Ms. Damyanti V. Tambay, Deputy Director, PE has been nominated as Government Observer in the discipline of Badminton by the Govt. of India, Ministry of Affairs & Sports.


Mr. Biju K.P., Research Scholar, Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, has been awarded “Jawaharlal Nehru Young Leaders Fellowship” for the year 2007 under the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF) of the Nippon Foundation & Tokyo Foundation, Japan.

Professor Anil Bhatti, Centre for German Studies & Prof. Chaman Lal, Centre of Indian Languages have been elected as Vice-Presidents and Dr. Devendra Kumar Choubey Centre of Indian Languages, School of Language, Literature & Culture Studies as member of Executive Committee of Indian Association of World Languages & Literatures (IAWLL).

The University’s Aravali Guest House won the Ist Prize for the Best Mini Garden and the Vice-Chancellor’s lodge the IInd Prize in the Best Large Private Garden category in the Pusa Horticulture Show organized by the Delhi Agri-Horticultural Society, Division of Floriculture and Landscaping, Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI). The gardens of Aravali Guest House and the V.C. lodge have been maintained by Shri Paras Nath and Shri Moti Ram Yadav respectively.

An Instrument to Detect Cosmic Rays

A member of the Jawaharlal Nehru University faculty will soon start work on a brand new project as principal investigator to develop an instrument that could help in improving an early warning system on changes in earth’s environment.

Prof. S. Mukherjee of JNU’s School of Environmental Sciences is being funded by the Asian office of Aerospace Research in Japan to start the project on the “Influence of the Sun and other Cosmic Factors on the Environment of the Earth”.
 

The project which has also been technically approved by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the US, will develop an instrument to detect cosmic rays. The variation data of these rays will be used to improve upon the existing early warning systems to understand the changes in global climate, including rainfall, snowfall and global warming.

The instrument, which should be ready by 2009-end, will also help in understanding the direct relationship between changes within the sun and global warming and its implications in water resource management.

Under the agreement with the Japanese organization, Prof. Mukherjee will install a new particle detector to monitor various species of secondary cosmic rays with different energy thresholds at JNU to investigate detailed simulation of the traversal of cosmic rays through atmosphere and precise calculation of the detector response function in association with terrestrial and extra-terrestrial remotely sensed data. The grant was received by JNU in December and the one-year project that can be extended for another year got under way last month.

The project will also be one of 12 locations worldwide for Space Environmental Viewing and Analysis Networking (SEVAN) to develop a global model in order to analyse why the intensity of cosmic rays is more at some places and less at others.

“JNU is one of the 12 locations for that. By 2010, all SEVAN locations will be functional. This will be useful to understand the changes in the space environment and its co-relation with the earth’s environment. We will be able to predict the effects of climatic changes like rainfall and thundershower in tropical areas and snowfall in high altitudes in a more accurate manner. There will be an online exchange of all the data emanating from all these centres,” explained Prof. Mukherjee.

About ten years ago, Prof. Mukherjee, who is an expert of remote sensing in geo-sciences and also a Visiting Professor on water resources at the University of Liverpool, had proposed a hypothesis that there was a relationship between earth-directed coronal mass ejections of the sun and triggering of earthquakes in active fault zones of the world.

Project on Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation

The Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) program of Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) has approved a project on Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation proposed by Dr. Girish Nath Jha. The project is titled ”Development of Sanskrit Computational Toolkit and Sanskrit-Hindi Machine Translation System” and has been recently sanctioned by DIT. It has the following major goals: developing a Sanskrit to Hindi Machine translation system, Sanskrit e-Ieaming (teaching Sanskrit through computer), and creating Sanskrit multimedia content. The overall duration is three years and the total funding is 316.68 lakhs with six partner institutions in a consortia mode. JNU has the largest share of the budget (90.68 lakhs). This project will not only create technologies for on-the-fly translations of Sanskrit stories for children, but also make available to them the Indian heritage in interactive multimedia form. One of the important spin-offs of this project will be training Sanskrit scholars in the area of computational linguistics, creating job opportunities for Sanskrit students and providing easy access to the vast repository of Sanskrit texts with the help of technology. The best part however is the fact that India’s glorious heritage will reach India’s younger generation in the form they like.

(Girish Nath Jha, Assistant Professor, Centre for Sanskrit Studies)

JNU Dons Sell Books for a Song

It was a festival of a different kind. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professors gave away 600 books for a nominal sum. The students didn’t let go the opportunity.

Although most of the books were course related, there were many on apartheid, poetry, history, fiction and art.

Organised by the School of IT, the books were lapped up by the students in no time.

Abhishekh Kumar, a Ph.D. student of the department of Biotechnology, said he rushed to the SIT when he saw his friends coming to the class with armful of books.

“It’s quite strange that I didn’t come to know about the fest, otherwise I could have got more books,” said Kumar, holding three books on ecosystem in his hand and rummaging through the shelves for more.

“But I am happy with what I got. These books cost no less than Rs 300-500 each and here I got all the three of them at a nominal price,” he added.

Ram Ramaswamy, Professor of Physics in SIT and one of the three professors who contributed their books to the fest, said that this would become a regular affair from now on.

“We have so many books in our homes which we have not read for ages, books which we no
longer required or may consider as a bad buy. Why let them go waste? Three of us (professors) put up these 600 books for the fest and they simply disappeared from the shelves in two hours,” said Ramaswamy.

“The festival is the first of its kind in JNU and we hope to make it a regular affair,” he added.
Anshika Gupta, a student doing her masters in literature and a self-confessed bookworm, said that more people should emulate this festival.

“It’s a wonderful thing to do. We all have so many books lying in our homes untouched and unread for years… what better way to bring them back to life than by letting someone else read them?

“I have picked up some novels, magazines and a book on poetry from the fest. The amazing thing was that they were priced at as low as Rs 20-50 each. Next time they do this, I will probably put up some of my old books for it as well,” said Gupta, while typing a message to her friend to come to the fest.

“Not only that, some of the books are as old as 50 years… they can be quite a treasure,” added her friend Harsh.

The festival, which was on for just three hours, had just one rule not more than five books per person.
 

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