Bharat Rakshak

They appear to be residential flats..and quite a strategic location i suppose. Holdouts for a better buyout price from the RE developers perhaps?

This is Phase 2, Gurgaon. I have a place hardly a kilometer from here, invested in 91 when no one heard of Gurgaon..got brickbats from family and friends for doing that. Now most of them settled sheepishly years later right there..

However this is not the best area in Gurgaon though. The problem with Gurgaon is extremely bad roads and lack of public transport. It has grown so much that the Babu never imagined this would happen. So there are world class buildings, but shabby roads. Every building has it's own power supply. In the pic you barely see the WNS, Microsoft Offices..go along that road. Look up and you'll imagine you're in down town of some highly developed country. Look down on the road and it's a mess. That one road is barely a km long. Wide and full of potholes. The buildings are worth billions of dollars and are aesthetic glass and steel structures 1st world. It would barely take an investment of 1c to get the road done with pavements and landscaping. Just so the Babu's make a few lakhs it really spoils the show. Coming to think of it the solutions to the problems may be much smaller than we envison.

No way. Gurgaon by all accounts is hellish . Buildings alone do not a society make. In fact, in much of Nai Dilli and it's surroundings , the fundamental problem is lack of a civil society and lack of civility in general.

Life is not that bad really. Women move out all night and day in Gurgaon. Nightclubs are open till 5 am everyday. There are plenty of restaurants and malls of every type. Gurgaon is quite cosmpolitan in that sense. Yes incidents do happen, but it's really not that bad.

the most dangerous folks in NCR are surely not the poorer people but the super rich politician-son/son-of-top-police-IAS-type/import-export-scion who move around in range rovers and benz's with a couple of SUVs full of armed guards and flit between 5* hotels and lounge bars

I completely agree with you there. And thats really not the Gurgaon crowd. It's the Delhi crowd that spills over here.

No discussion on this thread please. This is just for links with brief comments directly related to thread topic.

Roads thread is there for relevant discussions.

Could not find a suitable topic .. so posting here.

Today we have one of the darkest Moon eclipse.

http://sssalvi.blogspot.com/2011/06/tot ... today.html

Another possible Indian CEO of a top multinational company, Unilever. Harish Manwani is now COO and heir-apparent.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpet ... umer-goods

Physics Olympiad: Indian students win three gold medals and two silver medals at the 42nd International Physics Olympiad (IPhO).
Link:http://mpec.sc.mahidol.ac.th/ipho2011/node/101

^^^News Item in Hindu and TOI
Indian students bag three gold, two silver medals in IPhO
Rajasthan students win gold silver at Physics Olympiad

You hear it first here.. News paper stories to follow..
(x post from Math dhaga)
Akashnil Dutta is going to get a Gold Medal at International Mathmatics Olympiad 2011. . (Most successful Indian student with 1 gold and previous 2 silvers)... Congrats!

^^^ India is the only country in which no career incentive is given to the participants of these contests. In most other countries students are given admission to college and branch of their choice. They are treated as Olympic heroes.
When I was in class 12th several years ago the second round of selection and the orientation cum selection camp (ocsc) were always at inconvenient times . (near class 12th prelims in January and near medical/engineering entrance exams in May/June respectively). Due to this parents often dissuaded their kids from participating. I had to argue with my dad to be able to participate in the final selection camp for the physics olympiad as it was a few days before some entrance exam. It was a good learning experience even though I did not get selected to represent India. Experimental work was a great deal more than what was taught in schools. These days the exams are a lot more popular in India . But no career incentives offered by government.
Yet the Indian performance has been great ever since we first participated in 1997. And has improved ,especially in mathematics. In my time we used to find number theory questions tough as they were not a part of our curriculum. We gave lot more emphasis to calculus in class 12th.

Indian Scientist develops reversible, non-hormonal injectable vasectomy technique

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... -vasectomy

low-cost solar cells using Graphene developed
http://dailyreckoning.com/graphene-the- ... -material/

gakakkad wrote:^^^ India is the only country in which no career incentive is given to the participants of these contests. In most other countries students are given admission to college and branch of their choice. They are treated as Olympic heroes.

Now most likely American universities will swoop in on the kids with full scholarship!

Hiten wrote:Indian Scientist develops reversible, non-hormonal injectable vasectomy technique
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... -vasectomy

Brilliant if effectively implemented.

Amber G. wrote:You hear it first here.. News paper stories to follow..
(x post from Math dhaga)
Akashnil Dutta is going to get a Gold Medal at International Mathmatics Olympiad 2011. . (Most successful Indian student with 1 gold and previous 2 silvers)... Congrats!

(I am relieved that my prediction - (based on partial results) did come out correct and The results below are official)

Congratulations to India's IMO team:
Akashnil Dutta - Gold medal (He won silver in 2010 and also in 2009)
Akashdeep Dey - Silver medal
Debdyuti Banerjee Bronze medal (Missed a silver by a whisker)
Mrudul Thatte Bronze medal
Prafulla Dhariwal Honourable mention (Missed a Bronze by a whisker!)
Indraneel Kasmalkar Honourable mention (Also Missed a Bronze by a whisker)

Overall The team did very well. Mrudul is only 16. Akashnil becomes one of the most successful Indian student with 1 gold and 2 silvers (in 2010 and 2009).

Congrats to them all.
(US Team also did very well ( 6 Gold Medals))

First Blip in an Indian News Paper...
India bags gold medal at IMO

I think DDM's should at least get their story straight. From the link (only one at present I see from any Indian newspapers) posted in the previous post..

Indraneel Kasmalkar and Prafulla Dhariwal had Honorable Mention (equal to participation certificate),

(Honorable Mention is NOT equal to "participation certificate" - One has to score perfect on at least one of the problem to get one - Just for perspective, none of our friends on the west, except for two/three individuals in all the past years of its history have gotten any. Number of people who do not get any medal or an HM in a typical IMO is about 150!)

Also Congrats to Diptarka Hait and Dravyansh Sharma for winning gold in
43rd International Chemistry Olympiad

http://icho43.metu.edu.tr/

All 4 Indians win silver in the international Biology olympiad.

Cross Post..
Awright. Just gotta tell this experience. I had gone to the Passport Seva Kendra in Outer Ring Road, opp Intel , today to get my passport renewed.

I filled in the form and got an online appointment. I duly uploaded the the required documents as per what the website "Document Advisor" ( a very nifty feature, tells you exactly what documents are needed based on what service you desire) and I did notice that the website was run by TCS and the online process was available only for Bangalore, Mangalore, Hubli /Dharwad and Chandigarh! I thought , ah.. thank goodness we have the Foreign Minister from KA.

So, off I went this morning at my scheduled appointment time and I was expecting a typical govt office with creaky ceiling fans, battered furniture and paan stained walls and a massive line of people with an army of touts scratching their head outside. The building was an IT/Vity style building from outside . The first thing I noticed something was amiss was that there were smartly attired IT/Vity type private security guards, and not a govt chowkidar /security chap or a Karnataka Police Pandu outside, who was giving directions , and he made the public form an orderly queue, before frisking folks (women had a separate booth with women security frisking them) and then you enter a hall.

I was in for a shock. It was unlike any govt office I had seen before in India. It was light years removed from Shastri Bhavan in Chennai kind of place (from where I got my first passport while at the Madrassa) . There were very nice counters with smiling polite young folks manning it, who did a quick check of the documents and , scanned your appointment receipt's bar code, and gave out a token with a number and bar code and other details in it and as I was directed around the corner, I was gob smacked. There was a turnstile where a guard scanned your token, and then you enter into a nice waiting room , ample place to sit , with clean toilets, a nice snack corner which served coffee/tea out of a vending machine, piping hot and cakes, sandwiches and other snacks and big LCD screens which called out your tokens.

My number came up right as I entered and I was directed to a counter, where I was asked to SIT in nice comfortable chairs, where another nice smiling young man (I realized that it was all TCS folks until now), quickly pulled out what I entered online on the screen (there is one facing you as well, in addition to one for him) checks the doucments, walks with you through what you entered to make sure there are no mistakes and then asks to take your photo with the camera at his desk connected to the machine (the first time wasnt nice enough, I asked him if he could do it again, he smilingly said yes .. can you imagine that in a govt office and took it again), then he got my finger prints scanned, and printed out the documents and asked me to sign , asked if I was paying by cash (I was shocked.. since when could you use credit cards in govt offices. .), printed out a receipt and then scanned all my documents and said asked me to wait for my token to come up in the other counters.

Soon , enough, I went to the second counter where there was a "verification officer" (I think he was a GOI employee), nicely dressed, polite, not hassled, who verified my documents again, cleared me and asked me to wait for the last counter , and this time it was with the Officers (APO must be Asst Passport Officer I think) , who did a thorough check, as my passport was issued in NY, took his time (again, very polite, not hassled, very pleasant) and passed my file , cancelled my old passport and told me that he was done .

As I was going out through the exit door, another young TCS employee, asked form my token pass, scanned it, scanned my fee payment receipt, and finally , pointed out to a screen next to him and asked me to enter FEEDBACK on the entire experience, which included basically Ambience, Politeness, Cleanliness (even the bathrooms were a far cry from the typical govt ones and were largely fine, not 5 star hotel clean, but given that it was a public office, perfectly acceptable) and Entire Experience (I think). I gave them top ratings in everything.

The entire office (fully air conditioned, well lit, neat clean, modern furniture, beautifully laid out work flow) and everything could have come right out of any of the Cisco/Intel/Ass Enter/ IT/vity companies surrounding that place.

The final thing of asking for feedback and caring about things like cleanliness and pleasantness of the experience was like a pile driver to my jaw and rocked me back on the heels.

This easily qualified as simply THE BEST experience I have had in ANY official interaction whether in Singapore, Europe or US . Doing it online was fine, but I had not expected the face to face back end part. That simply rocked. No shady "agents" all the unsavory fixers not even visible anywhere near the Passport Seva Kendra .. And my word,what a difference from the experience of 6 and 7 years ago, when I wanted to get my wife's name included in my passport and also get a passport for my daughter.

This experience was a total "Shakinah" .. All Piss,Plogress and Plosperity . The productivity boost out of this outsourcing the bulk of the work to TCS must be simply enormous. There were like 3 govt "officers" and maybe some 6 govt employees and some 30 /40 TCS employees. If the Yindoos (like the TCS outsourced Passport Seva Kendra and the Infosys outsourced Income Tax Centralized Processing Center) can do this kind of process improvements and productivity boosts and this is just the beginning,not even scratching the first few atoms of the surface, the entire world better start shivering in their collective Dhotis. This is a level of Haiti to 1st world jump !

Even the officers and govt employees seemed so different. Maybe it is just that with the daily irritants and the corrosive environment in a typical govt office is removed, they truly come into their own and their entire demeanor and outlook changes!

Thank god for SMK as the FM. Dilli Billis can still get going to their paan stained, "fixers" and shakers infested Sarkari offices and get ripped by the touts and given the run around and the birdie! . I just hope that Dilli gets the new Passport Seva Kendras LAST

Thanks vina. Logged in to say, this made my day. Change is in the air. Once me have 50% in middle class, India will surge ahead. Cheers and Jai Hind.

Awright. Just gotta tell this experience. I had gone to the Passport Seva Kendra in Outer Ring Road, opp Intel , today to get my passport renewed.

Good to hear...the first few days when this opened was utter madness with things really going out of hand on many occasions ( with TCS S/W also crashing multiple times leading to war of words between MEA and TCS).

Good to know that everything is settled now and up and running. Wonder how the other PSKs like at LalBagh etc are doing?

K_Reddy wrote:Thanks vina. Logged in to say, this made my day. Change is in the air. Once me have 50% in middle class, India will surge ahead. Cheers and Jai Hind.

Oh. I forgot to mention. There was even a BABY ROOM for mothers with young kids over there. Think of it. The only place I have seen it in India is in Shoppers Stop, LifeStyle and the stores in all the malls kind of places in India until now. Just imagining something like a baby room to feed the baby and change diapers etc at a Govt service office means some serious thought has gone into this.

Sum, everything worked like a charm. I am sure the gremlins in the software must have got ironed out , and there were people behind me saying that the center at lal bagh is much bigger than the one at ORR and also "faster", presumably because they had more govt employees and Officers there to do the final verification and decision making on the passport. The wait time with the smaller no of govt verification folks and decision folks was the bottlneck here, with the intial processing and everything getting done in a jiffy.

I wonder if anyone could have even attempted to breast feed a baby @ Shastri Bhavan in Chennai in the good old days with that crush of humanity there.

Vina Saheb,Truly heartening to read. I hope for similar improvements at the RTO.

Vina, Truly good to read, there was talk of relocating the Pasport offices in late 2010 from Shastri Bhavan to new offices, dont know if these are also given to TCS, that will be good.. Dont know whether this has been implemented yet or not.

AoA - thanks Vina for that report.

Step by step, in our own way, we will surpass every mofo on the planet and stay there for the longest possible time. Mind it.

And now that I've made my comment, let me remind BRFites that this thread is for articles only (including vina's), no comments (Being moderator has to have some benefits)

Awesome!

Much power to such e-Seva initiatives. A respected citizen makes a respected nation!

Jai Ho!

That's and awesome experience Vina!!! Hopefully all services will be like that in future!!!

India fares well in social development: report

HDI ranged from 0.79 in Kerala to 0.39 in Chhattisgarh.

The report compares HDI growth to the global human development report rankings. It says over the eight-year period, HDI rose 21 per cent

The report also indicated economic prosperity was no guarantee of better social indicators. Gujarat, with a high per capita income, ranks below some poor states in terms of hunger, the report said... Gujarat had a hunger index of 24.70 per cent, just above Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.

I am very appreciative of what Modi has done economy wise in Gujarat, but the above with respect to hunger index was a surprise to me.

Nothing about Gujarat originating from Delhi should be trusted. DDM as usual is not bothering to ask if Gujarat agrees with these findngs.

^^ I don't know where these guys with hunger need come up from, as far as I know most small towns or villages in Gujarat have concept of free food since 1960's in many cases going back hundreds of years where food is served free at specific times during the day everyday. People donate food and money typically on ocassions of marriage, deaths etc in every towns/cities. The last food is typically served at 10 at night. I don't believe anyone would sleep without finding free food by that time. I certainly have never came across a family who did not ate food at least two times per day ever.

^^^ actually the "hunger quotient" it self is a flawed concept..collection of data too is flawed... I explained before , that in Guj the agency responsible for collecting the data , (tameen foundation or something of that sort) collects it from dangs , chhota udepur and some poor saurashtra villages... they ll never collect data from ahmedabad , sanand , charotar ,surat or Bharuch...the data of the tribal area is extrapolated the whole state... so obviously the data will be flawed...they are collecting data from poor area's and extrapolating results to whole state... its like collecing data from dharavi and extrapolating it to juhu , worli or the place where ambani lives....

as elections near you ll find these half truths and nonsense articles all over toilet...in previous election there was a gross disinformation campaign against Modi... my uncles neighbour in NJ went to Guj and provided funds for BJP... He went to some meeting of NRI where toilet reporters were lurking...the next day they published "NRI come in "droves" to campaign against Modi. " ..None of the NRI present there was saying a thing against Modi... some were actually contributing to Modi's campaign... I asked my uncle and his neighbour frequently about this..

The former BJP CM keshu patel campaigned against Modi ... These people came up with the lahori logic that Patel's alienate Modi...and published it as headlines ... the next day they came up with something of thakkar's ... when the election results came 85-90% patel's voted for Modi... Keshu has been silent since then...toileteers were then trying to create cast rift in Gujarat...which is almost non-existent. patel's ,shah's and thakkar's and brahmin's regularly inter-marry... But toilet came up with some crap shanghaied article a few year's ago comparing patel's to khap panchayat of haryana .and other cast to some equally defamatory nonsense...that was followed by successive hate articles by Ashis Nandi and Navlakha blaming gujarati's for India's "communal divide" ..they are so pissed off with Modi that that they have started writing crap about Gujarati's ... especially the NRI'S...

Please stay on thread topic. Periodically, posters seem to get confused about the direction of the march in this thread

Venture Beat's review of the Akash tablet PC:
LINK

What does GPRS mean? Is it like 3G wireless?

ramana wrote:What does GPRS mean? Is it like 3G wireless?

GPRS full form is General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and is considered a 2.5G. It gives mobiles/cell phones same functioanlity as 3G but at a reduced speed.

GPRS is the stepping stone to full 3G service for the Telco's.

India's Leading Export: CEOs

When Ajay took over at the credit-card company's headquarters in a suburb outside New York City, the Times of India crowed that he was the first "entirely India-minted executive"...

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... z1cZpGlDJN

GPRS - basically used by 2G based mobile phones to surf the net

This group is doing something great. Hope they succeed, and it becomes a real mass movement. The talk on their website sounds like it is some BRF member? Anyway, kudos. Would like to join them one day when I am in that neck of the woods.

Ugly Indians

The Bangaloreans in the Ugly Indians civic group have spent every week of the past year trawling the city's central business district with face masks, gloves, buckets, broomsticks and mops.

Their mission is to "spot-fix" Bangalore, dirty street by dirty street, and has inspired the confidence to throw their "Ugliness Challenge" at other cities.

They choose small stretches each week to clean: pavements piled up with plastic, defaced walls, footpaths rendered unusable by potholes.

'Spot-fixing'
The Ugly Indians are mostly professionals in the 25-40 age group and remain strictly anonymous - they respond to media queries only by email.

The Facebook page shows how bad things were. This locale was designated Ugly Spot 15
The mission began a year ago to "understand the Indian mind and attitude towards cleanliness" and "outwit him/her with clever solutions".

Facebook page

Have you ever felt frustrated by the filth around you?
Have you ever wished India was a cleaner place?
Have you ever felt like doing something about it, and not known where to start?
Don't all of us Indians feel the same?

Good overview of their work and other videos on this channel:

Interview and other videos

The Ugly Indian website

Moved the Mr Colin Gonsalves related posts to "Know your India" thread.

This thread is for positive march of the nation. I used to have another thread "Blots of a Nation: which folks objected to and was removed. The "Know your India" thread is for deficiences that need to be aware of.

Thanks, ramana

Cheap beads offer alternative solar-heating storage
A

cheap material that can store heat energy collected from the sun during the day that can be released slowly over night has been developed by researchers in the India. The material based on paraffin wax and stearic acid is described in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Renewable Energy Technology and could help keep homes warm in sunny parts of the world that get very cold at night without burning wood or fossil fuels.
Mechanical engineer Meenakshi Reddy of Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering and Technology, in Chittoor, Andra Pradesh, and colleagues explain how certain materials, known as phase change materials (PCM) can store a large amount of heat in the form of latent heat in a small volume. PCMs have a high heat of fusion and melt/freeze at a certain temperature. Heat is absorbed when the material melts and released when it freezes. Heated in the sun, the mixture of paraffin wax (which melts at about 37 Celsius) and stearic acid (a fat commonly used to make soap) becomes entirely liquid. However, as it solidifies it slowly releases the stored heat. The process is akin to the phase changing heating that occurs in hand-warmers that contain a PCM but in this case the material does not need to be boiled in a pan or heated in a microwave oven to absorb latent heat.
The team has now tested spherical capsules just 38 millimetres in diameter containing a blend of paraffin and stearic acid, which can be floated on the top of water in a tank. Stearic acid is a lot cheaper on the Indian market than paraffin and more readily available. The team found that costs could be held down without reducing the overall heating efficiency of the capsules by lowering the proportion of paraffin wax.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 120211.php

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/infrastructure/narendra-modis-rs-78000-cr-hi-tech-city-gift-to-try-new-concepts-may-shape-future-city-technologies/articleshow/11368455.cms

Posting in full.

AHMEDABAD: Narendra Modi would not have thought of Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) as the test-bed for future city technologies, but his dream project in Gandhinagar may well have this interesting spillover. Work on the proposed Rs 78,000-crore nano city has now started, and the first occupant may move in by March.

By the time the first phase is completed in three-and-a-half years, this special economic zone (SEZ) would have tried out, on a small scale, some contemporary urban design ideas.

GIFT would have a command and control centre to monitor the IT infrastructure and respond quickly during emergencies (a fire anywhere, for example, will trigger an automatic response). The city will use the energy-efficient district cooling system instead of air-conditioning. It will also use an automated waste collection system that sucks away garbage from buildings at high speed. Says GIFT Director Ramakant Jha: "We will now try on a pilot scale many technologies that will be used when the city is developed fully."

District cooling, which uses chilled water to cool buildings, is being tried in a few places such as Toronto, Cornell University and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Its proponents say the technology consumes 90% less energy compared with traditional air-conditioning.

In automated vacuum waste collection systems, garbage is sorted out and then sucked away at high speed through underground tubes to a central location, which can be as far as 20 km away. It is being used in cities such as London, Montreal, Stockholm and Barcelona. No Indian city has these technologies yet.

These concepts may be widely used in smart cities of future as they are considered sustainable. District cooling, for example, can be used easily with renewable energy. Automated waste collection can be combined with biomass energy generation systems, so GIFT will burn waste to generate energy. Greenfield cities such as GIFT have an opportunity to test new technologies before they are adopted in existing Indian cities.

GIFT was conceived in 2007 and the idea was developed initially by a set of consultants such as McKinsey and urban development specialist Fairwood Consultants. It is being planned as a top-notch global financial centre to rival London, New York and Hong Kong.

On a more immediate time scale, it is being built to attract companies from Mumbai, Gurgaon and even Bangalore. After the initial flurry of announcements, the project entered a stage of lull due to the global economic meltdown in 2008. With the city being granted permission last November to operate as a multi-services SEZ, the Gujarat government is keen to take it forward quickly.

The stock exchanges of London, Tokyo and Singapore have evinced interest in setting up offices in GIFT, as have many Indian banks. Singapore Co-operation Enterprises, a government agency, has just signed an agreement with GIFT to develop a banking enclave.

"Liberty to transact in foreign currency at the IFSC in GIFT will significantly raise foreign firms' investment and participation in India," says SS Thakur, former chairman of HDFC and former controller of foreign exchange in the Reserve Bank of India. Similar financial centres in Hong Kong, Dubai, China, Malaysia, the UK (London) and the US (New York) contribute 5-60% of GDP of their respective countries. GIFT is expected to create 10 lakh jobs in 10 years.

Fairwood Consultants, which developed the first master plan, had envisaged a 'next-class city'. It proposed 110 buildings with the tallest being 88 stories. "God does not give us land anymore," says Vikas Chopra, senior vice-president of Fairwood, which is no longer associated with the project. Concentrating urban life into a small area was an eminently 21st Century concept as it made many services cost-effective and environment-friendly.

However, GIFT will have to wait a while to go vertical. Currently, it has clearance to build only up to 122 metres since the airport is seven km away. In 6-7 years, the airport will shift to a new location, allowing GIFT to soar high.

GIFT had made changes to the original plan, which had proposed subterranean roads and four levels of underground parking, leaving the surface purely for pedestrians. It had also envisaged a Personal Rapid Transit System similar to the one operational at London's Heathrow airport and one planned for Amritsar. Now, the parking will be on the surface since underground parking and roads are too expensive.

The Personal Mass Rapid Transit System has been dropped as the Metro would come right up to GIFT. However, cars will remain in the periphery as residents and visitors will use district-cooled, moving walkways to get to the city centre. The city is being planned in such a way that future planners do not have to dig for 100 years.

The first phase of GIFT would experiment with new technology concepts to see if they can be replicated on a larger scale. It would involve two 30-storey buildings with around 10,000 people working inside. The investment for infrastructure in this phase would be Rs 1,400 crore, and around Rs 10,000 crore for all the three phases. The city would need a total investment of Rs 78,000 crore.

[Edited. This is not a political news thread]

Sorry to digress, just a little humour in this good thread.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... 80eff3c.f1
Polio breakthrough: India marks disease-free year

India marked a year since its last new case of polio Friday, a major milestone in a country once considered the epicentre of the disease and one that gives hope the scourge can be eradicated worldwide.

There were 150,000 cases of the highly contagious virus in India in 1985, but the country has now gone 12 months since discovering a new case -- in an 18-month-old girl in the eastern state of West Bengal.

India, which until recently accounted for half of all the polio cases in the world, is one of four countries -- with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria -- where the disease is still officially endemic.

But if all laboratory tests for the wild polio virus return negative in January, India will follow recent success stories Niger and Egypt and be removed from the endemic list by the World Health Organisation by mid-February.

There was cautious optimism in New Delhi as health workers and the government celebrated the milestone while stressing that the virus -- which mainly affects young children and can cause paralysis and deformed legs -- could resurface at any time.

"We are excited and hopeful, at the same time, vigilant and alert," Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said in a statement to mark the occasion.

Since the last new case was reported on January 13 last year, another vast effort to immunise children has seen 2.3 million vaccinators travel across India to deliver 900 million doses.

"What India has achieved is reaching a first milestone in a very important process," Lieven Desomer, head of the polio unit at UN children's agency UNICEF in India, told AFP.

"It's not the end of the road, but it's something to be very proud of.

"Achieving this milestone is going to instil confidence in polio eradication efforts globally. If it can be done here, it can be done everywhere."

India will only be judged to have eradicated the disease if it stays polio-free for another two years.

Polio was one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century for children, but it has been successfully controlled through a programme of vaccination in most countries.

UNICEF figures show India, where the crowded and impoverished northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have historically been the hotspots, had 150,000 cases of the disease in 1985.

This had fallen to about 6,000 in 1991, to 741 in 2009 and to just 42 in 2010.

The decline worldwide, through a concerted effort by governments, UN agencies and private donors, has raised hopes polio might go the way of smallpox, the only disease successfully eradicated globally.

"If we can achieve that it will be of great benefit to the children of the world," said Desomer. "But the last bit is the toughest."

The precipitous fall in polio cases in India is attributed by UNICEF to a huge campaign by the Indian government, which is often pilloried by critics for its failure to tackle malnutrition and poor sanitation.

It represents a rare public health success story in a country where four in 10 children under five are underweight due to malnutrition and only a third of people have access to toilets.

"India's success (with polio) is arguably its greatest public health achievement," said World Health Organisation Director-General Margaret Chan.

Desomer estimated the Indian government contribution to polio eradication to be about $2 billion over the last 10-15 years.

The other two important factors in combating the virus were a new, more efficient oral vaccine introduced in 2010 and partnership comprising the government, private donors and UN agencies.

He singled out the Rotary International charity for helping kickstart efforts to eradicate polio in the 1980s, as well as more recent donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.