Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

Tweet

He counted numbers of political posters up on Mumbai streets while driving to work. In 1.9 kms of stretch, there were 106 posters!!! Now I tried to think who are putting up these posters and why:

1. Political Party workers : To gain political mileage
2. RWAs : To please political leaders and get their society cleaned up
3. Associations like Yuva Morcha : To enter into politics or showoff or become local group leader (good for nothing)

Implications:

1. Illegal hoardings as these are politically driven
2. Revenue loss for local municipal as lot of commercial ads could have been put. I happened to call an ad agency (name confidential) who told me:
Illegal ad rate: Rs. 5000 near signal of Andheri Naka per month (he said "sab setting ho jayegi", it means everything will be sorted with relevant authorities)
Legal ad rate: Rs. 10000 including for same site including undertable payment for clearance in few days
3. Lost cause: Nobody would be looking at them. Damn it, people are fed up.
4. City looks awful. It makes entire surronding look dull.

This is not only trend on Mumbai roads but across the country. I remember me and Paras were going to Ghaziabad, city in Uttar Pradesh adjacent to New Delhi and we came across poster of Ms. Mayavati on every single pole on streets.



What can be done:
1. Public awareness
2. Empowering local municipal to remove such hoardings and not to give up from political pressure
3. Mass rallies from people like us to destroy such posters
4. Ban people in politics whose illegal hoardings are up on streets

These are instances that make me feel that we are living in uneducated and unregulated society. Keep posting your comments on this issue.

Tweet

RailRadar, an application which gives you muscle to track Indian Railways trains in real time. It uses the Google Maps platform to deliver timings, location, station, routes and schedules of more than 6,500 trains on a real time basis.

RailRadar has been developed by Centre for Railway Information System and uses a top level colour coding system to mark trains as blue and red. Blue arrows indicate trains running on time while red arrows are those which have been delayed. Users can use the + and – buttons to zoom in and zoom out of the map.

Clicking on an arrow will reveal train details and its route on the map. The details include the train’s number and name, last stop, station at which it will halt next and the train’s status as on-time or delayed in minutes. The real time status will generally be on a 5 minute delay.

Few observations:

1. Ease of use
2. Google Maps interface which looks familiar
3. Website loads quickly, no comparison with sucking IRCTC site
4. Most importantly, it gives loads of information like estimated arrival, halt duration, last stop, train status, exact location, timetables.

In nutshell, it is welcome step with right use of technology.

Tweet