The exit polls have gone wrong yet again in India. While all the surveys had predicted an edge for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), they also said the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would be a close second. But as results came in on Saturday, the gap between the two was expected to be a nearly 100 seats.

Not just the Centres’ predictions went wrong, even the state predictions have gone wrong with the UPA allies contributing to the big success of the Congress giving Prime Minister Manmohan Singh another chance to form a stable government.

In Tamil Nadu, popular schemes like colour TV sets, 1 kg rice for Re 1 and loan waiver for farmers seemed to have worked wonders for ruling DMK which put up an impressive show in Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu defeating an alliance led by its rival AIADMK which had made Tamil Eelam an election issue. The DMK bagged 18 of the 21 seats it had contested.

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad on Saturday admitted that breaking away from the Congress led UPA was the “biggest mistake” that resulted in his party’s “heavy” defeat in Bihar. Railway Minister Lalu Prasad suffered a humiliating defeat in Patliputra Lok Sabha constituency by his friend-turned-foe Ranjan Prasad Yadav, but salvaged some pride by trouncing BJP rival Rajiv Pratap Rudy in Saran.

Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) President Ramvilas Paswan, who was in the Union Cabinet in all governments since 1996, suffered a shock defeat in Hajipur. Paswan had represented this seat seven times in 1977, 1980, 1989, 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2004.

The bulk of seats in the Congress-led UPA’s stunning victory came mostly from the states where the Third Front partners had expected to do well and play kingmakers.

The exit polls had been wide off the mark even in the 2004 elections. Nearly all of them predicted an NDA victory by a wide margin, but the Bharatiya Janata Party-led grouping lost to a rejuvenated Congress.

In this years UPSC final results the first three positions were clinched by women who are trying to break the barrier for second time in as many years. This years results saw a marked improvement over the last few years and top three candidates have very different story from each other the topper Shubhra Saxena is from IIT who resigned from a prosperous IT job to pursue her interest in Indian Administrative Services. She was ably helped by her husband for her second attempt at the exam.

Sharandeep Kaur from Chandigarh secured second position followed by
Kiran Koushal. You can see the list UPSC toppers below

UPSC 2008 results (IAS,IPS,IFS exam results)
http://www.upsc.gov.in/exams/final-results/csm/2008/idx,prnote&rol.htm#PageTop

UPSC 2009 links : http://www.upsc.gov.in/Query/csp/csp_venue_query.htm

IAS Toppers for 2008 (UPSC toppers)

1 159306 SHUBHRA SAXENA
2 307085 SHARANDEEP KAUR BRAR
3 055950 KIRAN KAUSHAL
4 170034 VARINDER KUMAR SHARMA
5 006731 BIJAY KETAN UPADHYAYA
6 109733 YASH GARG
7 047983 TARUN KUMAR PITHODE
8 005167 SURYA PAL GANGWAR
9 259842 S SASIKANTH SENTHIL
10 059632 MITHRA T

The British government on Tuesday introduced a new strict visa regime for students from outside Europe amid a 30 percent rise in the number of Indians studying in Britain.

International students in Britain last year paid tuition fees worth a total of 2.5 billion pounds.

The British home ministry said the new system will make the visa process simpler, more objective and more transparent while preventing abuse of the immigration system.

From Tuesday, all British schools and colleges taking in international students from India and other countries outside the European region will need to be registered with the UK Border Agency.

More than 2,100 universities, independent schools and colleges have applied to be licensed sponsors, undertaking responsibility for ensuring that international students comply with the conditions of their visas while they are in Britain.

Under the new visa rules, students will need to ensure that they have an unconditional offer of a study place, and show that they has sufficient funds to cover course fees and living costs.

A record number of Indian students are now going to Britain. In 2008, almost 29,000 Indian students received visas – a 30 percent increase on 2007 figures.

From April 1 you can use any ATMs of your choice without shelling out any extra money.

According to RBI directive, banks have been prevented from charging any fee for cash withdrawals using ATM and debit cards issued by other banks from April 1 onwards.

However, banks can still charge extra for services like cash withdrawal with the use of credit cards and at ATMs located outside India.

Last year on March 10, the RBI had come out with guidelines limiting the fee charged by banks for using their ATMs by clients of other lenders to Rs 20. It had also allowed the use of ATM for purposes like balance enquiry free of any charge.

Mohammad Azharudddin, the former cricketer who joined the Congress last month, will open his political inning from Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh.

Azharuddin’s name figures in the list of 14 candidates declared by the party on Friday for Uttar Pradesh, where the party wants to revive its lost votebase by going it alone in the polls.

The candidature of the former India batsman, who hails from Hyderabad, was earlier being considered for Tonk in Rajasthan and Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.

So far, the Congress has announced 53 candidates in Uttar Pradesh where its negotiations with the Samajwadi Party for seat sharing collapsed. Former union minister Sanjay Singh was announced as the candidate from Sultanpur, a constituency neighbouring Rae Bareilly and Amethi from where party president Sonia Gandhi and general secretary Rahul Gandhi will contest respectively.

India will need to introduce further measures to stimulate growth, said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the nation’s Planning Commission, ahead of a Group of 20 meeting on the global economic crisis.

The new government that takes over in May after general elections will need to take steps to try and maintain the current year’s economic growth, Ahluwalia said at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s annual conference in New Delhi today.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is heading to London next week to attend a meeting where leaders of the 20 major economies will discuss ways of spurring global growth. The International Monetary Fund has urged countries to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on stimulus, estimating that only Saudi Arabia, Australia, China, Spain and the U.S. will introduce budget boosts worth that much this year.

The government has injected about 4.3 trillion rupees ($85 billion) into the economy since September, India’s cabinet secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar, said at the same meeting today. The impact of the global financial crisis was first felt in India in that month with a freeze in the credit market.

The new government must spend as much as 1 percent of GDP as extra stimulus, Ahluwalia said earlier.

Sri Lanka’s national carrier has cut its flights to India by half, a report said Wednesday.

‘Sri Lankan Airlines has slashed flights to India from 100 a week to 51, as part of a cost-cutting strategy and re-aligning of services to conserve cash and maximize yields,’ Lanka Business Online (LBO) quoting a top airline official said.

‘In the first quarter of the financial year starting March 2008, the airline lost almost 50 million US dollars, on core airline operations, but progressively in the next two to three quarters we’ve managed to stem this loss significantly,’ Manoj Gunewardena, chief executive officer of the airline has been quoted as saying.

‘In the two months of December and January we have managed to break even on operations. With the financial year almost over the airline would end on a minus, though cash flows have stabilized,’ Gunewardena told LBO in an interview Saturday.

According to LBO, the carrier has lost 6.1 billion rupees in 2008 on core airline operations but ended the year with a 4.8 billion rupee profit, with aircraft sales bringing capital gains.

Coming April, India’s student community will get a big morale booster when the country’s first student-made satellite will ride into space on the PSLV, (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) along with ISRO’s (Indian Space Research Organization) Risat Satellite.

The “Anusat” has been designed by 37 aerospace engineering students with the help of 10 teachers from the Madras Institute of Technology. ISRO, which has been promoting the development of satellites (microsatellites), is finally seeing its efforts bearing fruit with the imminent launch of the Anusat. The idea behind the promotion was to make the students aware of the various factors involved in the design and launch of a satellite. These involved taking in to consideration the thermal management of the satellite, controls, the guidance system, power delivery, and not to mention, the communications part wherein the two-way communication between the satellite and the command centre will be managed.

The satellite will orbit the earth in a low altitude orbit between 600 and 800km. Data from the satellite will be received at the Chennai Tech University and the Pune University.

Anusat has been designed to cater the basic communication purposes. However, the main purpose behind the initiative, apart from the obvious scientific intent, was to give the students a “hands-on” experience in handling complex projects like the design, development and execution of a project of this nature. The program was initiated in 2002 and was ideated by R. Vasagam, the former vice chancellor of Anna University.

Other universities and educational institutions are already in the midst of developing micro satellites. These include the IIT Mumbai and IIT Kanpur and not to mention, Anna University to which the Madras Institute of Technology is affiliated with.

The launch of the satellite is expected to happen on April 5 or 6.

Unidentified gunmen have shot dead the editor of a newspaper in India’s north-eastern Assam state, police say.

Anil Mazumder, editor of the Assamese daily Aji (Today), was attacked by armed men when he was returning home in the state capital, Guwahati, they said.

The attackers who came in a car shot at Mr Mazumder at point-blank range and fled, a police official said.

Local television channels say Mr Mazumder was sympathetic to the separatist movement in Assam.

The murder has caused widespread panic in the state as the campaign for the forthcoming parliamentary elections is just beginning.

A number of separatist groups are active in Assam and the state has regularly witnessed violence.

It turns the much awaited 10$ laptop is nothin more than a ebook reader with a low quality screen.

The hype surrounding the $10 laptop “prototype” with two GB RAM turned out to be a joke when the department of Human Resources
Development announced — during its inauguration in the temple town of Tirupati — that it wasn’t a laptop at all but a computing device.

While the world eagerly waited for the launch of the $10 laptop — designed by students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras, UGC and MHRD — it wasn’t a patch on the $100 laptop made by MIT.

The MHRD officials said the price was working out to be $20 but with mass production it was bound to come down to $10 (Rs 500) and thus become affordable for every student in India.

But netizens were disappointed when the “laptop” turned out to be nothing more than a computing device along with a hard disk with e-books, e-journals and relevant educative material through the state-art-of-the-art “Sakshat” portal.

As the device appeared smaller than the normal laptop with 10-inch length and five-inch width, buzz got around that it was a “Nano-top” and not a laptop. But MHRD official brought the curtains down on all the hungama, saying it was just a computing device with 2GB memory.

Joint Secretary, MHRD, N K Sinha said that the device still needs to be fine tuned. But he had no answer to the million dollar question: where was the $10 laptop?

The talk of the “invention” had raised expectations of bridging the technological divide between rural and urban India. Talking to TOI, a Professor from Sri Venkateswara University said (on the condition of anonymity), “How can just a computing device bridge the digital divide and make access to computer literacy affordable to the masses? Where will poor students get computers to jack this gizmo with? Will MHRD provide computers and internet connectivity in rural and remote areas? There is no clarity among the officials themselves,” he said.

A research scholar from Mahila University said, “How many students in Tirupati have access to computers? Then, MHRD hasn’t given details of the size of the screen, storage, processor, etc. MHRD should first think about the feasibility of such projects before they are launched. The entire world was watching. This act of MHRD has shamed the nation,” she said.

On a day of high drama, the fallen Indian IT leader, Mr B. Ramalinga Raju, found himself drawn away from the comfort of 5-star luxury and high echelons of power to the claustrophobic confines of the Chanchalguda jail.

The Founder-Chairman of Satyam Computer Services, who admitted that the company was in a Rs 7,136-crore financial mess, was on Saturday remanded to judicial custody till January 23 by Mr D. Ramakrishna, the sixth Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate.

The court has also directed the jail officials to monitor the health condition of Mr Raju as he was suffering from blood pressure fluctuations and high cholesterol and hepatitis C infection.

At the jail, Mr Raju would not get any preferential treatment. He would have access to one newspaper and there would be no TV in the barracks. His diet would consist of a total of 650 gms of rice (lunch and dinner), tea twice a day etc.

The two Rajus (Mr Ramalinga Raju and his brother Mr Rama Raju, former MD and CEO) were among the 27 persons remanded to judicial custody to the Chanchalguda jail.

Meanwhile, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Satyam, Mr Vadlamani Srinivas, whose whereabouts were not known till yesterday, has also been arrested by the police. Interestingly, Mr Srinivas, was the most significant name not exonerated by Mr Raju in his statement of facts.

Hectic activity

The action began late last night, when Mr Raju along with his brother drove to the Director General of Police (DGP) office, and was closeted with CID officials till the wee hours, culminating in their arrest.

Throughout today, police, opposition parties, media and investigating teams probing the Satyam affairs were busy, to ferret out important threads of the unfolding events, even as Mr Raju remained elusive.

Expectations of his appearing before the Magistrate which were doing the rounds from early in the morning, turned real only around 5 p.m. when Mr Raju and his brother, were brought under heavy security by the police to the residence of Mr Ramakrishna in Marredpally, as the courts are on vacation.

Mr S. Bharat Kumar, legal counsel for Mr Raju, has said that he would move the court for bail on Monday.

CM talks to PM

Meanwhile, the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, has spoken to the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and detailed him about the happenings related to Satyam Computer.

Earlier, the Chief Minister had discussed the case with Mr S S P Yadav, DGP, Mr K. Aravinda Rao, Additional DG (Intelligence), and the CID officials probing the case, at his Camp Office today.

India’s state-run carrier Air India has dismissed 10 women flight attendants who were grounded last year for being overweight, a report said Monday. Indian Airlines has always faced mockery about its cabin crew either too old or too heavy. Last year IA started taking action against its crew who were overweight and asked them to report to Ground Duty.

The sackings came after the cabin crew were warned about meeting minimum physical fitness standards and given sufficient time to lose weight, the Press Trust of India news agency reported quoting airline sources.

The flight attendants were also offered alternative ground assignments which they refused, the report said.

Delhi High Court last year upheld Air India’s right to reassign overweight attendants, citing clauses in their contracts that barred them from flight duties if they put on too much weight.

The court had noted that the state-run airline needed fit attendants to compete with private rivals in India’s fiercely competitive aviation market.

Meanwhile, a lawyer for the sacked cabin crew Monday said the dismissals were against the law as the case was being heard by India’s Supreme Court.

“The action is illegal and against the natural justice. I will soon file an application in the Supreme Court against the (sacking) order,” lawyer Arvind Sharma told the news agency

India has handed over the material evidence in the Mumbai terrorist attack case to Pakistan foregin secretary in islamabad and Pakistan High commissioner.

The materials include the interrogation tapes of Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Mohammed Ajmal Amir, details of the weapons and ammunition used and data from the satellite phones recovered from the attackers.The satellite phones are the main evidence connecting Islamabad to Mumbai attacks. The terrorists were guided through sea by Stellite Phone and GPS systems.

“The material is linked to elements in Pakistan,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “It is our expectation that the government of Pakistan will promptly undertake further investigations in Pakistan and share the results with us so as to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

In light of this information, Menon said, India expected Pakistan to follow up with investigations it was legally obliged to carry out as it was a signatory to international conventions and legal instruments under SAARC.

Bangalore, India

Terrorists are trying to create havoc in the silicon valley of the east, A series of threat emails were received by the top Bangalore based IT companies Infosys and Wipro. The other four company names are not available. TCS the top Indian company also has presence in Bangalore.

Bangalore home to world’s top IT companies including Microsoft,IBM,Google is a heavily crowded city, this threat mails ahead of first full week of of Newyear could disrupt day to day life in the city.

Six prominent IT companies in Bangalore, including Infosys and Wipro, have received e-mails threatening to blow up their buildings, a top police officer said on Sunday.

Joint Commissioner of Police B Gopal Hosur said in Bangalore that the companies received e-mails threatening to blow up their establishments two days ago and immediately informed the police.

The police have already begun investigations, he said, but did not divulge further details.

For many who doesn’t the History of Lashkar e Taiba, this news can be surprising. But this once again proves no terrorist organization can prosper without the backup of Nations.

Last three times the UN Security council attempted to ban Lashkar e taiba’s political wing Jamaat-ud-Dawah, it was blocked by India and Pakistan’s common neighbor China. China and US have always stood behind Pakistan over the years with main goal of preventing India’s rise in the region. But now with the global focus squarely on Pakistan and its militant groups, Will China again block a move to ban the Jamaat-ud-Dawah again?

This also brings questions about Al Qaeda itself, Osama was grown by US to fight against Russians within Afganishtan. Though most countries intelligence agencies support terrorists in one way or other it always backfires. China Keeps a tight lid on any muslim religious activities within its borders even banning daily prayers, but still supported Jamaat-ud-Dawah for no strange reason.

It’s learnt the UNSC has already initiated the necessary steps to ban JUD and tighten the screws on its chief Hafiz Saeed, regarded as a key man behind the Mumbai carnage, who is wanted by India as a criminal terrorist. A Saeed-specific ban is also a certainty, said government sources.

Pakistan, which had denied the complicity of Lashkar in Mumbai attacks, had to make the statement about banning JUD at the UNSC because of the near-unanimity in the Security Council about JUD’s involvement in terrorism. The UNSC move marked a global concert against Pakistan because of its failure to carry out its repeated pledges to India and others to crack down on terrorist camps.

Mumbai, India

TATA Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro the IT biggies from India have put big brakes on the recruitment drives. Most of the IT companies were running amok in terms of recruitment for past few years in college campuses. But the current batch might have to struggle hard to find good positions in IT industry.

Now the focus turns to quality from quantity as far as IT industry is concerned. The most expected outcome is the companies will reduce the number of colleges they visit in the next few years. And within each college they will pick only the cream, gone are the days when able to utter few words in English would mean a position in one of these companies.

Strangely this will affect the Mechanical and Electronics (ECE) and other departments of the colleges compared to Computer Science and Information technlogy departments. These companies will prefer already trained candidates compared to the other departments.

The questions in interviews might tougher and interviews themselves will get longer as the number of positions will reduce. So tough times ahead for the present batch in College, but if you are good enough you will still have job.

Police in India said Tuesday they had identified the nine suspected Islamic militants killed during the three-day siege of Mumbai and uncovered new details about them — including their hometowns in Pakistan.

The new information, which included three gruesome photos of maimed faces, appeared to bolster India’s claims that all the attackers were from Pakistan.

Mumbai’s chief police investigator Rakesh Maria also showed photos of eight of the men — some from identity cards, while others were gruesome shots of the dead attackers. The body of the ninth, he said, was too badly burned.

Most of the attackers came from Pakistan’s Punjab province, and all were between the ages of 20 and 28.

Meanwhile tensions are raising in pakistan, Prof Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who now heads Jamaatul Daawa, has condemned Pakistani security forces’ raid on the Muzafafrabad offices of the JuD, saying the Pakistani rulers have finally bowed to the Indian government which has apparently decided to use the Mumbai attacks as an excuse to crush the ongoing freedom movement in Jammu & Kashmir.

The terrorists in the Mumbai attacks recently were tech savvy and used Google earth to train and get to know about the streets of Mumbai. They also tracked the events using their web enabled balckberry. And their main communication tools were a Satellite phone and number of sim cards (to prevent being tracked), they had used advanced GPS navigation systems in the sea for navigation.

Now there Public interest Litigation in Mumbai High Court ,asking Google to reduce resolution/remove sensitive areas all through out India.

Few years back this issue came to the fore when Indian parliament was attacked by suspected LeT militants.