MAHARASHTRA

Over 40 lakh college students from 4,000 colleges across the state can train for free skill-based courses to be offered as part of an agreement between the higher and technical Education department and IT major Infosys as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative.
The courses will include computer programming, cloud computing, , finance and several others.

Minister of higher and technical education, Uday Samant, said that under the MoU, the students are set to benefit from 3,900 skill courses from different categories.

The courses will be open to arts, science and commerce colleges from Nagpur and Technical College, Ratnagiri in the first phase.
Samant said this agreement will benefit 1,600 technical colleges and 10 lakh technical students and 3,000 higher education colleges and 30 lakh students in state.

The state cabinet decided to withdraw theMaharashtra Public Universities(third amendment) Bill, 2021, which had been introduced by the erstwhile Maha Vikas Aghadi government and passed by the state assembly.

The bill had curtailed the powers of the governor and empowered the to recommend names for the vice-chancellor’s post. It had appointed the higher and technical Education minister as pro-chancellor.

The amendment had been passed in the winter session of the State Legislature in 2021, but had not received the assent of governor B S Koshyari. “The bill had amended sections 11 and 13 of the PublicUniversities Act. Students and teachers as well as citizens had requested the governor not to sign it.

The will set up aMaharashtra Gene Bank(MGB) to document native Resources, conserve them, and add value to thecommunitythat is conserving this rich diversity in the state, launch Biodiversity conservation as a peoples movement and engage folk ecologists in a scientific enterprise.

Started in 2014, the MGB project demonstrates the power of community-led conservation activities. For these to sustain and continue in mission mode, the state will now include these projects for funding. This will benefit local communities using traditional and scientificknowledgefor Sustainable Development.

Funded by Rajiv Gandhi Science & Technology Commission, it is a collaborative work of Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER), Pune; National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa; National Centre for Cell Science (NCSS), Pune; Shivaji University, Kolhapur, and College of Fisheries, Ratnagiri. It also saw participation of 13 NGOs, of which two (BAIF and CEE) are pan-India organizations.

Livelihood strengthening efforts happened in the course of this project via activities related to fodder management. About 4,000 MT of palatable grass is produced in this area and this fodder availability is supporting about 3,000 animal heads, which belong to about 1,000 Livestock-keeping families.

All the three state-run power utilities — MSEDCL, Maha Genco and Maha Transco — will have disaster response cells to minimize the losses incurred due to natural calamities. In the last some years, such natural calamities have caused severe damage to the power distribution ,

TheMaharashtra StateelectricityDistribution Company’s staff made extensive efforts and has restored power supply to 7,53,000 customers so far.

Among the nine NCP MLAs who took oath as ministers on Sunday isAditi Tatkare, MLA from Shrivardhan in Raigad district. She is the first woman minister in the Shinde-Fadnavis government.

Aditi was a minister of state in the MVA government and worked as a junior minister handling the tourism, information and public relations, law and judiciary portfolios. She was also the guardian minister of Raigad. Daughter of senior NCP leaderSunil Tatkare, who is an MP from Raigad and was a minister in the Congress-NCP government in the past, Aditi was the president of the Raigad Zilla Parishad from 2017 to 2019.

The Shinde-led government had faced criticism for not having any woman minister. When Shinde expanded his council of ministers in August last year, the names of several senior Women representatives were widely discussed, but none of them found a place in the cabinet.

TheMaharashtra cabinet cleared the proposal to renameAurangabadasSambhaji Nagarand Osmanabad as Dharashiv.

This the second attempt to rename Aurangabad. Earlier, in the year 1995, the then Shiv Sena-led government had issued a draft notification to name Aurangabad after Sambhaji, son of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. However, it was challenged in court.

The cabinet approval, however, is not the final step. A long-drawn process lies ahead, including an approval from the Centre for the official renaming.

A day afterSupreme Courtrefused to re-examine theMarathaquota, theMaharashtra governmentappealed to the Centre to make a Constitutional amendment to grantMaratha quotaon the lines of 10% economically weaker section (EWS) reservation, while theMaratha Kranti Morcha(MKM) said that they would continue to fight until their demand for reservation was granted.

One of the convenors of MKM and a petitioner in the Maratha quota case Vinod Patil said, “The state should form a backward classes sub-committee to collect data on Marathas and send it to the Centre. Both the state and Centre should take equal responsibility for the quota and act immediately.” Though the SC refused to consider the Centre’s plea, the two review petitions filed by the and Vinod Patil are still pending in SC.

TheMaharashtraReal Estate Regulatory Authority (MahaRERA) on Monday directed to display QR codes of all registered housing projects, along with their registration numbers, in all advertisements or Social Media display from August 1.

The authority started issuing QR codes for registered projects in March. A homebuyer can scan the QR code and get vital information about a project, such as the commencement and completion date, details of any complaints registered, besides necessary approvals. Also, modifications in approved plans and project renewal, too, are included in the QR code. Nearly 40,000 projects are registered with the MahaRERA.

This streamlined accessibility aims to empower customers in making informed decisions regarding their property investments.
MahaRERA officials said that under the RERA Act developers are required to update project information on their websites every 3 to 6 months.

Maharashtracannot afford to rely onothersfor medical Oxygen in the present Covid-19 situation and priority must be given to produce 3,000 metric tons of the vital gas per day in the state itself, chief ministerUddhav Thackeraysaid.

He was speaking after commissioning online an oxygen generation plant and inaugurating anRT-PCRlaboratory in Saibaba General Hospital in Shirdi in Ahmednagar.

The second wave of infections appears to be ebbing but the state must be prepared with Health as experts have predicted a third wave, the CM said.

Japan International Cooperation Agency(JICA) has signed an agreement with India to provide an Official Development Assistance (ODA) loan of 300 billion yen (around Rs 18,750 crore) as tr-anche 4 for the construction of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail (MAHSR) project, also known as the bullet train project.

It is the largest amount committed through a single project loan agreement in JICA’s HISTORY across the globe, said the Japanese agency.

JICA has been supporting the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project by providing ODA loans with the cumulative commitment amount of 650 billion yen (Rs 40,625 crore) since 2017 and by providing technical assistance, including feasibility study, basic and detailed design, trainings in Japan, station area development technical cooperation project, and dispatch of Japanese Shinkansen experts to the National High-Speed Rail Corporation Ltd (NHSRCL), which is the executing agency of the project.