Main Page                                                 Archive

India test-fires Naag successfully

     Hyderabad: India has successfully launched the third generation anti-tank guided missile system 'Nag' from the Army range near Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) scientists along with top brass of the Army tested the missile on Saturday. The missile test fired, Nag, is capable of being launched from advanced light helicopter Dhruv. "The Nag missile is a 'fire and forget' system with a top attack capability and was launched from the Nag Missile Carrier NAMICA exclusively made for it," said Prahad, the Director of Defence Research and Development Laboratory. He added that during one of the tests Nag was mounted with a warhead that destroyed a battle tank located 4 km away.

Court blurring legislature-judiciary demarcation: Somnath (Go To Top)

     New Delhi: Addressing the meeting of the state presiding officers in Delhi, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee, said that the court order had blurred the demarcation between the legislature and the judiciary. He convened a meeting of all the presiding officers of the country and said that orders like the Supreme Court directive on Jharkhand could upset the constitutional balance and democratic functioning of the Indian state. "The issues arising out of the interim order of the case are of such far-reaching ambit that if not reconsidered and if followed in future, it will upset the constitutional balance and the democratic functioning of the state as a whole," Chatterjee said. The Speaker observed that the Supreme Court order has got "serious implications". "With all respect to the Hon'ble Supreme Court, I am of the view that the very principle of separation of powers which is one of the 'basic features' of our governance has been violated," Chatterjee said.

     The one-day meet was held in the backdrop of the Jharkhand crisis. The apex court had advanced the trial of strength and directed that the proceedings in the state assembly be videographed. Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee had strongly objected to this court directive. Earlier, the Speaker even convened an-all party meeting where he suggested that a Presidential reference be made to the Supreme Court for opinion on its order, a move criticised by the BJP and the party even mulled the idea of a no-confidence motion against Chatterjee. Both the issues of Presidential reference and the presiding officers meeting indeed resulted in differences between the government and the Speaker. Even the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had to step in. The meeting of the speakers was convened by Chatterjee after the recent row with judiciary. The Speaker was almost isolated in the past fortnight for seeking a Presidential reference on the question. However, the conference was boycotted by Presiding Officers of states ruled by BJP-led NDA, a development on which Chatterjee declined to comment. The only speaker from an NDA-ruled state who showed up was from Orissa.

Tsunami-hit India gets 12 cm closer to Indonesia (Go To Top)

     Hyderabad: If scientists are to be believed, India has moved closer to Indonesia by 12 centimetres after the deadly tsunami waves struck its southern and eastern coasts on December 26, 2004. Scientists at Hyderabad's National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) have confirmed the news of this geographic shift. The new revelation comes close on the heels of an announcement by geologists in Trivandrum that the Andaman and Nicobar islands had shifted southwest by a few metres immediately after the earthquake-cum-tsunami attack. "What we find was that there should be a permanent down movement in Nicobar and Andaman of the order of 1-5 metres. So, that means in Nicobar or in northern Sumatra all the points which were located there moved to about at least five metres towards the west or south west. If you go for one north then in Andaman all these points moved by amount of let's say one metre towards west. Then you cross the fault that means the Andaman trench fault. If you cross that then you come to mainland that is south India places like Chennai (Madras), Bangalore or Hyderabad. We calculated the movement of these places and found that all these places have moved by at least 10-15 metres towards east," said Vineet Gahlaut, a National Geographic Research Institute scientist.

     A team of scientists had analyzed the data from Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers positioned at different islands. Scientists said that an independent geodetic survey using the same GPS receivers found that the distance between Bangalore and Medan in Sumatra had shrunk by 12 centimeters. The NGRI analysis also suggests that cities in southern India might have experienced eastward horizontal movement of up to 10 mm after the quake. Over 16,000 people were killed in India by the deadly tsunamis, half of them in southern Tamil Nadu alone, and initial estimates put losses at over 1.1 billion dollars. The Asian tsunami, triggered by 9.0 Richter scale undersea earthquake off Indonesia, caused widespread damage along India's eastern coast. Earlier, preliminary survey data revealed on Jan 15, 2005 that the area around Andaman and Nicobar capital Port Blair had shifted by over one metre in the south-eastern direction after the killer earthquake and tsunami of December 26, indicating that new maps would be required for the archipelago now. A team of surveyors from the Survey of India compiling scientific readings from across the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has discovered that their Port Blair control point had shifted towards the south-eastern side by 1.15 metre from its earlier position. "The sea has also recorded a not-so-significant drop of 25 cm from its earlier level at the Port Blair control point which leads us to infer that there could be some subsidence also," the Surveyor General of India Prithvis Nag said, while he was briefing about the Port Blair shift. However, the mean sea level has also increased by 1.5 m post- tsunami, he said.

---