SRINAGAR: United Nations Internship programme has been started across various cities and fields. The duration is initially for three months and is renewable for a combined period of six months. The deadlines of application for different programmes vary between April 2, 2023 and December 30, 2023.
This is an unpaid internship. Candidates from any part of the world are eligible to apply. English fluency is required for the internship.
The fields available for internship are Human resources (Various locations), Administration (Various locations), Partnership and development finance (Kuwait), Podcast production and multimedia communication (Geneva), Human resources (disability inclusion-The Hague), Management and programme analysis (New York), Research and evaluation (Geneva), Finance (New York), Data analyst (New York), Programme Management (New York), and Economic affairs (Bangkok).
SRINAGAR: In a bid to curb the drug menace and maintain a strict vigil, the Drug Control officers have suspended the licenses of dozens of medical shops involved in selling drugs without prescription in Kashmir valley.
Official sources said that it is an ongoing process and for the past six months owners of scores of medical shops have faced the music.
They said in South Kashmir’s Anantnag district alone, seven licenses were suspended of medical shops by the Drug Control officers for selling drugs without a prescription, especially to those habitual of taking drugs. ‘Same action has been initiated in other districts as well, officials said.
They said that the operation of Drug Control Officers against illegal medical shops and drug abuse will be carried further and no one will be spared for playing the lives of people. (KNT)
SRINAGAR: After a video of a Councillor allegedly misbehaving with a doctor on duty at the District Hospital (DH) Pulwama, went viral, the authorities in the district ordered an inquiry into the matter.
Deputy Commissioner, Pulwama has tasked the ADC concerned to probe the matter and submit the report within 2 days, and initiate the action as per rules.
Councillor, Municipal Council, Pulwama Bilal Rather, accused of misbehaving with the doctor on duty in Pulwama, was seen screaming at a doctor , and later allegedly hurling choicest abuses at him. All this was recorded in a video that was posted on various social media platforms garnering thousands of views.
After the incident, the doctors of the DH Pulwama including the paramedical staff have written to the concerned Medical Superintendent, seeking immediate action.
The medical staff has stated that on 27-02-2023, around 06:15 pm while their colleague was busy with his duty in casualty, “few miscreants barged into the room and started asking in a rude manner about the non-availability of USG facility in the hospital after 4.30 pm and why the patient has been asked to undergo USG outside.”
“Miscreants obstructed the patient care which could have caused death or a serious complication to critical patients admitted in the casualty,” they added.
They said that the doctor accompanied the “mob” to the triage room where they hurled abuses at him and tried to manhandle him. “He tried to make them understand about the non-availability of USG facility after 4.30 pm that day as the concerned Sinologist’s son was admitted to ICU, but still they were not in a mood to listen.”
The staff said that in case he would have retaliated, he would have been lynched.
Medical staff has requested the concerned authorities to take stringent and exemplary action against the accused Councillor for his condemnable act.
The Medical Superintendent of DH Pulwama, has, in the meantime, lodged an FIR against the identified MC Pulwama Councillor.
Meanwhile, the J&K Doctors Coordination Committee (JKDCC) has also written to the Deputy Commissioner, Pulwama about the matter and has sought immediate action against the accused person.
SRINAGAR: The Jammu and Kashmir police have started the process to attach properties of nearly 168 militants who belong to different districts of the UT but have been operating from other side of the LOC.
The Ministry of Home Affairs had recently directed the J&K Police to initiate action against such militants, including 118 from Doda, 36 from Kishtwar and 14 from Rajouri and Poonch districts. The action was sought after attacks on the Kashmiri Pandits in different parts of J&K. Most of the attacks in Jammu division were handled by the militants who belong to J&K but based in different cities of Pakistan.
Doda SSP Abdul Qayoom said that out of 118 militants from the district are based outside J&K, 10 are the most active and have been trying to recruit local youth into militancy. “Two among them have been declared individual militants and two proclaimed offenders,” the SSP said.
In December, the property of an absconding Lashkar-e-Toiba militant, Abdul Rashid, alias Jehangir, was seized in Thathri area of Doda. He is said to have been behind many IED blasts in Jammu region. The SSP said a list of properties of other militants had been sought from the Revenue Department, which too would be seized.
The police are likely to soon seize properties of many militants from Doda, including Mohammad Irshad, alias Idrees, who has been designated a ‘terrorist’ by the MHA.
SRINAGAR: Senior Congress leader and former Sadar-e-Riyasat of erstwhile J&K State, Dr. Karan Singh has said that there is a lack of communication between public and bureaucrats in the Union Territory (UT) of Jammu and Kashmir.
He stated that assembly elections should be held in J&K in a free and fair manner and Statehood should be restored to the UT without any delay.
When asked to comment on the bifurcation of J&K State into two Union Territories, he said, “We should look ahead rather than looking back and added that same remained his principle in life.”
Replying to a question of taking back the regions of J&K occupied by Pakistan, he said that it was not easy as the same could not be materialized without a war which only brings deaths and destruction.
Singh said that forceful religious conversions are not good things be these happen in India or in Pakistan. He was speaking in a session on Vedanta organized by FICCI FLO J&K wherein he educated a gathering on Gyan Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Karam Yoga, Raj Yoga and also touched Hath Yoga.
SRINAGAR: Sudden emissions of gas from a tube well in Bomai village of Sopore in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district created panic among locals.
Accusing the concerned department of carelessness, locals said that the well was dug to meet up water scarcity in Logripora village of Bomai, however, sudden gas emissions created panic. among villagers.
They accused Jal Shakti Department of carelessness stating that no official visited the site to look into the matter. “When we brought the matter before the concerned officials, they asked us to block the tube well with the help of JCB, but didn’t even bother to visit the village themselves,” the locals alleged.
Meanwhile, the locals have appealed to the higher authorities to look into the matter at an earliest. (KNO)
SRINAGAR: A daily rated worker in Irrigation and Flood Control Department died after sustaining grievous injuries during the dredging process in the world-famous Wular Lake in North Kashmir’s Sopore area, official sources said. The incident occurred late Tuesday evening.
Official sources told that Tanveer Hasan Bhat, a resident of Darpora, Delina Baramulla who was working as a helper in the mechanical wing Irrigation and Flood Control Department suffered life-threatening injuries while dredging in Wular Lake near Watlab Sopore. He was shifted to District Hospital Sopore where doctors declared him dead. Police after taking cognizance of the incident handed over the body to his legal heirs for last rites. [KNT]
SRINAGAR: Upper reaches receive light snowfall with Gulmarg receiving 5-cm of it while rains lashed plains in Jammu and Kashmir. The weather department has forecast intermittent snowfall and rain during the next 24 hours in J&K.
Quoting a meteorological department official , GNS reported that mainly dry weather was expected during March 3 to 7.
He said Srinagar received 0.6mm of rain, Pahalgam 0.7mm, Kupwara 2.1mm, Jammu traces, Banihal 1.2mm and Bhaderwah 1.1mm while Gulmarg received 5cm of snowfall in 24 hours till 0830 hours.
Regarding temperature, he said, Srinagar recorded a low of 6.4°C against 4.0°C on the previous night and it was above normal by 4.9°C for the summer capital.
Qazigund, he said, recorded a low of 5.0°C against 1.8°C on the previous night and it was 4.6°C above normal for the gateway town of Kashmir.
Pahalgam, he said, recorded a low of 0.6°C against minus 1.2°C on the previous night and it was 4.1°C above normal for the famous tourist resort in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district.
Kokernag recorded a low of 3.4°C against 3.0°C on the previous night and it was 3.3°C above normal for the place, the officials said.
Gulmarg recorded a low of minus 2.0°C against minus 3.0°C on the previous night and it was 3.3°C above normal for the world famous skiing resort in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district, he said.
In Kupwara town, he said, the mercury settled at 4.2°C against 2.8°C on the previous night and it was 4.2°C above normal for the north Kashmir area.
Jammu recorded a low of 14.2°C against 13.1°C on the previous night. It was 2.6°C above normal for J&K’s winter capital, he said.
Banihal, he said, recorded a low of 5.6°C (above normal by 3.4°C), Batote 6.8°C (above normal by 3.3°C), Katra 12.5°C (3.0°C above normal) and Bhadarwah 5.6°C (4.8°C above normal).
Ladakh’s Leh and Kargil recorded a low of minus 5.6°C and 3.6°C respectively, the official added.
SRINAGAR: Kashmir Valley including the summer capital of J&K sprung to life on Wednesday as children made their way to schools after long winter vacations.
According to reports, students dressed in uniforms were seen heading to their respective schools very early in the morning as the School Education Department has changed school timing in Srinagar city from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Some parents even expressed resentment over “too early” schooling.
“The interest of students should be paramount. Normally timings used to be changed from April 1,” several parents said, adding, “There is still considerable chill during the morning hours and people at the helm of affairs should not lose sight of it.”
The schools up to class 5th were ordered to observe winter vacation from December 1 to February 28, the classes from 6th to 8th from December 12, and those from 9th to 12 standards from December 19. (GNS)
Working in SKUAST-K’s potato laboratory, a scholar was desperate for the MS media, a key ingredient for tissue culture but the lab lacked funds. It took her 28 months to discover a cheap alternative that is abundantly around the campus and it fetched her a prestigious grant to set up a unit for its production, reportsIfra Reshi
Sameena Lone, the young Kashmir scholar, who bagged a Rs 50 lakh grant from the respected BIRAC for her ground-breaking innovation, intends to change the way people look at the mounds of weeds that are perennially extracted from Dal Lake. She will be converting the weeds into a cheap medium for popularizing tissue culture.
A resident of Nishat Brein, Sameena, the daughter of a forest range officer, is a vegetable science scholar currently pursuing her PhD at SKAUST. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s in horticulture from SKAUST and her work on potato tissue culture started during her MSc. Working with her mentor, Dr Khursheed Hussain at the Potato Tissue Culture Laboratory, she recognized the high cost of nutrient media used in the cultivation of tissue cell culture.
“During the learning process, once we fell short of the Murashige and Skoog (MS) media that we were using in potato tissue culture, I posted my mentor. He said the laboratory can’t buy media for lack of funds,” Lone said while recalling the first time she felt the necessity for looking at the alternatives. “My mentor told me he was also looking for alternatives as he faced the same problem at his own end.”
It pushed the team on a hunt for an affordable, organic nutrient medium that would allow farmers to conduct tissue culture on their own, generating disease-free plantlets with lower pesticide loads.
After 28 months, “in a whistle-blow phenomenon, Coontail media came to the limelight”. After three years of research and standardization, she discovered that part of the weeds in Dal Lake are hugely nutrient-rich and can be used to create ideas for tissue culture. The success led her team to patent the idea and the associated processes. The idea was found to enable potato farmers to have affordable, organic potato tissue culture media, which not only reduces costs but also produces healthier, and disease-free potatoes.
This became one of its kind and the first Organic Tissue Culture Media to be used for the mass multiplication of high-quality, disease-free, and organic planting material of potato. Its success led Sameena to set up her own start-up, Kashmeer Organo Greens Private Limited with her mentor as co-founder. The unit currently operates from SKUAST-K’s Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (SKIIE) Centre.
= Having an idea and floating a start-up does not make a successful enterprise because it requires resources. Sameena’s Eureka moment in 2018, however, lacked an environment in which capital and resources could be even discussed. There was no concept start-ups, the way it is mainstream right now.
Things started changing fast as the team started talking about the idea. Almost in every competition of newer ideas, Sameena’s MS media was taken seriously.
The idea won the first prize in an Innovative Idea Presentation Competition organized by Maharaja Ranjit Singh College of Professional Sciences, Indore (MP), on the 36th National Science Day in 2022.
Back home, the idea got selected for seed funding from the JK Department of Science and Technology and IC.
Again, the idea also won first prize in Innovation Business Competition during the National Innovation Workshop held at Jammu on December 1, 2022, organized by GCET Jammu in association with IIT Kharagpur and the World Consortium of University held at Jammu.
Then came the final surprise when the idea, Organic and Disease-Free Seed Potato Production through Tissue Culture in Kashmir, bagged a prestigious grant from the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), a Not-for-Profit Company’ of the Government of India, which supports technology innovators and entrepreneurs to pursue a promising technology and establish and validate proof of concept (POC) for the idea under the BIG grant scheme. It is a Rs 50 lakh grant.
Sameena Lone, SKUAST-K PhD scholar, discovered a cheap alternative to MS media required in potato tissue culture. The media is being produced from locally available weeds, abundantly growing in Dal lake. The patented idea fetched her a Rs 50 grant to set up a start-up for producing tissue culture media. KL Image: Shuaib Wani
The grant is a very competitive one. More than 500 innovators had applied for the grant and only 26 were selected for the final pitching round before the panel. Eventually, only nine innovators were selected. “I was the only one from Jammu and Kashmir to receive the BIRAC BIG grant in the present round,” Sameena said.
“This has helped me realise my dream of doing something creative and something that was not done before,” a confidant Lone said. “Still, a lot of work is to be done.”
The grant is a staggered process that will release funds coinciding with the completion of the project within two years. There are key milestones in the implementation of the project, which are linked with the release of funds. The next step for this project includes product development at a commercial scale, demonstration trials, marketing at cost, and conducting awareness campaigns to educate people about the benefits of organic and healthy vegetables.
The unit is starting with four employees and the numbers will go up as per the demand. Anticipated to require almost four tons of weeds a year, the project will fetch Kashmir a reliable tuber for growing organic and disease-free potatoes. Estimates suggest, Kashmir grows 4500 tons of potato a year but the consumption is much more. Sameena’s innovation can help growers use the MS media and pick the tissue culture skill for better production at home.
Sameena and her scholar colleagues along with their mentors are working on developing anti-diabetic carrots in the SKUAST-Ks plant biotechnology department.
