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The untold story of India's missile defence
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There was scepticism on November 27, 2006, when the Ministry of Defence made a surprise announcement. In a secret test off the Orissa coast, a missile launched by the Defence Research and Development Organisation had hit and destroyed a simulated incoming enemy ballistic missile while it was 78 km above the Bay of Bengal, still outside the earth's atmosphere.

A year later, on December 6, 2007, the MoD declared a second test successful, when an incoming ballistic missile was shot down inside the atmosphere, some 15 km above the earth. This was high-technology success; no more than six or seven countries have anti-ballistic missile capability.

Unlike the shrill promises that accompanied the Trishul and Akash anti-aircraft missiles, the ABM programme was kept secret, even from close watchers of the DRDO.

Business Standard was granted exclusive access to the ABM missile production facilities in Hyderabad, and told the story of how the programme evolved.

It began in 1995, after India learned that Pakistan had obtained the M-9 and M-11 ballistic missiles from China. India already had its own nuclear deterrent in place; the Prithvi missile was ready, and the Agni was being tested.

But Pakistan was considered unpredictable and, in 1996, the MoD asked its Scientific Advisor APJ Abdul Kalam [Images] whether India could quickly develop protection against an incoming Pakistani ballistic missile.

Kalam was already overseeing the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme; he began feasibility studies on an ABM programme as well. DRDO's first challenge was to develop radar, which could pick up enemy ballistic missiles being launched from up to 300 km away.

The longest range Indian radar was Rajendra, with a range of 60 km, and there simply was no time to develop long-range radar from scratch. The only option was foreign collaboration. Kalam put one of his top scientists, VK Saraswat, in charge.

Saraswat recounts Russia [Images] was approached first, but the conditions in Russia -- with defence R&D at an all time low -- made the DRDO reject that option. It was then that the Israeli ABM programme -- the Arrow-1, based upon the long-range Green Pine radar --caught the DRDO's eye.

A delegation was sent to Israel, but it was turned down because the Green Pine radar incorporated US technology. But Israel did agree to collaborate with India in building a Long Range Tracking Radar.

Also needed for the system was guidance radar to track the incoming enemy missile. The Electronics and Radar Development Establishment (a DRDO laboratory), explains Saraswat, has developed that radar in collaboration with a French company, Thales.

With the radar problems solved, government sanction was obtained in 1998 to develop an ABM system; the ability to defend against an enemy nuclear strike is believed to undermine deterrence.

But the project remained secret, because an ABM system is controversial. Besides that, says Saraswat, India's nuclear tests that year had tightened international sanctions.

"We were having collaboration with these two countries, but the times were not good. We faced severe sanctions in 1998 and, if we talked too much about it, the cooperation could have dried up. That was the main concern."

But while the radars were a collaborative effort, interceptor missiles were developed entirely by the DRDO, say the scientists. So were the mission control centre and the launch control centre, which are the nerve centre of the system.

The DRDO says the programme has now reached maturity, and that international sanctions cannot hurt it. There is also a degree of self-confidence in the DRDO, which allows it to acknowledge the role played by other countries. International collaboration is no longer a bad word.

January 30, 2008 | 1:52 AM Comments  0 comments

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my married life
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i have completed two months of my married life. each day came up with new challenges and new surprises.i got many many relations and iam learning to remeber all by name and face.it is a bit difficult as ours is a big joint family where four generations live in a single house.then we both are trying to spend to get quality time with each other as we both have crazy work schedules with lots of workload.when ever w eget a day off we thonk that today will be our day but then some relative invite us over for lunch or dinnner.spmetimes we get two invitataiosn for a single day .on 2 6thjan. first we went to gurgoan for luch and from there hopped back to our house to get ready for dinner. for dinner we went to east delhi.in a day we were on road for four hours.it was crazy.in between our fuel tank ran out of petrol .we found a petrol pump just in nick of time.oh yes my dear nephew has gone with his folks to agra and iam missing him badly.we have completed 2 months only of our wedding life and family memebers have started asking us -when are we going to have a baby. at times we just laugh it out or feel shy to answer it.
oh yes it is so crazy that iam yet to see my wedding video.ihave seen my wedding album .we both love it a lot.

January 28, 2008 | 4:59 AM Comments  1 comments

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Spouses Who Fight Live Longer
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A good argument with your spouse could be just what the doctor ordered
Preliminary results from a survey of married couples suggest that disputing husbands and wives who hold in their anger die earlier than expressive couples.


"When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict," said researcher Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Psychology Department. "Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that's fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict."


So while conflict is inevitable, the critical matter is how couples resolve it.


"The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?" Harburg said. "When you don't, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don't try to resolve the problem, then you're in trouble."


The findings add to past research showing that the release of anger can be healthy. For instance, one study revealed when people are angry they tend to make better decisions, perhaps because this emotion triggers the brain to ignore irrelevant cues and focus on the meat of the matter. Individuals who express anger might also have a sense of control and optimism over a situation, according to another past study.


Bottled anger adds to stress, which tends to shorten lives, many studies show.


In the current study, the authors suggest a combination of factors to explain the higher mortality for couples who don't express their anger. These include "mutual anger suppression, poor communication (of feelings and issues) and poor problem-solving with medical consequences," they write in the January issue of the Journal of Family Communication.


Over a 17-year period, Harburg and his colleagues studied 192 married couples in which spouses ranged in age from 35 to 69, focusing on aggressive behavior considered unfair or undeserved by the person being "attacked." Harburg said that if an attack is viewed as fair, the victim doesn't tend to get angry.


Based on the participants' anger-coping responses to hypothetical situations, Harburg placed couples into one of four categories: both partners express their anger; the wife expresses anger; the husband communicates anger while the other suppresses; and both the husband and wife brood and suppress their anger.


The researchers found that 26 couples, meaning 52 individuals, were suppressors in which both partners held in their anger. Twenty-five percent of the suppressors died during the study period compared with about 12 percent for the other remaining couples.


In 27 percent of the suppressor couples, one member of the couple died during the study period, and in 23 percent of those couples, both died during the study period. That's compared to only 6 percent of couples where both spouses died in the remaining three groups combined. Only 19 percent in the remaining three groups combined saw one partner die during the study period.


The results held even when other health factors were accounted for, including age, smoking, weight, blood pressure, bronchial problems, breathing and cardiovascular risk.


Harburg said the results are preliminary, and his team is now collecting 30-year follow-up data. He expects the follow-up to show almost double the death rate compared with the preliminary findings.


January 24, 2008 | 10:38 AM Comments  0 comments

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Girl switches blood type after liver transplant in first known case: doctors
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SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian girl spontaneously switched blood groups and adopted her donor's immune system following a liver transplant in the first known case of its type, doctors treating her said Thursday.

Demi-Lee Brennan was aged nine and seriously ill with liver failure when she received the transplant, doctors at a top Sydney children's hospital told AFP.

Nine months later it was discovered that she had changed blood types and her immune system had switched over to that of the donor after stem cells from the new liver migrated to her bone marrow.

She is now a healthy 15-year-old, Michael Stormon, a hepatologist treating her, told AFP. Stormon said he had given several presentations on the case around the world and had heard of none like it.

"It is extremely unusual -- in fact we don't know of any other instance in which this happened," Stormon told AFP from the Children's Hospital.

"In effect she had had a bone marrow transplant. The majority of her immune system had also switched over to that of the donor."

An article on the case was published in Thursday's edition of the leading US medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine.

Doctors who treated Brennan say she is now only under treatment as an outpatient and are interested to know if the case could have other applications in transplant surgery, where rejection of donor organs by the recipient's immune system is a major hurdle.

Stormon said it appeared that Brennan may have been fortunate because a "sequence of serendipitous events", including a post-transplantation infection, may have given the stem cells from her donor's liver the chance to proliferate.

The task now was to establish whether the same sort of outcome could be replicated in other transplant patients, he said.


January 24, 2008 | 10:34 AM Comments  0 comments

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Reliance Power maiden issue sets world record
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The just-concluded maiden public issue of Reliance Power, which was oversubscribed 73 times and garnered an astronomical $190 billion, has created many world records, its chairman Anil Ambani said on Saturday.

"It is the largest subscription of any IPO (initial public offering) anywhere in the history of global capital markets, with a record five million applicants," a beaming Ambani said at a press conference here, a day after the issue's conclusion.

"When Reliance Power lists early February, it will be among the 10 top listed companies in India with the largest number of shareholders in any listed Indian company or in the world," he said.

"If we assume it lists at the issue price of Rs.450, the market capitalization for the group will be around $100 billion," he said, adding that it will make his Reliance Anil Dirubhai Ambani Group the second largest in India in terms of market capitalisation.

Ambani said the issue came at a time when the Indian markets and global markets were experiencing a meltdown but yet attracted a record subscription of $100 billion from foreign funds, equalling 40 percent of India's foreign exchange.

"The inflow amounts to one-and-a-half times the cumulative foreign institutional investment (FII) flows into India since 1992. The Reliance Energy IPO is greater than the combined subscriptions recorded by five top in India so far."

The five top public issues in the past were those by Mundra Port, Power Grid Corp, Reliance Petroleum, Idea and Power Finance Corp.

According to Ambani, provisional calculations revealed the issue was subscribed 73 times over.

While the amount set aside for qualified institutional buyers, including foreign funds, was oversubscribed 82.5 times, that for retail buyers was subscribed 14.4 times over.

He said the company would fix the issue price at the top end of the price band at Rs.450 per share, with a discount of Rs.20 per share for retail investors - another first in India.

The Reliance group, that now stands divided between Anil and his elder brother Mukesh, came with its first public offer 31 years ago for launching a textiles unit. The issue then was oversubscribed eight times.

In contrast, when the Reliance Power IPO opened itself to subscriptions Jan 15, it was fully subscribed twice over in the first 58 seconds. By the end of the opening day, it was subscribed 10 times over, Ambani said.

The company notched another record in launching the issue within eight working days of receiving regulatory approvals Jan 2, he added. It also distributed over 40 million application forms, and involved 177 bank branches at 126 bidding centres.

Ambani said after his group was carved out of the larger Reliance empire in June 2006, the market capitalisation had gone up from $4 billion to $100 billion.

The companies under the fold include Reliance Communication, Reliance Capital, Reliance Power, Reliance Natural Resources, Adlabs and Reliance Energy.

Reliance Power proposes to use the funds to build power generation units across the country. As per company officials, projects worth 28,000 MW are in the pipeline.

"This is the largest portfolio of power generation within a geographical area or a group anywhere in the world," Ambani had told a press conference earlier. The government envisages an addition of 80,000 MW during the 11th five-year plan (2007-2012).

The company, which is an associate of Reliance Energy, was in November awarded the 4,000-MW Krishnapatnam power project in Andhra Pradesh, with the lowest bid for a tariff of Rs.2.33 per unit among all qualified bidders.

Another major project of the company was the 4,000-MW Sasan power project in Madhya Pradesh, awarded in August 2007.

Source: IANS

January 19, 2008 | 8:29 AM Comments  0 comments

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