TIMES CITY

SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE

OCTOBER 11, 2015

Closed Pashan Road spurs chaos

Diverted Traffic Crawls As Burden Increases On Street Going To Baner

OCT

30

MINUTES

MOST AFFECTED STRETCH:

University junction to Abhimanshree Society

350

THE STRETCH OF PASHAN

ROAD ON WHICH WORK
IS UNDERWAY

METRES

AS THEY SAID

OFFICIALSPEAK

I usually leave office by 6pm and reach home by

6.30. But one day I started 20 minutes late and got
caught in the terrible traffic on Baner Road. I finally
reached home at 7.45pm.
Shashi Khullar | A RESIDENT OF SUS ROAD

The turn towards Abhimanshree Society is narrow

which slows down vehicles. We usually deploy extra
personnel in the evening. The commuters must
understand that the temporary inconvenience is for
the larger good of the entire area.
Kranti Pawar | POLICE INSPECTOR, CHATUSHRUNGI TRAFFIC DIVISION

I had gone to Shivajinagar after a long time and did

not know about the road closure. The road was
packed from the University chowk itself. Its a 15
minute drive, but on that day it took me half-anhour to reach home on a two-wheeler.
Kirti Parchure | A RESIDENT OF SUS ROAD
commuter woes are also a reality.
Baner Road resident Mahesh Pratap has a similar experience. Traffic congestion
has now become a routine. City buses form the chunk of extremely slow-moving vehicles
on the left lane. Many cars re-

The complete project will go on for several months,

but hopefully Pashan Road will open soon. I will ask
my junior engineer to expedite the work
Madan Adhari | SUPERINTENDING ENGINEER (WATER), PUNE
MUNICIPAL CORPORATION

main parked in front of shops

which adds to the chaos. I sincerely hope the Pashan Road
is opened at the earliest.
Senior traffic officials said
that it is unlikely the road would open till the end of the
month. Rajkumar Shere, police inspector (planning) of the

traffic police, said, The work

is expected to continue till October 30. The rock under the
ground is very hard and the
contractor is having a tough
time digging through it.
Shere said the work will
then shift to Senapati Bapat
Road. The work to lay a water

pipeline has been pending for

long and will take a lot of time.
This temporary inconvenience will ultimately benefit residents of Pashan, Sus, Baner,
Aundh and other newly-emerging areas nearby. The work
on Senapati Bapat Road will
start after Navaratri, he said.

TO THE RESCUE

n Cubs
Rescued

2
3

Handle the cubs

with care

with too many odours, the

mother may reject it

The cub should be

rubbed with plant
leaves to remove any
scent on its body

Wait and observe from

a safe distance until
mother picks up the cub

Use gloves to touch

them; if it is marked

time varies a lot. Once a

mother came and picked up
her litter of three cubs within
15 minutes or so, Deshmukh
says. The wait can be much
longer, and the mother may
take time to accept her young
ones. Deshmukh recalls a
case in Narayangaon when a
leopard took a whole week before picking up her twomonth-old
babies.
She
would keep coming to the area, but remained very skepti-

2015

TOLERANT ANIMALS

IF YOU FIND A CUB

Inform the forest
department immediately; sooner the cubs are
reunited with the mother
the better

2014

After handling over two dozen such cases, Deshmukh has

perfected the drill from rescue to care to reunion. For instance, the cub found in Vadgaon Anand had fallen inside
a dry well. Confused and
dazed, it hid behind bushes.
We had to lower a camera
inside the well to check if it
was indeed a cub. We then
went down and took it out,
he says. The first thing we do
is to examine the cub thoroughly. There should be no injuries and it should be fully
fit. Cubs more than three
months old are given deworming medication and
vaccination shots If the vets
think the cub is dehydrated or
hungry, they feed it diluted
milk. But sometimes, they
prepare for an immediate release.
But before the release is
planned, local villagers have
to be convinced. Often the
villagers are reluctant about
releasing the animal in the
same area. They ask us to capture the mother too and release the pair somewhere
else. We have to win them
over; without their cooperation, we cannot proceed,
says Kartick Satyanarayanan, co-founder of Wildlife
SOS.
Moreover, the reunion

cal, Deshmukh says.

The teams effort has not
gone unnoticed. Chief conservator of forests, Jeet
Singh, says the success rate of
Deshmukhs team has a lot to
do with the specialized
knowledge available to them.
In
veterinary
colleges
across the country, most of the
practical experience students get is on domestic animals. Rarely do they get
hands-on experience on wild

necdotal evidence suggests

that animals like tigers and
elephants refuse to accept
a young one back in the fold
if they have come into contact
with humans. Leopards seem to
be more tolerant. Similarly,
wolves too take back their
cubs, said Ajay Deshmukh,
senior veterinarian at Manikdoh
leopard rescue centre
animals, Singh says. The
group is getting better at its
work with each case. The
team has learned from experience. Initially, we would try
keeping a watch on the animals with a camera trap, but
that would scare the mother
away so now we rely on torches. It would be great if we had
night-vision binoculars or
cameras, but at present we
dont have the equipment,
says Deshmukh.

Sugar coat on Mulshi water demand

Politics Simmers CENTRE OF ATTRACTION
Over Claim On
Mulshi dam water
is controlled by Tata
Dam To Meet
Power company
As of now, the
Crisis In Pune
dam holds 14.6
Radheshyam.Jadhav
@timesgroup.com

Pune: Concerns for the sugarcane crop and crushing

season are allegedly embedded in the rising demand to release the Mulshi
dam water for Pune city.
Former deputy chief
minister Ajit Pawar recently demanded that the state
government must ask Tata
Power, which controls the
Mulshi dam and reservoir,
to release water. The city
Congress leaders supported Pawar and the irrigation department officials
claimed that they were ready to act once the state government gave a go-ahead.
Experts feel that the demand for the Mulshi water
comes from a concern for
the sugarcane crop in Pune
and Solapur districts. Once
the water is released for Pune, it will go to the Ujani
dam from where no water can be released now for
the sugarcane crop following a directive from the
Solapur district collector.
Once the Mulshi water reaches Ujani, it could be used
for the crop and sugar mills
will have no problem in carrying out crushing. .
Sugarcane in the state is
cultivated on less than 4%

TMC water
76.12% of its total
capacity
Pune and
Solapur politicians
want water from
Mulshi for the city
The state government has not rejected the demand
Sugar lobby is
building pressure
on the state to
release water as
there is no water
left in dams to
irrigate sugarcane
crop in Pune
and Solapur

File photo

Experts feel that the demand for the Mulshi water comes from
a concern for the sugarcane crop in Pune and Solapur districts

LACK OF MECHANISM TO MONITOR

Even if Mulshi water is released, Pune and Solapur district
collectors have no mechanism to
keep tabs on water thefts
There is no system to check if
water is used for sugarcane crops
Sugar economy will crumble if
mills fail to start crushing season
due to lack of sugarcane crop
State agriculture minister
Eknath Khadse has indicated that

of the total area under

crops, but it soaks almost
70% of the irrigated water.
Nearly 80% of this cash
crop is grown in acutely
water-scarce areas and leading the chart is Solapur
with its 32 mills majority
of them controlled by NCP
and Congress satraps.
Against this backdrop,
the NCP and the Congress
leaders are not talking about sugarcane but are showing concern for Punes
water crisis. BJP MLAs
and MP in Pune must take a
lead and ask the state government to release Mulshi water for Pune city, ree-

ling from water crisis, said Pawar.

Deputy
mayor
and
Congress corporator Aba
Bagul demanded 5 Thousand Million Cubic Feet
(TMC) Mulshi water for Pune, saying the city needs
this quota so that citizens
do not have to suffer.
The civic body had announced water cuts in the
first week of September because the dams that meet
Punes needs were just halffull due to poor monsoon.
The four dams Khadakwasla, Temghar, Varasgaon and Panshet are still
not full to their capacity.

r Amitabha Ghosh, who

has worked in multiple
Mars missions of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) since the
US launched the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft in 1996, believes
that one day space travel will
become affordable. Dr Ghosh
now leads the rover operations
on the Opportunity Rover on
Mars as the Chair of the Science Operations Working Group
of the Nasa Mars Exploration
Rover Mission. Recently in Pune to deliver a lecture at the
Nasscom Engineering Summit
2015 to explain the technology
that enabled NASA to send the
Mars Pathfinder spacecraft to
Mars, he spoke to TOIs Satyanarayan Iyer on what he thought about the discovery of liquid water on Mars and if life
was a possiblity on the planet.
Excerpts:

What does the latest

discovery of liquid water
on Mars signify?

Vet who reunites leopard families

Continued from Page 1

Mars mission expert

believes space travel will
be affordable one day
Reuters

15-20

2013

Pune: The Pune police booked

a tourist car driver on Friday
for allegedly raping a 12-yearold girl at her residence in
Kondhwa around 6.30pm on
October 4.
The driver would often visit
the girls residence to meet her
mother and brother, as he stayed in the same vicinity. The rape survivor is a school dropout.
Her mother is a homemaker,
while her brother does smalltime jobs.
On October 4, the girls mother had gone to Akluj and her
brother was also not at home.
Police said the suspect visited their residence to return
the brothers vehicle keys. On
finding the girl alone, he locked
the door from inside and allegedly raped her. He then threatened her with dire consequences if she informed her family
members about it.
The girl picked up the courage to disclose details of the
incident to a neighbour and talked to her mother on phone.
The mother returned home
on Friday. She registered a
complaint against the driver,
who is on the run, under sections of the Indian Penal Code
and Protection of Children
from Sexual Offences Act.

SEPT

2012

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Average increase
in travel time
during peak hours

TENTATIVE
DATE OF
COMPLETION

2011

Car driver
booked for
minors rape

TRAFFIC
CLOSED
SINCE

2010

Pune: On Friday evening,

Sus Road resident Kirti Parchure was driving home on a
two-wheeler from Shivajinagar.
Usually, it wont take her
more than 20 minutes to cover
the distance, but that day she
spent almost 45 minutes on
the road a chunk of this time was spent navigating through choc-a-bloc traffic from
the University flyover to the
Abhimanshree Society.
For regular commuters,
though, it has become a routine since September 6 when
the Pashan Road was closed
for Sus-bound traffic to lay an
underground water pipeline.
Vehicles are now diverted
through Baner Road. While
some take a left at Abhimanshree Society to get on to
Pashan Road, others drive
further till Hotel Mahabaleshwar and then turn towards the Baner-Pashan Link
Road.
The diversion has doubled
evening traffic on Baner Road, which means more travel
time.
Girish Deshpande, a resident of ITI Road and a member of the Aundh Vikas Mandal, said, The vehicles move
bumper to bumper up to Abhimanshree Society, with the
spill-over effect felt till Baner
phata from where I turn right.
It takes me at least 5-6 signal
changes to finally reach the
junction. While development
work is inevitable, resultant

Pic: Mandar Deshpande

FACTS AND FIGURES

2009

Tarini.Puri@timesgroup.com

Times of India, Pune, October 11, 2015 Pp.3

some mills might not get permission to crush sugarcane due to

water scarcity
Former Union agriculture
minister Sharad Pawar said the
state government would have to
compensate farmers if their
sugarcane was not crushed
Sugar politics is going to
snowball into a major issue in
next few days
South Asia Network on
Dam, Rivers and People
(SANDRP) has an altogether different concern, though. In a letter to the chief
minister, the organisation
stated that while the situation was this serious in the
Krishna river and adjoining basins in Maharashtra, huge volume of water
was being diverted from
the Krishna basin to the
water surplus Konkan region, which has seen close
to 1,600 mm rainfall already.
This westward diversion of water from the east
flowing Krishna-Bhima ba-

sin ultimately takes the water to the Arabian Sea, while the Krishna basin, which
should have the first right
over this water, remains
plunged in scarcity. The
Krishna basin was thus being deprived of its water,
stated the SANDRP letter.
The westward diversion of
water from the Krishna basin to Konkan and further
to the sea is happening
through the four stage Koyna dam and three Tata hydropower stations.
The collective volume
of 2,715 MCM of live storage water in Koyna and Tata
dams can be easily released
into the Bhima-Krishna basins and it can benefit the
whole of Krishna River Basin, right till the tail end in
the Krishna Delta. Water
from the Mulshi dam must
be released for Ujani as water level in this dam has
dipped completely. But there should be strict monitoring of water usage and no
water must be given for the
sugarcane crop, said Parineeta
Dandekar
of
SANDRP.
One of the senior state
irrigation officials said if
the state government issues orders, the department
would take steps to release
the Mulshi dam water for
Pune and Solapur. The
matter was discussed in the
canal committee meeting
and the state government
assured the elected representatives that appropriate
action would be taken at an
appropriate time said the
official.

The discovery of water in the liquid state on Mars is significant because life on Earth has
been largely associated with
water. However, water on Earth
is not necessarily associated
with life. So, water on Mars does not necessarily mean that life exists on Mars. It, however,
does increase the possibility of
life being there.
The discovery of water on
Mars can help pave the way for
efficient conversion of the liquid water into oxygen that can be
used for running interplanetary vehicles, and also as rocket
fuel for the return trip from
Mars to the Earth. Further, this
oxygen could be used as rocket
fuel and also used by future astronauts on Mars, instead of the
oxygen brought from Earth. It
is obvious that this use of Martian oxygen instead of terrestrial oxygen will cause the cost
of a Mars mission to drop very
substantially.

Is the amount of water

enough to sustain humans
on Mars?
This is still not fully known. A
lot of studies and experiments
will have to be done. However,
one requirement is that the water has to be easily extractable.
For example, gold can be extracted from sea water, but as
this is very costly, it does not
make economic sense. Similarly, extracting water from Martian subsurface water, has to
make economic sense.
During the last 300 years, various explorers travelled into
the different, unknown regions
of Asia, Africa and America,
fumbling at first but finally succeeding in their mission. In the
same spirit, the human endeavour to live on Mars will go
through a long learning curve.

Does that mean human life

can be sustained on Mars?
Mars is the next frontier. I think
humans can survive on Mars.
Suppose, you are in a plane,

Nasa scientists have found the first evidence that water may flow on the
surface of Mars during the planets summer months. Researchers found
telltale fingerprints of salts that form only in the presence of water in
narrow channels cut into cliff walls in the planets equatorial region

at an altitude of 30,000 feet, and

the outside temperature is
-50C. If you suddenly open the
door, humans cannot survive
because of the low pressure
outside. But you are not afraid
to travel in a plane because you
travel in a controlled environment. In the case of a Mars mission, the only difference is that

I think humans can

survive on Mars.
Suppose, you are in a plane,
at an altitude of 30,000 feet,
and the outside temperature is -50C. If you suddenly
open the door, humans
cannot survive because of
the low pressure outside.
But you are not afraid to
travel in a plane because
you travel in a controlled
environment. . In the case
of a Mars mission, the only
difference is that the controlled environment is 200
million miles away
Amitabha Ghosh
the controlled environment is
200 million miles away. So there
has to be an economical way to
deliver this controlled environment, lets call it, a habitation
module, to Mars. Will it happen? I think, it will. The cost of
technology is reducing, as there are a lot of initiatives now for
lowering the cost of space
flight. Yes, I think access to

19 stolen motorcycles
recovered, five held
TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Pune: The city police have recovered 19 stolen motorcycles,

together worth Rs 8.35 lakh, following the arrest of five suspects on Wednesday and
Thursday.
Dhiraj Lokhande (19) from
Saswad, a criminal on police record, was arrested on Wednesday while riding a motorcycle
without a registration number
on Shankarsheth Road. A team
led by senior inspector Raghunath Jadhav, in charge of the

Khadak police station, made

the arrest. His interrogation
led to the recovery of seven more vehicles stolen from Saswad
and Phaltan. He has been sent
to police custody till October 12.
On Thursday, the Sinhagad
police arrested Mahesh Nalawade (22), Vivek Ghare (18),
Aniket Bhokare (20) and Nikhil
Vankhede (22), who were found
riding two stolen motorcycles.
Police recovered nine more vehicles from them. They have been remanded in police custody
till October 13.

Mars will eventually become

affordable.
The per kilometre cost travelling in a taxi can be higher
than the per kilometre cost for
traveling in a plane. For example, the cost of an air conditioned
taxi between Bangalore airport
and Whitefield is Rs 500 for 50
km or Rs 10/km. Now, the cost of
travelling from Bangalore to
New York and back, a distance
of 30,000 miles, is perhaps between Rs 60,000 and Rs 90,000 in
Economy: which works out to
Rs 2 Rs 3 per hm. So, if you look
at the rates per km, it is cheaper
to fly in a plane than to drive in a
taxi. Now, consider Mars, if you
go to the Red Planet, there are
only two distinct places where
energy is required one is
when you leave the earths gravity and other is when you land
on Mars. It is interesting to note
that the large part of the journey, the Cruise Stage (about 200
million miles) is free! Isnt that
wonderful? Did you know this?
Somehow if we can figure out
technologies that will reduce
the cost of launch out of Earth
and landing on Mars, the cost
of travel to Mars will go down
very significantly.

Is a manned mission to

Mars feasible? If so, when?
From the technology perspective, a manned mission is
feasible. The problem is that no
space organiasation has the
budget required to send men to
Mars. The expenditure will be
considerable: north of $500
billion.
A little less than five decades ago, when the US went to
the Moon, space was part of
the arms race between US and
Russia. Hence, space was
perceived as a military necessity: and was funded accordingly.
But, right now, there is no such
compulsion because space is
no longer perceived as a frontier for the military. So, we will
have to wait for costs to come
down for a manned mission to
be realistic. I think we might
have to wait 20 to 30 years.