ASIA IN BRIEF India's government has successfully migrated 25,904 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) to a unified ERP system in just five months, as part of its broader initiative to modernize and streamline rural lending operations.

PACS providers are small rural lenders that have typically operated their own apps to track loads. In December 2023 India decided that 67,009 such operations need to move their affairs to a national ERP platform.

Last week, the government revealed that effort is proceeding well.

The ERP platform is promised to improve efficiency and governance, to speed loans, reduce costs, and link to district banks to make accounting chores easier.

The massive project will also help to realize India's vision for PACS - which calls for the orgs to diversify into activities including fuel distribution, procurement of seeds, hiring equipment, and providing more credit products.

Last week the government also announced that it has adopted an electronic Human Resource Management System (e-HRMS) that will facilitate "data-driven decisions for training and personnel management."

"It would help the government to digitally manage the service matters of officials leading to reduction in transaction time and cost, availability of digital records, dashboards for Management Information System, real-time monitoring of manpower deployment as well as serving as a productivity enhancement tool amongst others," explained a Ministry of Personnel statement.

India's government has over eleven million active and retired employees to manage.

In case you're still not impressed by the scale of India's digitalization efforts, its national archives last week launched an effort to digitize 300 million pages of its records over the next two years. Previous efforts managed to digitize 45 million over three years.

"Digitized scanned documents are in the format of Portable Document Format for Archival (PDF-A), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), and Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Digitized documents in PDF-A are uploaded on the centralized portal hosted on hot cloud storage and PDF-A, JPEG, and TIFF are also stored on archival cloud storage. One copy is stored on Linear Tape Operation (LTO) as backup," explained the National Archives of India (NAI).

The digitized documents are freely available for public access online.

Indonesia reportedly bans DuckDuckGo

Indonesia has reportedly banned search engine DuckDuckGo on grounds it allows netizens to find gambling and pornographic sites.

A Ministry of Communications and Informatics spokesperson told Reuters that complaints about results for such sites led to the ban.

It is unclear why Indonesian authorities are more concerned about such results from DuckDuckGo, given other search engines also produce similar results.

- Simon Sharwood

UPDATED: Crytpo exchange WazirX changes plans

Indian crypto exchange WazirX has walked back its plan to make good $230 million worth of losses from a recent cyber attack through a socialization strategy that would see 55 percent of account holders' funds made immediately accessible and the remainder converted to Tether tokens (USDT) and locked for an unspecified amount of time.

The plan attracted criticism. One crypto afficionado posed the question: "Why give basket of currencies of random assets which may not be in the interest of customers?"

Others are reportedly seeking legal action.

The crypto exchange ran a weeklong poll that concluded on August 3 to solicit feedback from its users. CEO Nischal Shetty clarified on social media that the poll was non-binding and only a preliminary step to understand opinions.

"We are now looking into next steps based on all the feedback received," wrote Shetty.

The cyber attack on WazirX, thought to be the work of North Korean operatives, wiped out 45 percent of the exchange's crypto assets. The exchange has labeled the attack a force majeure event.

Joanna Cheng, associate general counsel at NYC-based cryptocurrency custody and security firm Fireblocks, told The Register the usage of the force majeure clause "likely" allows the exchange to halt withdrawals, but "if it is found that the event is in fact foreseeable and could have been avoided or mitigated through reasonable measures, the clause cannot be invoked."

Food poisoning hits ByteDance's Singapore office

ByteDance employees found last week particularly hard to stomach, when 130 people at its Singapore offices fell ill with gastroenteritis after eating food from its canteen.

According to the nation's Ministry of Health [PDF], 17 were hospitalized. The rest sought outpatient treatment, self-medicated, or recovered without treatment.

Reports indicate those 17 were brought in by ambulances dispatched to the downtown office, which - as one might imagine - was not smelling of roses.

"The toilets were all full and there were people lying on the floor," was how one employee reportedly described the carnage.

The nation's food safety org, Singapore Food Agency, suspended the operations of the vendors at the 26th floor canteen where the food was consumed until further notice.

Those affected who saw a doctor were reportedly given medical certificates specifying to their employer that they are entitled to three days of sick leave.

Indonesia building massive radio telescope

Indonesia's Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), or Bandung Institute of Technology, announced it will build a Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Global Observing System - aka a VGOS Radio Telescope - at the Bosscha Observatory in West Java.

The telescope will take on tasks like observing cosmic radio sources - quasars, pulsars, and galaxies - with high precision, measuring the Earth's movements or continental drift.

The construction is a collaboration with the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory-Chinese Academy of Sciences (SHAO-CAS).

"The presence of a radio telescope at the equator is critically important, given that the only existing station in this region is located in Brazil," explained the Institute.

The Bosscha Observatory is approximately 6.7 degrees south of the equator.

"With the construction of this VGOS radio telescope, Indonesia will play a role in bridging the baseline of the northern and southern hemispheres," added ITB.

APAC Dealbook

Recent alliances and deals spotted by The Register across the region last week include:

• Japan's NEC Corporation scored a deal to build out communication and SCADA systems for the extension of the north-south train line in the Jakarta Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system.

  The extension is hoped to ease some of the serious traffic congestion and air pollution in the Indonesian city.

  The contract was awarded by India-based MNC Larsen & Toubro Limited, a subcontractor of Japanese investment company Sojitz Corporation, and is supported by a Japanese development assistance loan.

• Datacenter operator Equinix committed RM23 million ($5 million) to expand its Malaysian operations. The expansion adds to other launches of datacenters in the nation's capital, Kuala Lumpur, and along the nation's border with Singapore in Johor Bahru.

  The company plans a new 14,300 square meter datacenter located less than one kilometer from the existing KL1 facility in the planned tech city of Cyberjaya.

• BDx Indonesia announced it has completed the first phase of its 500MW renewable-powered AI campus, CGK4, in Jatiluhur, Indonesia.

  "The renewable-powered CGK4 facility offers high power density of up to 120kW per rack, innovative liquid cooling technologies, and high-speed connectivity that enable it to meet the demands of Generative AI workloads," detailed BDx, which offers up to 700MW of power across Indonesia.

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https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/05/asia_tech_news_in_brief_/