PUNE: One more attempt to get   24 X 7 water supply scheme on the track fell through on Tuesday, when the standing committee of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) rejected   a Rs 37 crore   proposal submitted by the Tata Consultancy Service (TCS) to prepare a Detailed Project Report (DPR) on the scheme and instead decided to scout for an agency ready to take up the scheme on a DBOT ( Design, Build, Operate and Transfer) basis.   The scheme, first envisaged by former municipal commissioner Praveen Singh Pardeshi in 2008, was designed to address the issue of heavy water leakages, estimated to be around 30 to 40 per cent of city’s water supply.   The PMC is undergoing a severe crash crunch   and most standing committee members felt it would be not advisable to spend Rs 37 crore on a DPR   if the work on it could not be begun before 2012.

MELBOURNE: Ending weeks of political uncertainty, Australia’s first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard Tuesday staked claim to form a new government after two kingmaker independent MPs extended support to her Labor party, giving it a wafer-thin one-seat majority in the first hung Parliament in nearly 70 years.   After Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, the two rural independent lawmakers, said they would support her party, 48-year-old Gillard called on Governor-General Quentin Bryce in Yarralumla, a suburb of Canberra.   She formally advised her that Labor had the numbers to form a minority government, more than two weeks after the cliffhanger August 21 polls failed to produce a clear winner.   Labor now controls 76 seats in Parliament’s 150-member House of Representatives, with the opposition Coalition of Liberal party leader Tony Abbott having 74 seats.

MELBOURNE: Ending weeks of political uncertainty, Australia’s first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard Tuesday staked claim to form a new government after two kingmaker independent MPs extended support to her Labor party, giving it a wafer-thin one-seat majority in the first hung Parliament in nearly 70 years.   After Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, the two rural independent lawmakers, said they would support her party, 48-year-old Gillard called on Governor-General Quentin Bryce in Yarralumla, a suburb of Canberra.   She formally advised her that Labor had the numbers to form a minority government, more than two weeks after the cliffhanger August 21 polls failed to produce a clear winner.   Labor now controls 76 seats in Parliament’s 150-member House of Representatives, with the opposition Coalition of Liberal party leader Tony Abbott having 74 seats.

India's first underground robot-assisted parking will come up in Mumbai by March 2012. Real estate developer Ackruti City Limited (ACL) is introducing India’s first multilevel underground robotic car park system at two of their commercial building projects, Ackruti Star and Ackruti Solaris in Andheri East, at a combined car park space for over 1,100 cars.   Ackruti Star is a commercial building with a multilevel underground robotic car park system, covering an area of 1.5 lakh sq feet, having parking space for over 350 cars. Parking or retrieval of the vehicle is quick and hassle-free and takes less than a minute compared to other car parking facilities, where it   takes nearly five minutes to park or retrieve the vehicle. The first phase is expected to be complete in a   couple of week's time.

NEW DELHI: A robot performing surgery sounds like a scene out of a Hollywood sci-fi flick. But fiction is fast turning into reality in Indian operation theatres where high-precision robotic surgeries - a less cumbersome procedure than conventional operations - are gaining acceptance.   Leaving behind the days of low technology methods, doctors are now ushering in a new era of medical treatment successfully. Robotic surgery in Delhi's premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is one of the success stories.   "Robotic surgery is the next major revolution in the field of surgery since the discovery of anaesthesia," Arvind Kumar, head of the department of surgery at AIIMS, told IANS.   So far more than 60 chest surgeries have been performed through robots in India. The robot is also used for urological surgeries like prostate.