the bacteria spe-cies and mingle it to produce a clone that is more efficient but less pathogenic so that they can be safely released in dump-sites. She is also get-ting ready to conduct field trials that will actually use waste from landfill sites to check the potency of these bacteria in non-controlled atmosphere.

Scientist discovers plastic degenerating bacteria

mumbai ranks 37th on global urban mobility indexManagement consul-tancy Arthur D Lit-tle’s new global study has ranked Mumbai 37th in the world the urban mobility index. The index determines how good or bad mass transportation is in a particular city.

While Kolkata is the second city from India on the index rating, it is placed at the 41st position globally. The study assesses “mobil-ity maturity” and the performance (of public transport) in 66 cities

worldwide.Mumbai’s BEST

General Manager Om Prakash Gupta said, “There is certainly a need for Mumbai to further improve and strengthen its mass transportation net-work. If we go higher up in the ranking on this index, it will not only enable seamless transportation for locals, but will also make Mumbai as one of the most preferred destination for foreign tourists.”

The e-governance proj-ect of the Transport Department of Punjab has attracted the atten-tion of Odisha and Utta-rakhand governments. They have shown keen-ness towards imple-menting this project in their respective states as well.

The project on the ‘Automation of the Road Transport Sec-tor’ has been imple-mented in the 22 dis-tricts of Punjab. The implementation of this project enables people to procure their driv-ing licenses and reg-istration certificate in the form of smart cards.

Punjab Transport Department’ s spokes-person says the com-mercial transport sec-tor can now pay taxes online thereby sav-ing their time and

avoiding harassment in transport offices. Online registrations of vehicles through authorised motor vehi-cles dealers have also started in the state.

Punjab’s transport e-governance project a model for other states

C-DAC launches tele-medicine tool that uses cloud computingThe Centre for Devel-opment of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has launched Mercury Nimbus Suite, a tool to deliver tele-medicine services using pub-lic and private cloud computing. This suite developed by the Med-ical Informatics Group (MIG) of C-DAC, Pune, is available for use over Windows Azure Cloud Service and is built to be made available over other public cloud

services in future.This tool will enable

tele-consultation and maintenance of elec-tronic health records of patients over an indef-inite period of time. This service can be used by as few as two doctors and is scale-able upto multiple hos-pitals. Also, any patient who requires specialist healthcare can avail of these services from spe-cialist hospitals without physically travelling.

In a bid to create intelli¬gent 3D digi-tal mapping of the cit-ies, low-flying planes equipped with hi-tech cam¬eras sub-con-tracted by the Indian company Rolta, would be seen hovering over skies in the Middle East in the coming months taking pictures

of the cityscape. It is even capable of captur-ing meticulous details of the inte¬riors of buildings.

These mapping would be the start-ing point for the city planners to work on intelli¬gent analyses for town plan¬ning, disaster management,

emergency response and traffic management, said AP Singh, Board Member and Principal Advisor, Rolta. A pre-dominant part of this project involves geo-spatial work where data from dif¬ferent sources would be inte¬grated with online maps, added Singh.

Intelligent mapping for better urban planning

URBAN NEWS DIGEST | MARch 2014 • 2

Volume III - Issue 1

smart cItIes | it, gis & gps application, e-governance

UNFccc registers tata Power’s solar project in GujaratThe Tata Power Com-pany Limited has reg-istered its 25 MW solar project at Mitha¬pur, Gujarat, with the United Nations Frame-work Con¬vention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Now, the com¬pany can trade the certified emission reductions (CERs) earned from this project.

This is Tata Power’s sec¬ond Clean Devel-opment Mechanism (CDM) regis¬tered

project after the 50.4 MW Khandke wind farm in Maharashtra.

Anil Sardana, Managing Director, Tata Power, said, the company will con-tinue in its mission to add ‘clean and renewable energy’ genera¬tion capacities to increase its renew-able energy portfo-lio. “We plan to add 150-200 MW of wind power and 50 MW of solar power capacity every year,” he said.

Tata Power’s Mithapur project is one of the largest of

its kind in the coun-try and has crossed 43,000 MW/h of

gen¬eration since its commission¬ing in January 2012.

New battery to help renewable energy productionA low-cost, long life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid has been developed by the researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stan-ford University.

As solar and wind’s combined contribu-tions to an electri-cal grid approach increase, energy stor-age systems must be

available to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this “intermittent” power – storing excess energy and discharg-ing when input drops.

The new flow battery has a simplified, less expensive design that presents a potentially viable solution for large-scale production.

The Ministry for New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE (Fraunhofer ISE) have signed a memoran-dum of understanding (MoU) to develop pilot projects in photovolta-ics (PV), solar thermal and hydrogen.

Under the agree-ment, the two parties will construct PV test centres, develop test regulations for con-centrating solar col-lectors, provide solar thermal desalination demonstration systems and hydrogen technol-ogy for stationary and mobile applications.

The Delhi-based Solar Energy Center, which is a dedicated unit of the MNRE, will coordinate the work with Fraunhofer ISE.

Scientists at the Uni-versity of Manches-ter in U.K. have pro-duced solar powered surfaces by using wafers of graphene with thin layers of other materials.

The resulting sur-faces, which were paper thin and flex-ible, were able to absorb sunlight to produce electricity at a level equivalent to existing solar panels.

These could be used to create a kind of “coat” on the outside of buildings to gener-ate power needed to run appliances inside while also carrying other functions too,

such as being able to change colour.

The researchers are now hoping to develop the technol-ogy further by pro-ducing a paint that can be put onto the outside of buildings.

Graphene was first discovered in 2004 by Andrew Geim and Konstantin Ser-geevich Novoselov. They won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Phys-ics for demonstrating its remarkable prop-erties – that it was harder than diamond, transparent and could conduct electricity inspite of being one atom thick.Fraunhofer ISE and India sign MoU to

develop solar pilot projects

Graphene paint could power homes of the future

URBAN NEWS DIGEST | MARch 2014 • 3

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