Online facility to pay electricity charges in three districts

Easy way: Tamil Nadu Electricity Board has introduced online power charges payment facility for consumers in Coimbatore region.

COIMBATORE: The Tamil Nadu Electricity Board has introduced online facility for the payment of power consumption charges in Coimbatore region.

According to an official of the board here, the facility was first launched for the Chennai consumers and was extended to consumers here recently.

Tie-up

The board had tied up with some banks for this purpose.

Electricity consumers in Coimbatore, Tirupur and the Nilgiris Districts could log on to www.tneb.in and register their name and service number.

They would be able to remit the current consumption charges through internet banking, credit or debit cards.

Internet banking

Consumers could pay through internet banking if they had account in Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Indian Bank, Indian Overseas Bank or City Union Bank.

Credit card

Payment facility using credit card was available for Axis Bank and ICICI Bank and debit card facility for Indian Bank and Indian Overseas Bank.

The facility was available for this region from June 24 and the system was expected to stabilise in a month.

The board proposed to introduce payment though ATM and post offices too here.

The region had about 13.17 lakh domestic consumers and three lakh commercial consumers. The official added that the board had restored load shedding here for two hours every day.

Load shedding

It had lifted the two hour load shedding for about 10 days last month.

COIMBATORE - Mega city proposal sent to Central Government

The Coimbatore Corporation has submitted to the Central Government a proposal to add three municipalities, 11 town panchayats and 18 village panchayats to it and expand the city area from 105 sq.km. to 476.54 sq.km.

“A city development committee from the Central Government will visit the city to assess the Corporation's requirements and also what it can do for the areas it wishes to merge with the city,” Mayor R. Venkatachalam says. The proposal has now moved up to this point after a series of discussions with the other local bodies

The Corporation will list all the infrastructure development, solid waste management, drainage and energy saving schemes it has already embarked upon and explain how these can be implemented in the other local bodies that will be merged with it, he adds.

The Mayor explains that villages and towns adjoining the city will benefit immensely from major schemes that are approved for a corporation when they are merged with it.

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, originally meant for 63 cities across the country, later added an urban agglomeration component that aimed at including the peri-urban areas (along the city border) for infrastructure development.

The city expansion will naturally bring development to these areas.

“There is a demand for metro rail facility for the city. But, it cannot be implemented with the current size of the city. The expansion will be of great help in this regard. Only big cities can get big schemes,” Mr. Venkatachalam points out.

If there are reservations over the expansion in some of the targeted local bodies, it is only because of the reluctance to give up posts of municipal chairman and panchayat presidents, the Mayor says.

“I was a member of Ward 8 of Sanganur Panchayat, before it became a part of the Corporation. Now, I am the Mayor of the city. Apart from development, expansion can bring about greater opportunities in terms of posts too,” he says.

A satellite for students, made by students

It was more than three years ago that D.V.A. Raghava Murthy, Project Director, Small Satellites Projects, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Satellite Centre, Bangalore, was addressing a group of college students in that town on what a fascinating subject space was and how students should get interested in it. His speech was so riveting that at the end of the meeting, a group of students met him and

asked him why ISRO could not help them in building a satellite. Thus began the story of Studsat, a tiny satellite that was built by 35 students belonging to four engineering colleges in Bangalore and three in Hyderabad. Studsat was put in orbit by the PSLV-C15 from Sriharikota on Monday. “Studsat is part of the encouragement given by the ISRO to colleges and universities to learn space technology and learn how to build, nano, micro and pico satellites,” said Mr. Raghava Murthy. Indeed, Shewata Prasad, one of the students from Bangalore, was fascinated enough by the Studsat project that she gave a wide berth to a well-paying job, her teachers said.

“The contagion” has caught on, and four other nano satellites are in the pipeline. According to Mr. Raghava Murthy, these are a three-kg “Jugnu” satellite being built by the students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur; a 3.5 kg satellite called Pradhan being built by the students of IIT-Mumbai; and two other satellites, each weighing less than 10 kg, that are being assembled by the students of SRM University and Sathyabhama University, both in Chennai. Anusat, a 40-kg satellite, built by Anna University, Chennai, had been put in order by one of the earlier PSLV missions.

The Studsat employed several frontline technologies that were designed and developed by the 35 students themselves with guidance from ISRO. “It was a multi-disciplinary effort,” said Professor B.S. Satyanarayana, Principal, R.V. College of Engineering, and Prof. S. Jagannathan, Head of the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in the same college. It took the students about a year and a half to design, build and test the Studsat. (The project began in August 2008). The lead institute in the project was Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology (NMIT), Bangalore.

How it works

The satellite has a camera which can take pictures in the HAM code. The camera can take pictures of the earth, which can help in predicting the weather. The resolution of the images, taken from an altitude of 637 km, was 90 metres, said H.C. Nagaraj, Principal, NMIT and Professor Jharna Majumdar, Professor, Department of Computer Science Engineering in the same college.

“The ground station built by the students in Bangalore is one of the achievements of this project,” said Prof. Satyanarayana. It received the signals from the satellite soon after the Studsat was put in orbit and the students also built a clean room for testing the satellite.

While NMIT contributed Rs. 45 lakh for the project, six other colleges chipped in with Rs. 45 lakh. The six colleges are Rashtriya Vidyalaya College of Engineering. M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology and B.M.S. Institute of Technology, all located in Banglore, and Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Institute of Aeronautical Engineering and Vigyan Institute of Technology and Science, all located in Hyderabad. The Department of Science and Technology, Karnataka Government, gave Rs. 5 lakh to the project.

"Initially, we found it funny, how can we develop a satellite? We are only electronic students of second year and third year, but something started ticking in our head, and we got in touch with ISRO," said the team leader of the STUDSAT project, Chetan Angadi.

Their guide Professor Jharna Majumdar, a former scientist with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), can barely conceal her pride.

"Some attempt has started in the country with nanosatellite, microsatellite, but picosatellite is the smallest satellite weighting one kg. The students wanted to do something which is not there, which they will be the first person to do," said Majumdar.
The satellite would also have an on-board computer, communication system, power system and altitude control system.

Majumdar said the data would be analysed at a ground station, Nitte Amateur Satellite Tracking Centre, at her institute.

STUDSAT is the lightest ever satellite to be flown by ISRO. Therefore, accuracy had to be 100 per cent.

"We had to match the satellite with existing system. We spent endless nights in developing satellite, three to four models so that we could choose the right model, maintain weight considerations as we had to build a system under a particular weight," said the structure co-leader of the STUDSAT, Kiran.

Now, that the big moment is near, the STUDSAT team has only one prayer.

"We pray to god that the satellite goes to orbit, gives the data which inspires other younger students," said Professor Jharna Majumdar.

(Team members from different colleges who built the first Inidan PICO Statellite "STUDSAT" seen with dignitaries while handing over the 1st Indian PICO Satellite STUDSAT to ISRO in Bangalore )

Coimbatore TIDEL Park

About 90 per cent of construction work is over

The Park is located on a 56-acre SEZ

Coimbatore: The Tidel Park here is expected to be inaugurated next month.

According to an official of the park here, about 90 per cent of the construction work is over. Of the total built up area of 17 lakh sq.ft, the park has nine lakh sq.ft. Information Technology (IT) space. It would also have six lakh sq.ft area with a capacity to park about 1,200 cars and one lakh sq.ft of utility area.

The Tidel Park is located on a 56-acre SEZ. Apart from the Tidel, the park would have three IT companies setting up facilities at the SEZ. The SEZ also has 12 acres earmarked for social infrastructure.

IT and IT enabled services (ITES) companies can occupy minimum 5,000 sq.ft. at the park and the space is available at Rs. 30 per sq.ft. At least 35 companies are expected to set shop at the park.

Enquiries so far are encouraging, says the official. And, some companies have already booked space. Most of these are core IT and ITES companies.

The total project cost of the park, coming up at the Special Economic Zone at Peelamedu here, is estimated to be Rs. 380 crore. More than Rs. 250 crore has been invested so far.