India, Iran Weigh Troop Training, Sat Launch

Officials from Iran and India discussed cooperative training of troops and the possible Indian launch of an Iranian commercial satellite during Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's visit here Nov. 16-17, sources in the Iranian Embassy here said.

Mottaki called on Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Vice President Hamid Ansari and Foreign Minister Somanahalli Mallaiah Krishna during his visit.

Details of the Iranian satellite to be launched from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) vehicle have been under consideration since July, but no decision has been taken, an Indian External Affairs Ministry official said.

India and Iran are also negotiating a joint patrol exercise in the Arabian Gulf. India and Iran have a defense cooperation framework in the Joint Working Group on Defence Cooperation, which has been dormant since 2005.

New Delhi is also pressing Iran to share information with India on the movement of terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba, sources in the Home Ministry here said, but there has been no major breakthrough on this issue.

IEA sees 1.3bn people without power in 2030

The proportion of the world's population with access to electricity will rise over the next 20 years but more than a billion people will still be without power in 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said yesterday.

The IEA, which advises 28 industrialized countries on energy policy, said most of the people still living without power in 2030 would be in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia with four out of five of these people in rural areas. The agency's annual World Energy Outlook said that if governments made no change to existing policies, 1.3 billion people, or 16 percent of the world's population, would still lack access to electricity in 2030, despite widespread prosperity and more advanced technology.

Around 85 percent of the people now without access to electricity live in rural areas, where lack of heating fuel, mechanical power and reliable lighting can increase crime, health risks and poverty.

Increasing access to electricity is absolutely fundamental part of addressing poverty and achieving development, particularly in marginal ruralised areas where energy poverty is most extreme," said Robert Bailey, head of climate change at Oxfam.

UN-Energy, an energy-focused department within the United Nations, has said lack of modern fuel and electricity in most developing countries entrenches poverty, constrains the delivery of social services, limits opportunities for women, and erodes environmental sustainability.

Since the IEA began analysing energy poverty in 2002, the number of people without electricity has fallen by an estimated 188 million, despite a massive growth in world population.

This decrease was driven by greater urbanisation and government programmes aimed at improving access to electricity. The biggest energy poverty reduction was in China and East Asia, where booming economies saw the number of people without electricity access fall to 195 million in 2008, from 241 million in 2001.

China has improved power access, providing electricity to 99 percent of its population or 1.3 billion people. Around 8 million people are still without power in China, the IEA says, but it expects access to be at 100 percent in 2030.

However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the total number of people without electricity has grown by 78 million since 2001 and the IEA projects this to rise by a further 18 percent, to a total of nearly 700 million people by 2030.

Due to rising population in Sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of people without electricity was expected to fall to 53 percent by 2030, from 71 percent in 2008, the IEA said. In 2008, 22 percent of the global population were without electricity, this was expected to fall to 20 percent in 2005 and to 16 percent by 2030, according to the IEA's projections.

Some 70% of Tajikistan without electricity as hydropower plant fails

Some 70% of Tajikistan was left without electricity on Monday as the country's Nurek-Regar hydropower plant shut down, a power holding spokesman said.

The shutdown occurred at 6:30 local time (01:30 GMT), Barki Tochik's spokesman Nozir Yodgori said.

He said the blackout followed the country's withdrawal from the Unified Power System of Central Asia several days ago.

Dushanbe, the capital of the former Soviet republic, has also been left without power.

"The failure at power transmission lines run by the republic's hydropower plants has caused no danger," Yodgori added.

He also pledged power supplies would be resumed within the next few hours.

Energy market booming in Tajikistan

For more than a month the Sogda region of Tajikistan is not being supplied by natural gas. The glass processing plant is idle for the same period. The gas workers have sealed it because of the debts. Thousands of workers are on forced vacations. The journalists were hoping to find out the reasons of this situation during the usual press-conference. However their hopes were not met. The representatives of the gas agency did not arrive to the meeting with the press. The representatives of the energy sector and the industry of the region were obliged to answer all the questions on their own.

The absence of natural gas became the reason for the increase of demand. The region has over a hundred of points for filling of gas tanks. One kilo of liquefied natural gas costs almost 50 cents. Another 100 tons of LNG will be supplied in the nearest future. Since early 90s the price for natural gas increased by 30 percent. Formerly, the population would pay 11 dollars for one thousand cubic meters of gas. Today the tariff fluctuates from 250 to 300 dollars.

Tajikistan's Hidden Economy

Tajikistan has the highest remittance rate in the world — a recent World Bank report says that around half of the Central Asian country's money comes from workers abroad. But a weakened economy in Russia, where 98 percent of Tajik remittance income originates, has drastically slowed cash flow back to Tajikistan and its seven million inhabitants.

EurasiaNet reports that between September and November of last year, remittances from migrants dropped more than 50 percent. That decrease alone accounts for a 20 percent drop in the Tajik GDP.

Nearly one million Tajik men work abroad. These workers face growing tensions as local workers fight to keep their own jobs, feeling threatened by the guest workers who poured into Russia and Kazakhstan during better economic times in those countries. The New York Times says that during the migrant boom, the portion of Tajiks living below the poverty line dropped by one-third, to around 50 percent.

At home, Tajik women are left to manage the fields and young boys are the primary wage earners. Remittances help keep Tajik families out of extreme poverty, reports EurasiaNet's Rob Cavese, but because most transactions are cash-based and few Tajiks have bank accounts, the concern is that most funds from abroad are used for immediate consumption and not for investment.

With so many in Tajikistan relying on outside wages, Cavese writes, there is little incentive for the government to initiate a restructuring of domestic wages.

“The Tajik economy is not sustainable without migration,” Dilip Ratha, a senior economist at the World Bank, told The New York Times. “It is not diversified. People are the most important resource they have.”

Mars Nuclear Electric-Propelled Vehicle

This artist’s concept shows a nuclear electric-propelled vehicle, about the size of a football field, firing banks of ion thrusters in order to circularize its orbit around Mars.

Assembled in Earth orbit, the transfer vehicle with its 10 megawatt power plant could transport 130 metric ton payloads to Mars in 6 1/2 months, and could repeat its circuit every 52 months.

This artwork was done for NASA by Patrick Rawlings.