NEW DELHI: Ace Indian shuttler Saina Nehwal is just a step away from realising her goal of becoming the world's numero uno player as she jumped one place to a career-best second in the latest international rankings.
"I am very happy to achieve the world number two so soon in my career. The last three wins have really helped me. It is a great feeling but I feel my priority still will be to win more tournaments for India rather than focussing on ranking," Saina said.
"It will be difficult to hold on to the ranking but I hope to continue my hard work and win more titles and become the number one player soon," said the Hyderabadi shuttler, who is down with fever and cold.
The 20-year-old Saina made a meteoric rise following her back-to-back title triumphs at the India Open Grand Prix and the Singapore Open Super Series, reaching the world number three last month.
And after the Indian defended her Indonesian Open Super Series crown to complete her hat-trick of titles, it was just a matter of time that she jumped to the second place.
By virtue of the consecutive title wins, Saina now has 64791.2637 points and is just behind Chinese Yihan Wang, while Xin Wang of China is in the third place.
Saina's father Harvir Singh also expressed happiness and hoped her daughter can continue her good work for the country.
"God has been kind. It is a marvellous achievement. I hope she can continue to work hard and win more laurels for the country," Harvir Singh said.
In March, Saina had attained the fifth position after becoming the first Indian woman to reach the semifinals of the prestigious All England Super Series Championships.
However, she dropped to the sixth position in the subsequent weeks.
Saina's next engagement will be in the World badminton Championship in Paris next month, before playing the Commonwealth Games and Asian Games.
In the men's ranking, the Indian trio of Chetan Anand, P Kashyap and Arvind Bhatt were at 15th, 25th and 27th spot respectively, while mixed doubles pair of Jwala Gutta and V Diju were static at the seventh place.
NEW DELHI: The Indian rupee will have its own symbol, a mix of the Devanagri 'Ra' and Roman 'R', to become the fifth currency in the world to have a distinct identity.
The new symbol, designed by IIT post-graduate D Uday Kumar was approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday.
The rupee will join the elite club of US dollar, British pound-sterling, Euro and Japanese yen to have its own symbol.
The symbol will be printed or embossed on currency notes or coins, information and broadcasting minister told reporters after the cabinet meeting.
Kumar's entry was chosen from among 3,000 designs competing for the currency symbol. He will get an award of Rs 2.5 lakhs.
Soni said the government will try that the symbol is adopted within six months in the country and globally within 18 to 24 months.
The symbol will feature on computer key boards and softwares so that it can be printed and displayed in electronic and print, she said.
Soni said it would also help in distinguishing the Indian currency from rupee or rupiah of countries like Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
The decision to have a symbol for the Indian rupee was taken by the government last year. The finance ministry wanted the symbol to represent the historical and cultural ethos of the country and called for entries from the public.
Mumbai: Dr. Tathagat Avatar Tulsi, a Patna-born child prodigy, becomes the youngest professor at Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay at the age of 22. He is set to join as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics from next week.
He had completed his high school at the age of nine, earned his BSc degree at 10 and M.Sc at the age of 12. At the age of 21, Tulsi completed his doctorate in Quantum Computing from Indian Institute of Science.
The young professor, who has never studied in a classroom, plans to ask his students how they would want to be taught. "I have never taught in a class. But I believe I can come down to the level of a student and help them understand the subject," he said. When asked about his future plans, he said "I want to pursue my research and at IIT-B, I will have the leisure to continue my research and one day set up a lab focused on quantum computation in our country."
Dr. Tulsi had to turn down offers from Waterloo University in Canada and the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER), Bhopal to come and teach at IIT-B.
In 2003, the prestigious Time magazine named him among the world's seven most gifted youngsters, though he went into a shell after an international delegation called him a fake prodigy in 2001. Tulsi said he is going to write to the Limca Book of Records to include him as the youngest faculty member in the country
Reuters - India's wholesale price inflation could come down to 5 percent to 6 percent by December, but price pressures in the economy may prompt the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to resort to tightening through unpredictable moves, a top government official said on Tuesday.
"By November, if market arrivals are significantly larger than last year, you should see a dampening of the rate of inflation," Chief Statistician T.C.A. Anant told Reuters in an interview.
He also said latest headline inflation numbers suggest that "slight dampening" was taking place.
June inflation data is due on Wednesday.
According to a Reuters' poll, headline inflation in June probably rose 10.8 percent from a year earlier, faster than a 10.16 percent rise in May.
Anant also said that monetary policy works best through an element of unpredictability and he would not be surprised if there is no rate hike in the scheduled July 27 monetary policy review
WASHINGTON: Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams, who holds the record of the longest spaceflight (195 days) for female space travellers, will head for the stars once again in June 2012.
Williams, 44, would take over as station commander at the International Space Station that was her home in the sky from Dec 9, 2006 to June 22, 2007.
She will be joined on the Soyuz 31 flight to the space station by flight engineers Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, the space agencies of the three nations announced Friday.
Daughter of Gujarat born neuroanatomist Deepak Pandya and Slovak mother Bonnie Pandya, Williams was born in Euclid, Ohio, but considers Needham, Massachusetts where her parents live as her hometown.
After launching aboard Discovery, Williams arranged to donate her pony tail to Locks of Love. Fellow astronaut Joan Higginbotham cut her hair aboard the International Space Station and the Discovery crew brought the ponytail back to earth.
Among the personal items Williams took with her on her last trip were a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a small figurine of Ganesha and some samosas. The question is what would she carry this time around.
Mumbai: The boards of two energy firms belonging to the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) -- one in the business of generating power and the other that trades and transports oil and gas -- Sunday approved their merger in a $11-billion all-stock deal.
"The board of directors of Reliance Power and Reliance Natural Resources today approved a scheme of amalgamation of the two companies in an over Rs.50,000 crore ($11 billion) all stock deal," said an ADAG statement.
The board also approved the conversion rate of four shares of Reliance Natural for every Reliance Power share. The exchange ratio was based on the valuation by global consultancy firm KPMG.
The proposed scheme is subject to approvals of the shareholders of the the two companies, the stock exchanges and the Bombay High Court, among other statutory requisites and permissions.
The group said the deal would bring "substantial benefits" to the shareholders of both the companies, as it would expedite a gas supply agreement with Mukesh Ambani controlled Reliance Industries.
The merger, thereby, will accelerate Reliance Power's plans to set up gas based power plants of over 8,000 mw capacity. Also, shareholders will gain from four coal bed methane blocks of Reliance Natural Resources and a 10 percent share in an oil and gas block in Mizoram.
Among other benefits that will accrue to the shareholders of the companies, the statement said, the merged entity will see cost efficiency for fuel supplies through Reliance Natural's coal supply logistics and shipping business.
Post the approval of the merger, Reliance Power's net worth will swell to over Rs.16,000 crore, having added around net worth of around Rs.1,900 crore o Reliance Natural.
The two companies had a market capitalisation of Rs.10,394 crore and Rs.41,979 crore respectively at closing bell Friday.
In fact, according to the statement, 80 percent of the shareholder of Reliance Natural Resources shareholders, also hold equity in Reliance Power, and had got their stake free of cost when the original Reliance empire was split.
"Reliance Natural Resources shareholders will benefit from the proposed amalgamation by participating in future growth prospects of Reliance Power's diversified generation portfolio of 37,000 mw," said the statement.
The group also has substantial coal reserves in India and abroad. Among Reliance Power projects are three ultra-mega power plants at Sasan in Madhya Pradesh, Tilaiya in Jharkhand and Krishnapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.
"Reliance Power will have over 6 million shareholders, the world's largest shareholding family, upon completion of the deal."
Mumbai: Indian drug maker Lupin has become one of the top five generic drug companies operating in the U.S. market in terms of number of prescriptions. This is a first among Indian generic companies selling drugs in the US, the largest market in the world, writes P B Jayakumar of Business Standard.
Lupin is now behind Teva Pharma of Israel, Mylan Labs, Novartis and Watson Pharma. It had an average of a little over 8.4 million prescriptions a month in year between May 2009 and April 2010, said IMS, a global market research agency that tracks drug prescription sales in the US market.
In the previous year, Lupin had moved into the top 10 rankings at eighth position. Three Indian companies - Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Zydus Cadila and Aurobindo - are among the top 15 companies in the U.S. market, at 11, 12 and 13th positions, respectively. Glenmark (rank 18), Ranbaxy Laboratories (20), Sun Pharma (25) and Torrent (26) are the other Indian drug makers among the top 30 players in the U.S. generic business, said the data.
However, the journey further up the ladder will be tough for Lupin, as Watson Pharma, ranked fourth in the list, generates more than double the number of prescriptions for Lupin. Lupin's largest market, the U.S., had grown by about 38 percent in 2009-10 to Rs. 1,789 crore, of a total revenue of Rs. 4,740.5 crore. In March and April this year, Lupin had over a million prescriptions in the U.S. market.
"We are happy that we could achieve our target of breaking into the top five position a few years before we targeted to reach that milestone. We could achieve it in just five years, in a market dominated by players like Teva and Mylan which are there for the last two decades," Nilesh Gupta, executive director of Lupin, told Business Standard.
Lupin had filed a record 37 product registration filings and 19 bulk drug or raw material registration filings with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during 2009-10.