Warmest greetings with this first issue of the Newsletter in the year 2010!!

We have made considerable progress on the execution of our project on 'Sustainable Rainwater Harvesting and Ground Water Recharge in Developing Countries - HRD and Technology Transfer' partially supported by the Group of 77 (G-77) under its Perez Guerrero Trust Fund (PGTF). In February, we organised one of the most important components of the project, Trainers' Training Programme, in Bengaluru, India with participation of 26 senior professionals from 16 developing countries and 20 resource persons / trainers from India and Sri Lanka.

The Centre brought out two publications in the last quarter, namely, 'Cleaner Production and Energy Conservation for Sustainable Development' (edited by Jurgis Staniškis and C. Jayaraman) and 'Surface Engineering' (edited by D. Srinivasa Rao and Shrikant V. Joshi) comprising valuable information and current status on these themes in various countries.

Our three ongoing Fellowship schemes aimed at capacity building in S&T have been announced for the year 2010 and we again hope to receive good response from the scientific community of the developing world.

We had a huge response for attending our forthcoming international conference in Pilani, India in April 2010 on 'Empowering Women in Developing Countries through Better Healthcare and Nutrition', and we have just come out with the announcement of yet another activity, an advanced training course on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) with its theme being 'Development of IPR Systems for National Growth', which will be held in July this year in New Delhi, India.

The Centre is continuing to receive requests from developing countries with offer to host scientific activities on partnership basis and I deeply appreciate your having reposed faith in the expertise and capabilities of the Centre in organising such scientific events. At the moment our calendar of activities is full right up to the end of next year. Please be on the look out for our announcements on some more exciting programmes in the near future.

Happy Reading!

(Arun P. Kulshreshtha)