The design, by three city engineering students, includes automated billing of the cart's contents.

There's no waiting in a long line for your purchases to be scanned all you do is pay the amount at the counter and leave
MUTHU P

Smart cart for easy shopping

t has been a disaster for the Indian cricket team in Australia, but three city students have become a big hit Down Under. Their presentation about a shopping cart won accolades at an international conference in Freemantle, Australia last month. Imagine you are in a supermarket after a long day at work. All you want to do is buy a loaf of bread and leave. But the long line of trolleys ahead of you psyches you out. No prizes for guessing what most of us would do in such a situation! Add to that the empirical heft of a 2005 global consumer survey by Visa, which says as many as 70 per cent of shoppers opt to walk out of a queue if the line is too long, while 10 per cent feel seriously annoyed. Big retailers are aware of these consumer irritants and offer alternatives like late-night shopping and internet shopping. But these have not caught on in a big way, as most of us are still hard-wired for touching and feeling a product before deciding to buy it. Now, salvation for gridlocked shoppers may come in the form of the self check-out counter intelligent shopping cart designed by three under-graduate students of PES School of Engineering, Bangalore. The students, Praveen Kumar B O, Roopa D and Arjun A K, claim the carts inbuilt automatic billing system makes shopping a breeze and has other positive spin-offs: it frees staff from repetitive checkout scanning, reduces pilferage and increases operational efficiency in stock-taking. The cart displays product discounts and offers using wi-fi. As a result, the time shoppers spend in poring over

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MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2012

Sridhar Vivan & Muthu P bmfeedback@indiatimes.com

Praveen and Roopa demonstrate the functioning of the cart

products and prices gets reduced, said Arjun. As products are dropped in or removed from the cart, the display keeps updating the billing. Once through, the shopper presses an end of shopping button and the details are transferred wirelessly to a shop counter. One has to just pay the amount and leave, instead of waiting for each item to be scanned at the counter, said Roopa. Even the store owners benefit from quicker updation of their inventory, said Praveen. The trios presentation was the only one from India to be accepted at an international conference on networked embedded systems for enterprise applications in Freemantle. Along with 18 other selected papers, it will be published in the form of a book. The students claim mass production can bring the cost of the cart down to Rs 200, while the RFID tags for each item would be 10 paise per tag. We are confident our cart will change the way people shop as radically as ATMs changed banking. Staff will be freed from counters and more self-service check-outs can be set up without adding to overheads. Stores can have a packing counter for add-on services like gift-wrapping. Also, one wont have to face unfriendly or bad-tempered cashiers, said Arjun. According to the trio, their proposed cart is easy to use and does not need any special training. It uses four technologies: infrared sensors for dynamic location detection and tracking, RFID tags for product identification, zigbee for wireless communication with the shops server, and an integrating system with display for billing and inventory management. In other words shorn of technical jargon long shopping queues will be a thing of the past, they claim.

BDA denotifies Rs 25-cr land, cites HC order

s it a simple case of misconstruction or something deeper? Whatever the real reason, BDA was pulled up and fined by the High Court for recommending denotification of a plot of land worth Rs 25 crore as per the orders of the court. BDA had acquired land for the formation of HRBR II Block layout in 1977. The preliminary notification on March 21 that year included two acres, five guntas of land belonging to JI Meckenzy. The final notification came on September 14, 1980 and the compensation of Rs 3,83,707 was awarded on September 22, 1986. However, Meckenzy continued to control over 20

Shocked court says it made no such mention about the 20 guntas, which is part of the land notified for acquisition in 1977, imposes fine on BDA
S Shyam Prasad shyam.prasad1@timesgroup.com
guntas of the land. Meckenzys appeal for more compensation was dismissed by the courts. In 2011, his heirs approached the High Court challenging the BDA move to take over the 20 guntas and demolish a house situated on the land. It was dismissed by Justice BV Nagarathna. An appeal was filed before the division bench of the then Chief Justice in April last year. The court gave an interim order not to demolish the house or dispossess the appellant of the land. It gave time till July 13 for BDA to consider a representation by the Meckenzys to denotify the 20 guntas. On November 9, the High Court gave a final three weeks for BDA to respond to the representation of the appellant. On December 15, it issued a show-cause notice to the BDA commissioner asking why contempt proceedings should not be initiated against him. When the matter came up for hearing on January 6 year, the division bench of the HC was shocked to hear that BDA had recommended denotification of the land as per the orders of the court. The division bench noted that the court had never asked BDA to give up the land. It sought to know under what provisions BDA had recommended the denotification. The court remarked caustically that BDA would even go to the extent of getting government approval on its own and handing over land to those seeking it. The court imposed a cost of Rs 1 lakh on BDA for the error, but reduced it to Rs 25,000 on the plea of the authoritys counsel.

KAUSHIK JN

The disputed plot