Indonesia hopes startups play big role in free school lunch plan

Nikkei Asia,

JAKARTA — Indonesia wants local tech startups to play an important role in a nationwide free school lunch program that the incoming administration is preparing, with some companies already keen to expand their businesses by participating in the billion-dollar project.

President-elect and Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, who will succeed incumbent leader Joko Widodo in October, promised ahead of February’s presidential election to provide free school lunches and milk to 78.5 million students at some 400,000 schools across the country, aiming to reduce malnutrition and stunted growth among children.

While details of the program are still in the works, it will require a massive amount of grain, vegetables, meat and other foodstuffs, as well as kitchens and logistics to ensure smooth distribution of safe, nutritious meals.

If there is no support from private companies, it will not run well Gibran Rakabuming, the vice president-elect, told reporters in July as the government conducted trials in some areas. He revealed that Gojek, a homegrown ride-hailing and food delivery service, recently helped facilitate a trial school meal program by connecting the government with small merchants registered on its app.

Food packages were delivered to a public elementary school by dozens of Gojek drivers, according to state news agency Antara. BroilerX, an agricultural startup offering digital technology to smallholder poultry farmers, is among the local companies hoping to take part in the program.

We can contribute,founder Prastyo Ruandhito said in an interview with Nikkei Asia. He said that one of the company’s board members was recently appointed by the Ministry of Agriculture to lead the effort to source ingredients for the free meal program.

The Yogyakarta-based company, backed by Indonesia Kopital Ventures and Tokyo-based venture capital firms W and Saison Capital, provides smallholders with management solutions and a smart farming mobile app that analyzes livestock data to improve farming efficiency.

Eyeing expertise, Rajnath visits key US navy centre

Hindustantimes,

NEW DELHI : Defence minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday visited a modern US Navy testing facility for ships and submarines at Memphis in Tennessee at a time when India is looking at setting up a similar facility for locally produced platforms, the defence ministry said on Sunday.

Singh visited the William B Morgan large cavitation channel (LCC) at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Memphis where senior officials briefed him on one of the world’s largest and most technically advanced high-speed, variable-pressure water tunnel facilities.

Senior navy and DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) officials accompanied him.

“The discussions intend to support the ongoing proposal for establishment of a similar facility for indigenous design and development in India,” the defence ministry said in a statement.

The LCC is part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division, one of the US Navy’s preeminent research and development facilities that specialises in critical ship and submarine design.

Operational since 1991, it provides significant cost savings for testing large-scale models of advanced ship and submarine system designs and full-scale torpedoes in a controlled environment, according to the US Navy.

It permits the US Navy to measure submarine and surface ship power, efficiency and propeller noise by using models in a controlled but realistic environment.The facility has commercial use too.

Singh was greeted by deputy under secretary of the US Navy for Policy Anne Gebhards, and Naval Surface Warfare Center and Undersea Warfare Center Commander Rear Admiral Todd Evans.

“Witnessed the pathbreaking experiments at the facility. India and the US look forward to work together and benefit from each other’s experiences,” Singh wrote on X.

Singh’s Memphis visit came on the back of meetings with US national security advisor Jake Sullivan and secretary of defence Lloyd Austin in Washington. These talks spanned an array of critical areas including the impact of global developments on geopolitics, pressing regional security dynamics, broadening cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region and deepening defence industrial collaboration.

What went wrong in response to Bucheon hotel fire?

The Korea Herald,

Funerals for the victims of Thursday‘s Bucheon hotel fire were held on Sunday, but the controversy surrounding the tragedy has intensified while authorities have been searching to identify the circumstances that led to seven deaths and a dozen other injuries.

Amid the ongoing efforts to determine the exact cause of the fire, a debate about the inflatable rescue mattress used by firefighters erupted, as two of the seven people died attempting to jump onto it.

Soon after the blaze broke out, video footage showed that a man and woman jumped out of the window of the building‘s seventh floor onto an inflatable rescue mattress set up by firefighters on the ground without supervision.

The mattress — 4.5 meters long, 3 meters high and 7.5 meters wide – flipped over after the woman landed on its edge. A few seconds later, the man attempted to jump onto it as well but due to the flipping, ended up on the ground, not the mattress. The two were taken to the hospital in cardiac arrest and were pronounced dead.

Some have pointed out professional negligence that resulted in the deaths,while the fire authorities said that they did not have enough personnel at the time to secure the mattress properly.

The absence of sprinklers in the hotel was also blamed for the deaths.Fire regulations mandated that all new accommodation facilities with more than six stories have sprinklers on every floor in 2018. However, this Bucheon hotel, built in 2004, had no sprinklers installed, which could have reduced damages by suppressing fires quickly and in areas that are difficult to access,according to safety experts.

“Sprinkler heads are designed to activate automatically when the surrounding temperature reaches a high level and release water to extinguish the fire.Early fire suppression is effective as it helps to control and put out a fire before it gets big,” Li Ki-hwan, a professor at Kyungil University‘s Department of Fire Safety, noted.

In light of the tragedy, Han Dong-hoon, chair of the ruling People Power Party,also stressed fire safety upgrades for old buildings during a high-level policy consultation meeting on Sunday.

The government and the ruling People Power Party also agreed to mandate the installation of wet sprinkler systems capable of detecting fires early and helping prevent their spread in all new buildings with underground parking lots.