-PTI Raising serious questions about the quality of Ph.D holders in the country, a parliamentary panel has sought an evaluation report to understand why suitable candidates were hard to find for vacant teaching posts. With over 7,000 research scholars being awarded Ph.D every year, the panel has suggested “reorienting” the entire system of evaluation of Ph.D and other research scholars. In its report tabled in Parliament last week, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Scientists are now scrambling to retrieve whatever data they can from a network of 293 ground motion sensors in cities and towns across northern and eastern India that was offline and cut off from the research community during the Nepal earthquakes. The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the earth sciences ministry will send a team to retrieve any records of ground acceleration from instruments in Uttarakhand, while...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A network of 293 ground motion sensors located across northern, eastern and northeastern India lay crippled during Nepal's 7.9 magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks, handicapping researchers trying to assess how the quakes affected cities and towns in these regions. No one knows how many of the 293 sensors designed to measure ground acceleration during earthquakes were actually recording data during the weekend earthquakes because funding for maintenance of...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: About half of Delhi would have flattened out had the epicentre of Saturday's morning earthquake been in or near the national capital. DK Paul, professor emeritus at IIT Roorkee's earthquake engineering department and part of the team that carried out a microzonation study of the capital in 2007, told HT that devastation in Delhi would be many times more not only on account of its high seismicity (it...

-The Indian Express While the Home Ministry has decided to put grants from US-based Ford Foundation under the “prior approval category” and also on its watch list in the interest of “national security”, some government-backed educational and research institutes that receive grants from the Foundation have said the US-based organisation helped build institutions in India. Among the beneficiaries of such grants are at least 10 that are also funded and supported by...