Ramalinga Raju set to retract his confession 
July 28, 2010
Source:  TNN

HYDERABAD: L'affaire Satyam is poised to take a dramatic turn. In a clear indication that he is all set to retract his confession and deny all the charges, former Satyam chairman B Ramalinga Raju said on Tuesday that his letter of January 2009 was a mere resignation letter from the post of the company's chairman and claimed that he was being falsely implicated in the criminal case by the CBI.

In his bail application moved in the AP High Court on Tuesday, Raju said he was the chairman of Satyam Computer Services till January 7, 2009, "when he tendered his resignation." Further, he submitted to the court that he was falsely implicated as accused No 1 in the criminal case filed by the CBI and that the allegations made against him "are absolutely false and not supported by any credible evidence."

Completely denying the ‘confession' in which Raju himself had admitted to several irregularities, the accused No 1 in the Satyam scam is now turning the tables on the CBI and saying that all the charges levelled against him were cooked up by the investigating agency. "The allegations in the charge sheet are that cash and bank balances did not reflect the true state of affairs," Raju claims now, though it was he himself who had admitted to this in his January 2009 letter.

Raju also denied all the other charges made against him by the CBI based on his confession. They included inflation of sales by generating false invoices, floating of 327 companies, offloading of shares by the accused and other promoters of the company, inflated revenues, publication of falsified figures with respect to utilisation of employees on profitable projects, and that the auditors of the company conspired with the accused deliberately in violation of the auditing and assurance standards.

Former Satyam chairman also denied that there was a criminal breach of trust by him in the matter pertaining to the declaration and disbursement of dividends and that wrongful gain was made by the accused and wrongful loss suffered by investors in shares of the company. Further, he also denied that he and his family members had acquired huge assets during the period in which the accounting fraud was perpetrated.

Biological changes may put UID out of bounds for kids
July 28, 2010
SOURCE : ET Bureau

NEW DELHI: The government’s unique identification (UID) project aims to embrace nearly 1.4 billion people, but the task of covering children, up to 15 years, who form a good part of the population is tinged with uncertainty.

Absence of what is delicately called stable biometric features in children — the 2001 Census said they constitute nearly 35% of the population — is proving to be a huge challenge for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), headed by technocrat Nandan Nilekani.

Children up to 15 years do not have sharp patterns of fingerprints, the metric used to uniquely identify each one of them and more importantly, for authentication. The iris — the coloured portion of the eye — that is to be used to issue a unique identity number, too, does not fully develop before seven years.

“The iris starts achieving 90% stability in size only after six years of age. A normal iris starts assuming stability only by eight years,” said Dr Rakesh Gupta, consultant eye surgeon at Max Balaji Hospital in New Delhi.

Fingerprint patterns assume stability at an even later stage, around 16 years, said Dr V Khanna, a South Delhi-based skin specialist. “Fingerprints are very feeble in children and difficult to capture,” he said.

A direct fallout of the lack of these features in children is that the UIDAI project will remain out of bounds, or at least inaccurate, for swathes of people it is intended to help. Iris scan and fingerprint examination are used for a process called deduplication, to verify if an applicant has already been issued a number.

“We know that such inaccuracy exists,” said UIDAI director general Ram Sewak Sharma, confirming the worst fears of a report issued by a biometric panel at the agency.

“But we did not want infants and children to be kept out of the system,” said Mr Sharma, adding that government wanted to monitor child welfare schemes such as Sarv Shiksha Abhiyaan and Integrated Child Development Schemes as well as vaccination programmes.

Despite the government’s best intentions, it is unclear on how it will circumvent the problem that threatens to throw the project into disarray. With the UIDAI system in place, the government was hoping to improve the working of these schemes, which have been hit hard by corruption, bogus claims and scalability issues.

A case in point is the Janani Suraksha Yojana, which hands out incentives to mothers. Earlier this week, a fake babies scam was unearthed in Bihar where 300 women claimed to have delivered up to five babies in a span of 60 days to avail an incentive of Rs 1,000 for each baby.

There is also the problem of bogus ration cards. Many BPL families inflate the number of children in the ration cards to increase allotments, thus amplifying the fake ration card problem. Of the 102.8 million ration cards, almost 37 million are estimated to be fake. There are around 102.8 million families in India who own a ration card, with almost 65.2 million below poverty line.

Telecom software groups merge in app store battle
July 28, 2010
SOURCE: REUTERS

HELSINKI: Two telecom operator-backed mobile software groups unveiled a merger plan on Tuesday to counter increasing competition from new rivals Google and Apple for applications.

Uniting the two consortia -- of smaller, more established JIL and wider application alliance WAC -- will let independent software developers reach a large share of members' 3 billion clients with just one version of software.

For most small development houses it would be too costly to create dozens of versions of software to reach each store separately. Apple's App Store, launched in June 2008, created a market for mobile applications, or small programmes, which was worth $4.1 billion last year, according to research firm Chetan Sharma.

WAC -- whose founding members include AT&T, China Mobile, Telefonica and Vodafone -- aims for the first stores using WAC software to open before February 2011. "WAC, by share scale, will have dominance in the market," Daniel Gurrola, vice president for strategy from France Telecom's mobile Orange arm, told a conference call with analysts and journalists.

Major telecom operators formed the WAC alliance in February to build an open platform that will deliver applications to all mobile phone users, but analysts have been sceptical whether so many operators could work together efficiently. Also Bharti Airtel, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange and Orascom Telecom are among the founding members of the WAC alliance.

The alliance is supported also by three of the world's largest phone makers -- LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. JIL groups China Mobile, Softbank, Vodafone and Verizon Wireless-- all of which also founded WAC.

The first phone models using new WAC software would be shown at the Mobile World Congress wireless trade show in February 2011 and reach the market around May 2011, WAC said.