Powerful dash of new spice (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22537267-5013460,00.html)
Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor
The Australian, Australia
October 06, 2007

IN India, as in China, it's sometimes the raw numbers that tell the story. There are more than 200 million mobile phones in India.

And seven or eight million new phones are sold each month. With more than 1.1 billion people, India is already the world's second largest nation and its largest democracy

By 2030, or thereabouts, India will overtake China as the world's most populous nation. And its population is so much younger than China's that it will keep expanding for many more decades than its giant neighbour. India's army is the second largest in the world.

India's trillion-dollar economy is growing at the breakneck speed of 9per cent a year. Measured by parity purchasing power, India's is already the world's fourth largest economy. Measured by existing exchange rates, India's is the 10th largest economy. Either way, it's very big and getting much bigger, fast.

These figures could go on and on. They are not the whole story. They are a part of it, a large part, certainly. But there is much more to India's rise as likely one of the great superpowers of the 21st century.

That rise is historic in ways that are not generally understood. It is the first we've seen of a democracy, especially a democracy with global cultural power, since the US 100 years ago. Japan is the nearest other case. It first rose as a democracy in the first part of the 20th century, but its democracy was quickly distorted by militarism. Japan emerged after World War II to become a huge economy, but it was a strategic client of the US, and its foreign and security policies, and its projection of itself, were anemic, in part due to the need to live down its war record.

India, on the other hand, is nobody's strategic client and its projection of itself is by no means anemic.

Like the US, India will eventually shape the world we live in. This will happen in terms of hard power and soft power. This can seem hard to believe, given the enormous contradictions of India. It's true nonetheless.

But first, here are some of those contradictions, in four images that will long stay with me after two weeks in India. It is just after dawn and I am catching the Shatabdi express train from New Delhi to Amritsar, from where I will journey to the border with Pakistan. Inside the first-class carriage of the Shatabdi, things are a little scruffy but perfectly modern. The cabin is airconditioned. Friendly attendants serve tea and breakfast. Mobile phones are buzzing. Some people have laptops plugged into power sockets in the carriage wall.

But at the edge of the station platform, just as we are pulling out and just after we've left the station, are piles, metres high, of undifferentiated rubbish. Amid all this rubbish, dozens of people are living.

One of them strikes me particularly, a comely woman, in a brightly coloured sari, lying back on a pile of filth as though it's the sofa in her living room, and it is.

On another day I join a group on a walking tour of Old Delhi.

I join the group at the Turkoman Gate. Outside the gate, still in New Delhi, is a modern city -- noisy, cacophonous, car and truck horns blaring ceaselessly.

But step a few metres inside the Turkoman Gate and you seem to have stepped back 500 years. Donkeys are carrying loads of earthen brick, every other household has a goat tethered in the street. The streets and lanes narrow at points to the width of a single person. I go to see a mosque built in the 1300s, and find myself standing in the middle of someone's lounge room, so unimaginably crowded are the living spaces.

On another occasion a friend gets me invited to a huge dinner at the New Delhi home of one of India's leading commercial families. The house and grounds are straight out of Bollywood.

There is a long, low, white bungalow, a vast and perfect green lawn and a generous buffet dinner under a huge marquee.

But it is image No4 that is most important, and it is here that I may have discovered the soul of the new India. I spend one day at the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. If the traffic is good, Gurgaon is about a 40-minute drive from the heart of New Delhi. Soon it will be an even easier commute, for a metro line is being built.

Gurgaon is home to many of the overseas call centres that have moved so many jobs from the First World to India. These are mostly middle-class jobs, not the super hi-tech IT high-flyers, though Gurgaon has its share of those too, and a manufacturing base.

All over Gurgaon, building is taking place at a frenetic pace. There is talk of a dozen new top-line hotels. Huge apartment blocks are going up all over the place. These are not the drab, concrete monoliths of India's Soviet-influenced past, but gaily decorated, stylish buildings with faux minarets and domes and decorative balconies. These buildings, with their spacious grounds, have names such as Belvedere and Woodlawn.

Beyond the apartments, I drive into a slice of California, a gated community of attractive but by no means lavish suburban bungalows. The gardens are green, and lovingly tended, the sidewalks are neat, a school bus drops off little girls in crisp, neat uniforms, their day's lessons complete.

Gurgaon's real glory lies along MG Road, which is home to a seemingly endless line of shopping malls. All glass and swagger, these could have been relocated from Sydney's Chatswood or Melbourne's Doncaster. Most telling of all, they have clean toilets. These shopping malls are the quintessence of bourgeois living.

In Gurgaon I witness the emergence of an authentic Indian middle class. No one will find mystical India in Gurgaon's shopping malls. The only things you chant there are brand names or drinks orders at Ruby Tuesday. But Gurgaon is the vision splendid of the Indian soul, the promise of a decent life for millions upon millions of people.

The world is taking notice of India at last, not for its mystical soul but its booming economy. But it is not just the economy. It is the combination of India's hard power and its soft power which at every point will make it so formidable, which makes its rise potentially comparable with that of the US.

The obvious factors compelling the world to take notice are India's economy, its military power and its nuclear deal with the US. But it is India's soft power that is most distinctive and that acts as a vast force multiplier to its hard power. Soft power is the ability of a country to get others to do what it wants without the use of force or the direct expenditure of money.

India has this in abundance. India is a democracy and its success as a society is immensely important to the prestige of democracy. But India is also diplomatically and politically far more powerful just because it is a democracy. It is inconceivable, for example, that the US would do for anyone else the nuclear deal it is doing for India, a deal in which the entire global nuclear governance regime is being revolutionised.

For India, like the US, its political character is a central component of its soft power. But India's soft power does not end there. It has a worldwide diaspora of 20 million, many of whom are immensely rich and powerful in their own right, and who look on India with great political and cultural fondness.

Indians form the most successful ethnic community in the US and their support has been critical to the nuclear deal.

India also has a huge cultural presence in the Western imagination. The ethical inheritance of Mahatma Gandhi is incomparable, and nearly universally recognised.

Culturally, India has colonised Britain. London is now a common cultural space with India. Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook nominated chicken tikka marsala as the English national dish.

The England cricket team, though still not up to much, always has a few Indian members. David Beckham became a star in the US because he was mentioned in the title of a smash hit, the Anglo-Indian film Bend it Like Beckham. The Indian star of that film went on to star in the US television series ER.

Increasingly, the Indian diaspora is centred on the US. This is showing up in exquisite recent films such as The Namesake. Indian writers such as Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry and countless others are part of the Western mainstream. The Indian film industry, intensely popular in many nations, is a force to rival Hollywood. Thus, through films and novels and much else, millions of Westerners experience Indian culture intimately and positively.

If we are not yet living in a world made in India, we are increasingly inhabiting a world imagined by Indians. It can only get more interesting as new spices are added.

Great collection of articles and effort bro! Keep up the good work!

Cavalryman Singh leads charge from slums to the malls (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/construction_and_property/article2602549.ece)
Dean Nelson, Delhi
The Sunday Times, UK
October 7, 2007

India’s king of construction wants to lead an infrastructure revolution across his country

IT HAS been a good week for Indian property tycoon and ex-cavalry officer K P Singh.

He made just under $5 billion (£2.5 billion) when his construction firm’s shares soared on the Bombay stock exchange.

Singh, who made his initial fortune by investing in Gurgaon, the Delhi satellite town and the country’s call-centre capital, saw his company’s value rise by more than 16%.

It followed news that his company, DLF, had clinched a joint-venture deal with a Dubai investor to build New Bangalore City, a satellite town that Singh hopes will do for India’s IT centre what Gurgaon has done for Delhi.

The windfall confirmed Singh’s place as India’s second-richest man with a personal fortune of just under £17 billion � five billion less than Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani.

Singh is now the undisputed king of India’s residential and retail construction markets, with DLF valued at £19 billion.

He had served as an officer in the Deccan Horse armoured regiment, and taken a job in his father-in-law’s construction firm when he decided to gamble on Gurgaon, which was a collection of dusty villages on farmland close to Delhi’s international air-port.

His chance roadside meeting with the late Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi enabled him to persuade the government to lift restrictions on converting agricultural land into commercial and residential use.

Now, 26 years later, Gurgaon is India’s answer to London’s Docklands � a glass and steel forest of modern skyscrapers housing the headquarters of most overseas corporations in the country, as well as the leading call-centre operators � and a monument to his vision and good fortune.

He is planning to repeat his Gurgaon success in small towns and cities throughout India as part of the “infrastructure revolution” that prime minister Man-mohan Singh says is essential if the country is to continue its extraordinary growth.

He recently said India needs to invest $475 million in roads, rail, ports, bridges, power plants and airports over the next five years to continue growing at the 8% it has averaged over the last three years.

It’s a huge task: India’s main highways are gridlocked with bullock carts, electricity is sporadic, water is in short supply, cities are drowning in their own sewerage, and planes stack and circle for up to an hour before finding a landing slot at international airports.

What’s more, 50% of the country’s one billion people live in slums.

But as incomes and a new middle class have grown, so too have demands for western standards of living.

Demand for residential property (an estimated 20m new homes in the next five years), shopping malls (the country’s retail industry is expected to grow from $6 billion to $23 billion by 2010) and working utilities is drawing some of the world’s biggest investors into India.

Citigroup, for instance, has launched a $5 billion fund to invest in infrastructure, while JP Morgan ING and Credit Suisse raised $10 billion last year for property projects.

Many of these will be in new special economic zone (SEZ) “townships” throughout India, and most the country’s main industrial families have announced plans to build these new “mini-cities”.

The international property con-sultants Cushman & Wakefield have predicted 400 new townships over the next five years, each with populations of more than half a million.

Sahara, the media to parabanking empire controlled by Subrata Roy, is currently raising $7 billion to finance 217 new townships throughout India.

Ambani is investing an estimated £50 billion in the country’s biggest new SEZs on the outskirts of Delhi, Mumbai and Jamnaggar, the home of his company’s Gujarat oil refinery.

Ambani has said the townships will have their own power stations, sewerage systems, residential districts, schools, shopping and entertainment centres, and manufacturing sectors.

International manufacturers will be promised trained staff, cheap rents and low salaries if they take plots. Ambani’s Reliance would be the ultimate planning authority in these “private cities”, with the power to adapt the town to suit incoming foreign manufacturers.

“There’s a huge supply and demand gap. There’s a great demand for roads, ports, and power. There’s a 15% power shortfall, but the economy cannot grow without extra power,” said an aide to Ambani.

“The opportunity for investors is clearly there.

“It’s a chicken and egg. Without the infrastructure, you don’t get good companies coming in, but once they do come in, you automatically make money by charging them international market prices. If we generate power, it will be sold at internationally competitive prices.

“It’s a business proposition.” Subodh Agarwal, the London-based boss of Euromax Capital, the Indian takeover specialists, said although the SEZs were high investment, long-term projects, they would be highly profitable.

“The land is being purchased cheaply. They are real infrastructure projects and there’s no shortage of funds � there’s huge amounts of money available for the right projects, and they’re low risk. They will make money,” he said.

K P Singh will be hoping he’s right. DLF now plans to join Ambani and India’s other private-city barons by building New Bangalore City, a £7.5 billion joint venture with Dubai-based Limitless Holdings.

The township will be built on a 9,000-acre site between Bangalore and nearby Mysore and will have its own metro linking it to the city and its airport.

DLF is also planning major new developments in Mumbai, a £1 billion investment in Tamil Nadu, and a series of SEZs in Orissa, one of India’s poorest states.

It has acquired vast tracts of land throughout the country, including 3,000 acres in sought-after parts of Delhi, Calcutta and Chandigarh.

Singh, meanwhile, has sought to portray himself as both visionary and social reformer.

Last week he spoke to shareholders about the country’s problems and DLF’s role in addressing them: “Frankly, in our cities and towns the human condition is unacceptably low. 50% of our urban inhabitants are still slum dwellers, lacking even basic hygiene facilities.

“Slum children, the citizens of tomorrow, are growing up in an environment where character building has no place.

“There are visible signs of cities being unable to cope with the burgeoning population. Glaring anomalies hit the eye wherever we turn.

“The majority of citizens, particularly those belonging to the underprivileged sections of society, are without water, power and sanitation,” he said.

To his critics, however, K P Singh is a “land-banker” who uses his connections to buy up huge tracts of land for future development or quick sales.

They claim that he has made his money from riding the property market.

New Bangalore City will be the test of whether Singh is simply another successful Indian trader or one of the visionaries leading its people out of the slums and into the malls.

Star of India (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/books/review/Taylor3-t.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=arts&adxnnlx=1191722591-FIje6t+jc+Vi9SAd3yO1fA)
By CHARLES TAYLOR
New York Times, United States
October 7, 2007

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/10/07/books/tayl600.jpg
Photograph from “King of Bollywood”; Courtesy of Bharat Shah
Shah Rukh Khan as the alcoholic lover in “Devdas.”

If Anupama Chopra’s “King of Bollywood” were only a sprightly biography of the Indian film superstar Shah Rukh Khan; a concise history of the development and sociology of Bollywood film; and a convincing argument for how India’s growing economy has changed its films, and how Bollywood stands to play a larger role in the world film market, that would surely be enough.

The larger significance of the book is that a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States. And that is remarkable at a time when newspaper and magazine editors and film distributors are increasingly reluctant to offer readers and viewers what they haven’t already heard about.
The state of foreign film distribution in America is disastrous right now. Strong work from new and established filmmakers continues to emanate from Europe and from all parts of Asia. But after winning raves at festivals, even the best of these films struggle for an American release.

Bollywood cinema, with its love of melodrama and lavish color and outsize emotion, with nearly every genre making space for six or seven songs, may not be the first thing that springs to mind when someone intones the phrase that remains a pedigreed arbiter of cultural sophistication: “foreign films.” But in a global economy in which India stands poised to play a bigger part, when the Internet and DVD’s are creating film audiences not bound by borders or by the caprices of film distribution, when some American multiplexes are giving over screens to Bollywood releases in order to lure America’s growing Indian population and when the stagnation of Hollywood sometimes makes the survival of movies as a popular art form seem an iffy proposition, Americans can’t afford to ignore Bollywood much longer.

At the moment no one represents Bollywood more than Shah Rukh Khan. It’s not just that this epitome of Hindi cinema is a Muslim, which makes Khan an unusual star. Part leading man, larger part buoyant goofball, Khan looks something like the offspring of John Stamos and Jerry Lewis (http://movies.nytimes.com/person/99633/Jerry-Lewis?inline=nyt-per). Without the dark undercurrents of the Bollywood superstar who came before him, Amitabh Bachchan (http://movies.nytimes.com/person/131049/Amitabh-Bachchan?inline=nyt-per), Khan claims, and Chopra agrees, that he represents the confident, successful Indian yuppie, the citizen of the world who is nonetheless recognizably Indian.

In “King of Bollywood” and in her previous book, a superb monograph on the wonderful 1995 Bollywood film “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” (“The Bravehearted Will Take the Bride”), which has never stopped playing at the 1,000-seat Mumbai theater where it opened 12 years ago, Chopra offers a brilliant reading of how Indian cinema, represented by “D.D.L.J.” (as its fans know the movie) and its hero Khan, has confronted the liberalization that came with an expanding economy, rejecting Bollywood’s previous view of the West as purgatory while at the same time expressing fear of waning Indian tradition and identity. The brilliance of Chopra’s reading of the film is that she argues for its simultaneous traditionalism and progressiveness, a dual but not contradictory approach that can be applied to some of our greatest mainstream movies, from “The Best Years of Our Lives” to “Schindler’s List.”

Chopra covers a lot of ground here. There is Khan’s story itself — his unlikely rise to fame; his wooing of his wife, Gauri, despite her parents’ objections; the predictions of failure when a few flops followed many hits; his finding himself under threat from the Indian mafia, which was extorting the country’s film industry. Still, I wanted more. Chopra hints that Khan’s extraordinary confidence may shade over into arrogance. And she hints of the horrendous pressure Khan finds himself under, referring to himself at one point as “just an employee of the Shah Rukh Khan myth.” And I wanted Chopra to examine how Khan, who can be a charming presence or an overbearing one, might be limited as his career proceeds. Most of all, I wanted to know if Chopra believes that a country contemplating greater corporate diversification might find its film industry damaged as ours has been by the triumph of a corporate mentality that possesses none of the old studio moguls’ love for movies.

But I wouldn’t have wanted any of this if Chopra weren’t good enough to raise the questions in the first place. “King of Bollywood” evokes a film industry that, whatever perils it faces, right now does what Hong Kong cinema did in the 1980s and ’90s, what Hollywood only intermittently does: approach the job of entertaining an audience without embarassment or apology, treating making movies as more than a future entry on a balance sheet. Hollywood still lives — if only occasionally in the American movie industry.


Charles Taylor is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark.

India’s Art, Booming and Shaking (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/arts/design/07mado.html?ref=design)
By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF
New York Times, United States
Published: October 7, 2007

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Christie's Images Ltd.
“Three Painters” (1996) by Atul Dodiya.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/10/07/arts/07mado.1902.jpg
Jack Shainman Gallery
A 2007 work by Subodh Gupta.

FOR an uninitiated Westerner, making your way to one of this city’s new art galleries can be a disorienting study in contrasts. In the crowded streets behind the Taj Mahal Hotel Palace and Tower, where the air is heavy with the smell of gasoline and flowers, you are approached by women begging for money and food. Men shout invitations to enter their carpet shops or purchase wares like watches, magazines, leather jackets and cigarettes.

Then, from a narrow thoroughfare, you enter a courtyard where an old man sits wearing a black security uniform. He speaks no English but, when asked for directions, points toward a flight of wood stairs so worn they are bowed in the middle. At the top, a door is opened by a barefoot woman in a scarlet sari. Behind her is an art gallery as white and sleek as any space in Chelsea.

These contradictions do not arise from any calculated exoticism. This is simply the new India.

“It isn’t as if we are not aware of what is happening in New York or Berlin or in China,” the dealer Usha Mirchandani said in an interview at the gallery. “It is just that we find ourselves in a new position, and we must find our own way.

“We are an old civilization. We have untold treasures. But what has happened here in the last year and a half has changed things, with the economy booming and so much art being sold and the prices just going off the graph.”

The Indian art world has more than changed. It has exploded. Prices have increased tenfold since 2002. In the last two years alone, they have nearly doubled. Works by India’s top-selling contemporary artists — Atul Dodiya and Subodh Gupta are the names most often cited — can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars. The auction price of paintings by the older generation of great Indian modernists, like M. F. Husain or F. N. Souza, can easily pass a million dollars — hardly uncommon for leading Western artists but staggering in a country where the average income among the 1.1 billion residents is about $820 a year.

Although the usual metaphors are marched out to describe the new art scene — a Wild West, a gold rush — there are signs that speculators have begun to pull back since the government imposed new capital gains taxes on art sales. Still, the global art world is enthralled. The abiding fascination with China’s modish new art has now spread to its southwestern neighbor, with international dealers and curators flocking in to discover talent.

In the next few weeks alone, at least seven large-scale exhibitions of contemporary Indian art will open in Italy, Switzerland and the United States.

Given the attention and fistfuls of money being thrown at Indian art, more and more galleries are opening or refashioning themselves. Some spaces are being retrofitted or built from scratch to accommodate bigger art and the more complex video or multimedia installations that are fresh additions to artistic practice in India.

In New Delhi, Gallery Espace, Vadehra Art Gallery and Talwar Gallery are three elegant examples. A fourth is Nature Morte, considered by many to be the pre-eminent gallery of contemporary art in India. It recently opened a second space in Delhi to house artists’ projects and a third space in Kolkata with its New York partner, the gallery Bose Pacia.

Similar energy is gathering in Mumbai, where Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Bodhi Art (which has other spaces in New York, Delhi and Singapore), Sakshi Gallery, Project 88 and Chatterjee & Lal have all opened or moved and expanded during the market’s rise.

Shilpa Gupta, a 31-year-old artist based in New Delhi whose videos and installations are exhibited in Asia, Europe and the United States, echoes the breathlessness of the moment. “It doesn’t matter who’s a star now,” she said. “It’s so beautiful. You can hang out, chill out. We all know each other, and everyone is doing very well, and it’s fantastic.”
Yet paradoxes surface in even the briefest conversations with artists, dealers, collectors and writers here.

Money pouring into the art world from nonresident Indians who have made their fortunes in the United States and Europe, along with the racing engine of India’s $4 trillion economy, has enabled artists to travel abroad far more often than they did before. But with this change has come the slow unraveling of the tightknit community that Ms. Gupta idealizes and that now gathers mostly at far-flung exhibition openings — hardly the forum for intense discussions of issues and artwork. And for all its recent plenty, as the art consultant Jai Danani pointed out, the money has yet to bring its Midas touch to the Indian art world as a whole — that is, to generate the largess needed to create art schools, studios and museums for contemporary art.

Alongside the auctions, art openings and dinners at fashionable restaurants like Indigo in Mumbai, another reality sits on an unpaved street in Khirki village in southern New Delhi. There in a plain two-story building stands KHOJ workshops, the only residency program for contemporary artists in the entire country. Across the way, a man sleeps on bare ground near a family surrounded by a cloud of flies. Inside are five small studios on two floors for visiting artists. In the “reference room,” exhibition catalogs teeter in stacks on the floor, organized by subject categories jotted on sheets of paper taped to the walls.

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Chatterjee & Lal Gallery, Mumbai
Nikhil Chopra in “Picnic,” from his “Sir Raja III” series.

Pooja Sood, KHOJ’s ebullient founding director, has struggled to keep the center alive the last 10 years, creating partnerships with similar vanguard institutions in South Asia. The government has “given up on contemporary art,” she said; only the private sector supports fledgling institutions like hers and new art in general.

The frustration is widespread.

Nikhil Chopra, a young performance artist in Mumbai, said: “I can’t believe we’re a country of a billion people that doesn’t have more than a couple of decent art schools, no contemporary art museum, no real funding, no group of trained curators fluent in contemporary art, no art criticism in the newspapers, just one serious art magazine, Art India, and only a few major collectors of contemporary work. In other words, no real infrastructure at all.”

But there are signs that the situation is improving. A modern art museum is being planned for Kolkata. A leading collector, Anupam Poddar, will soon open the Devi Art Foundation’s new headquarters in New Delhi to house his collection, organize exhibitions and hold lectures and talks. Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi now has a School of Arts and Aesthetics, a fairly sophisticated program of art history and cultural studies. Web sites have sprouted up that cover Indian art: mattersofart.com (http://mattersofart.com/), artconcerns.com (http://artconcerns.com/), indianartnews.com (http://indianartnews.com/), along with the online auction site, saffronart.com (http://saffronart.com/).

Yet there is no doubt, as Peter Nagy, the owner of Nature Morte, put it, that the Indian art scene is in its “pimply, adolescent phase.” It is an art community in upheaval, straining to reinvent itself for the 21st century.

The artists themselves, exposed firsthand to European and American art and artists as never before, with the Internet allowing them to sample whatever they care to see, find themselves in a fluid global arena of influence and identity. Their art is no longer confined to Indianness in subject or style, and the topic comes up without prompting in every conversation.

Sipping lassi, a drink of yogurt and water, in his New Delhi studio on a recent afternoon, Subodh Gupta (no relation to Shilpa) said he had steadily resisted the encroachment of global tastes. As he spoke, two assistants nearby quietly polished the surfaces of “Miter,” a large, multipart sculpture of cascading stainless steel pots.

“We are traveling, getting much more informed, and the information gives us useful knowledge,” he said. “But my work with these stainless steel pots and utensils comes from my lower-middle-class childhood, of memories of family and the rituals around food. This is my own language, my strength. If I make art just for the market, I am nothing.”

Not everyone sees the work made today as so earnestly conceived. The editor of Art India, Abhay Sardesai, said that many artists were trying either to overlocalize or to overglobalize themselves, depending on how one views it, exploiting common symbols of Indian culture so that the “local is flogged to create a spectacle for international consumption.”

Yet it is the local, of course, that makes Indian work interesting as it climbs into the firmament of high-profile contemporary art. There is an almost infinite sense of locality here, with 22 languages, a sprawling literature dating back 3,500 years and a caldron of Hindu and Muslim conflict and coexistence in the largest democracy on the planet.

Gayatri Sinha, a critic and curator in New Delhi, suggests that more than any other source of influence, it is the politics of the subcontinent that mold the context in which Indian art is created today. Mr. Husain, generally considered the country’s most distinguished painter, just spent his 92nd birthday in exile, forced out by threats from Hindu groups enraged by his paintings of nude gods and goddesses.

The filmmaker Amar Kanwar, who recently showed “The Lightning Testimonies,” his video installation about sexual violence to Indian women, at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, said that artists in India are “challenged ideologically every step of the way.”

“And yet this friction can be a source of great creativity,” he added.

“This is an extremely intolerant society, an extremely racist society,” he said in an interview at his office in a middle-class neighborhood in New Delhi. “You will run into censorship, but you can make a place to work here.”

“Indian artists are showing all over the world,” he said, “and each day they have to decide how they will confront their society and themselves. They will be critical, or they will just make work for the market.”

A note of defiance entered his voice, a note often heard in reply to questions on this issue: Why do Westerners assume that globalization only runs one way — from West to East?

The dealer Deepak Talwar, with galleries in New York and New Delhi, said: “The real history of modernism hasn’t been written yet. It is all about Europe and New York. But that’s hardly the whole of modernism. A hundred years from now, people will laugh at these narrow histories.”

But in the meantime, the Indian art world is writing the latest chapter of its history at a frenetic pace. One night, Atul Dodiya and his wife, Anju, two of the most prominent contemporary artists, surveyed the crowd at a closing party at Chemould Gallery in Mumbai, one of the longest-running and most respected spaces for new art since its meager beginnings in the 1970s. The gallery’s owners were bidding goodbye to their shoebox space of 800 square feet.

It was a moment of symbolic weight, the end of the old Indian art scene and the beginning of the new. Their polished new gallery, Chemould Prescott Road, is four times the size of the old.

“I have so many memories in this space,” Mr. Dodiya said. “It was almost a different world. We are happy for this boom, but I have to make art that means something to me, not just for the international market.

“The West may be with us, but India, India is very deep in the mind.”

Bollywood may soon be filming in RP--Arroyo (http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/breakingnews/breakingnews/view_article.php?article_id=92975)
By Michael Lim Ubac
Inquirer, Phillipines
Last updated 07:50pm (Mla time) 10/06/2007


NEW DELHI (Via PLDT)--Bollywood movies may soon be shot in the Philippines.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said Saturday that she has invited Indian filmmakers to consider the Philippines as an alternative site for producing Bollywood films during a meeting with Indian movie producers on Thursday in Mumbai.

Speaking before the Indian and Filipino business forum at the Oberoi Hotel here, the President said Bollywood movies would be produced in the Philippines within the year because of the country’s beautiful scenery and alternative location sites.

“When we explained this to 17 members of Bollywood ... they agreed to visit the Philippines before the end of the year to look for film locations. The leading producer, Aditya Raj Kapoor committed to make a movie in the Philippines within a year,” Arroyo said.

Tourism Secretary Ace Durano said Kapoor pledged to shoot a $10-million Indian movie in the Philippines.

Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based Hindi-language film industry in India. It is blending of the names Bombay (the former name of Mumbai) and Hollywood, the center of the American film industry.

The President said the Philippines offers fine locations, creative Filipino talents, post-production houses and studios, and other technical and logistics requirements for Bollywood, the largest film industry in the world which produces some 1,000 films each year.

In an earlier interview, Viva Films chief executive officer Vic del Rosario said the Philippines could take advantage of the huge market of India which has a population of some 1.1 billion, next only to China’s 1.3 billion people.

Del Rosario said the Philippines could develop and offer alternative production sites for foreign filmmakers in Subic and Clark such as the Fantasia Philippines.

Thomas Puig, chief executive officer of Compressor Films that was involved in the production of the top-grosser film “Pirates of the Caribbean,” added that his company was eyeing alternative production and location sites such as Fantasia’s giant water tank and the scenic islands and water areas in the country.

PGMA welcomes Indian investments in RP as she signs 9 bilateral agreements (http://www.pia.gov.ph/?m=12&fi=p071007.htm&no=03)
By Minerva BC Minerva
Philippine Information Agency, Philippines

Cebu, Philippines (7 October) -- President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo rolled out the red carpet for Indian investments in the country and moved for the integration of both countries' economies through the signing of nine (9) bilateral agreements.

In her recent visit to India accompanied by Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo, Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap, Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Favila, Tourism Secretary Joseph Durano and Press Secretary Ingnacio Bunye, the Philippine President encouraged Indian investors to come to the Philippines citing the country's investor-friendly policies and a highly-reliable, efficient and productive workforce.

President Arroyo specifically cited her determination to pursue a sustainable energy program that would lift the country from its dependency on imported fossil fuel and at the same time help minimize greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming.

She added that the country is serious pushing for the massive propagation of Jatropha that will be used as diesel substitute adding that the Jatropha seeds could be exported to India for processing.

Aside from energy investments, the President also invited Indian resort and hotel owners to come to the Central Philippines for tourism investments as she pointed out that the Philippines has a lot to offer to the tourists such as pristine white sand beaches and scenic spots.

She encouraged them to consider the country in their next business expansion and to take advantage of the increasing tourist arrivals in the Philippines. Among the India companies that the President invited to invest here were Praj Industries Ltd., hotel and resort operators and film producers.

"We invite tourist and tourism investors to come over. We invite Indian hotel chains, such as the Tata Group and the Oberoi Group to look at, and consider the Philippines as a destination for your next projects. Ecotourism has become extremely popular and a growth sector in the Philippine economy," she said.

She also regaled the Indian film makers with the beautiful and captivating location sites in the Philippines for making movies; the Filipinos' creative talents, post production houses and other technical and logistical requirements.

As one of the neighbors of India in the East Asian region, President Arroyo told the press that she is looking forward to the revival of cultural ties and enhancement of economic, political, trade and diplomatic integration between the Philippines and India. "We are happy to be here to move the integration of our economies forward."

The nine (9) bilateral agreements

In the same India visit, the President signed nine (9) bilateral agreements that aimed to fortify the economic, political, security and cultural relations between India and the Philippines and these agreements are:

The Framework of RP-India Bilateral Relations and Agreement to Establish the Joint Commission on Bilateral Cooperation are two agreements to identify priorities, set directions and lead RP-India relations to a new era in various areas of cooperation such as defense and security, health and medicine, trade and investments, energy, agriculture, tourism and culture.

The third agreement is the $150-million credit line from the Export and Import Bank of India. The President said that this loan hopes to finance transactions that will correct the lopsided nature of the country's trade in favor of India.

"With India now as one of the world's top economies with a new middle class of half a billion people, your internal market demand and domestic consumption can have a direct and positive impact on us in terms of job creation, balance of trade and investment," Arroyo told the Filipino-Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and India's Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the Oberoi Hotel.

The fourth bilateral agreement is the RP-India Joint Declaration for Cooperation to Combat International Terrorism.

This agreement will enhance defense cooperation between the two countries as President Arroyo noted that defense cooperation must be more intensive that would include the exchange of military personnel and students; joint military exercises in non-combatant activities such as disaster response, peacekeeping, and other humanitarian actions.

"Indeed, terrorism is an international blight. If we are to fight terrorism together, we must strengthen our defense cooperation," Arroyo said.

The other agreements are on health and medicine. The Philippines is spending massively on health care that includes importing medicines from India as part of the Arroyo administration's program to cut by 50% the price of medicines commonly bought by the poor.

The President signed the Memorandum of Agreement in the Field of Health and Medicine and an Agreement between the Philippine International Trading Corporation (PITC) for the purchase of $35-million worth of quality but affordable medicines from India.

Another important document is he Memorandum of Agreement on Enhanced Cooperation in the Field of Renewable Energy. The President told the Indian businessmen the country is developing its biofuels industry for "our energy independence, create jobs and keeps our nation clean for future generations."

She added that Praj Industries had informed her that they are ready to open their Philippine bio-ethanol plant soon and that the Philippines wants to explore joint ventures with Indian institutions to produce biofuel from sweet sorghum and Jatropha.

The President also said she has invited Indian corporations to participate in the privatization of the National Power Corporation (Napocor) and the National Transmission Corporation (Transco) as there were insinuations that Kapataru Power Transmission would join the bid for the December privatization of the national transmission grid.

The Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation between the Foreign Service Institutes of the Philippines and India as well as the Memorandum of Agreement on the Waiver of Visa Requirements for Holders of Diplomatic Passports and Official Passports will hopefully liberalize the government's policy towards Indian nationals. (PIA-Cebu) [top]

I think the Phillipines is the country most likely to be a threat to India's outsourcing industry, because of similar demographics and the fact that English is a second language there.

I think the Phillipines is the country most likely to be a threat to India's outsourcing industry, because of similar demographics and the fact that English is a second language there.
The size of the outsourcing pie is big enough for everyone to share. Also, India produces nearly 3million graduates a year against Phillipines 400000. So, there is no obvious threat. If only we can keep up with skilled labour supply, we can keep our outsourcing crown for many years to come. The obvious threat could only come from China which has a larger pool of human resource than us.

India: More opportunity than threat (http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1467941.html)
Some Minnesotans worry that India's growth might come at their expense. Yet business partnerships can benefit both our state and the Asian nation.

David Rosedahl
Minneapolis Star Tribune, MN
October 07, 2007

Mumbai is India's financial center, where commercial and investment banking activities are concentrated. It is a bustling city forecast to become the largest in the world. A constant stream of businesspeople fly into and out of the overtaxed airport. Hotels are full and securing reservations is a challenge.
In 2006, the Indian economy grew at an estimated 9 percent, compared with the United States' 3.4 percent growth in gross domestic product.

By offering high-quality, low-cost goods and services, such as outsourcing, Indian businesses can compete effectively in international markets. India's swelling capacity for human and technical resources lets its citizens' work grow at a hot pace.

Modern technology has played a key role in this expansion. While America sleeps, data from the previous day's transactions can be processed efficiently and less expensively for a company's next day of business. Transactions in many businesses can now be planned, executed and settled on a round-the-clock basis.

What does this mean for Minnesota business and trade? Does India present an opportunity or a threat?

In partnering with Indian companies, Minnesota firms can outsource noncore operations and expand by serving India's consumers and investors, selling goods and services produced in Minnesota. Gov. Tim Pawlenty's India trade mission this month aims to connect Minnesota business executives with promising partnerships.

Around the nation, U.S. multinational corporations have boosted overseas hiring at a faster pace than domestic employment -- for the second year in a row. Realistically, highly skilled services can be performed by educated, trained Indians who are pleased to work at compensation levels far below those demanded by Americans.

Minnesotans may perceive a threat to their economic and personal information security -- wondering whether these might lead to loss of jobs or security breaches of personal and business information.

Small businesses, in particular, may be hit hard hit as India scores contracts from Minnesota companies.

There is also a potential for the deterioration of consumer confidence when privacy and quality of service are considered. Do call centers in India provide better or worse service to Minnesotans?

Yet opportunity for growth in Minnesota and India abounds. Broad economic growth in India has caused the development of a true middle class, which exhibits more buying power than ever. Indians are increasingly interested in and willing to buy American products and services. The demand for financial services is a solid example.

Beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched a major consulting project to assist India in reforming its capital markets.

This effort carefully scrutinized India's securities trading and capital raising processes for ways to improve them.

Today, the effort has global implications. Recommendations for change and improvement have borne fruit for India's economy and increased investor confidence. Major changes in the investment markets already have occurred, with more to come.

Soon, India's workers will be able to invest in public companies through "private pension" schemes, comparable to our IRA and 401(k) retirement savings vehicles. India's domestic mutual fund business also is booming. In addition to workers' participation in the growth of India's companies and economy, their investments in international companies will grow.

For example, each citizen can invest up to $50,000 in foreign stocks. American financial services can help facilitate those investments, and our companies can benefit from new sources of capital.

Indian citizens are being encouraged to expand their businesses abroad, partnering with American companies and other attractive businesses around the world.

Minnesota-based companies benefit by expanding overseas, while Indians benefit from increased investing in Minnesota. Indian companies, growing stronger from more available investment capital and internal growth, are looking outward for business partners and opportunities.

Most recently, India's Essar Group announced an agreement to purchase Minnesota Steel. If successful, this investment will lead to the creation of thousands of jobs for Minnesota's Iron Range.

The laws of economics are hard to overcome. People will work to achieve changes that benefit their economies. Financial markets are driven by the steady flow of capital into areas where opportunities are greatest.

Minnesota businesses must continue seeking ways to compete aggressively in domestic and international markets, so that economic benefits can be achieved both at home and away.

Yahoo! looks to India for new internet ideas (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article2609731.ece)
Ashling O’Connor in Bangalore
The Times
October 8, 2007

Yahoo! is using India as a test-bed for new ideas in an effort to keep pace with innovation in the global online market.

The internet search engine group is also targeting fast-growing Asian economies for user and advertising sales growth in an effort to narrow the financial gap with Google.

The two-pronged approach comes as Yahoo! reassesses its strategy after a bruising encounter with investors over the summer. A disappointing share price and a feeling that its management was losing ground to Google forced the departure of Terry Semel as chief executive. He was succeeded by Jerry Yang, the company’s co-founder. In the subsequent soul-searching, Yahoo! has refocused on its core display advertising and search businesses.

David Filo, who co-founded Yahoo! with Mr Yang at Stanford University in 1994, said: “We all agree we were trying too many things before. We are taking a fresh look, questioning everything. It’s good to step back after 13 years and see where we want to go in the next ten.”

Part of that process involves a rethink on creativity and talent retention, two areas in which Yahoo! has lagged behind its rivals - which is why Mr Filo, the interim chief technology officer after the loss of Farzad Nazem this year, was in Bangalore at the weekend to oversee Yahoo!’s first “open hack day” in Asia.

The forum for third-party software developers to play around with Yahoo! applications reflects the California-based company’s willingness to learn from external sources.

“We do not have a corner on great ideas around the internet, so we are going out there to find interesting things happening,” Mr Filo said. “We can take a good idea and scale it up through our user network.”

Yahoo! claims about 500 million users worldwide, but nearly two thirds of its revenue comes from America. India represents a growth opportunity. With a population of 1.1 billion, it has just 40 million internet users, most of whom access it through cybercafés, but the number is rising quickly, particularly through mobile phones, Yahoo! says that it has 24 million active users in India, its largest operation outside America.

Burgeoning Indian companies go for growth (http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/burgeoning-indian-companies-go-for-growth/2007/10/05/1191091362628.html)
Heather Timmons in New Delhi
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
October 6, 2007

SKYROCKETING stockmarkets and a surging rupee are creating publicly traded behemoths in India. These new giants have swiftly overtaken some long-established Western competitors in terms of market value. Their lightning-fast growth may usher in a new round of foreign partnerships, overseas takeovers and competition for resources and talent.

Fuelled in part by overseas investors seeking refuge from the United States' subprime mortgage mess, share prices in India's markets have outpaced other Asian markets in recent weeks. The Bombay Stock Exchange's Sensex index set records on 10 of 11 days to Thursday, when it closed slightly lower at 17,777.14.

The Sensex is up 14.6 per cent since September 17. That follows months of somewhat slower gains - the index is up 28.9 per cent this year, according to Bloomberg Data, and up 102 per cent over the past 24 months.

"All of a sudden, India has these world-beating serious-market-cap companies across multiple sectors," said Brooks Entwistle, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs in India. The global ambitions of the companies "continue to grow". The real estate company DLF, for example, which had a $US2.3 billion ($2.6 billion) initial public offering in July, now has market capital of more than $US37 billion - making it roughly the size of Marriott International and Hilton Hotels combined. On Thursday, the company said it would consider overseas acquisitions and offshore fund-raising at its next board meeting.

Reliance Industries, the largest publicly traded company in India, reached a market capitalisation of more than $US85 billion this week, up from $US6.5 billion in January 2003. Reliance, an oil, chemical and manufacturing company, is now about double the size of Dow Chemical. The market cap of Bharti Airtel, a telecommunications giant, reached almost $US46 billion this week.

A strong rupee and weak dollar are also helping Indian companies look large compared with their overseas counterparts - but their bulk is still predominantly a result of investors' faith in India's long-term growth.

A large increase in market capitalisation does not necessarily mean the companies will go shopping for deals. Many Indian companies trade only on local exchanges, which means that the stock is not a viable currency for buying a foreign company. Even if they do plan to raise money overseas, few have huge trophy deals on their mind, bankers say.

Indian companies are investing at home first, then looking abroad, said Chanda Kochhar, the deputy managing director at India's largest bank, ICICI. "The Indian corporate sector is talking of investing $US500 billion in domestic projects in the country over the next three years," he said.

Acquisitions are also being planned - but not necessarily to acquire customers or clients, as they would be in developed economies, Mr Kochhar said. Instead, companies are looking at buying suppliers (for example, a power producer would acquire coal mines) or distribution networks. Dozens of such deals were in the works, he said.

A large public market capitalisation also makes Indian companies even stronger global competitors for everything from raw materials and talent to partnerships and clients. It attracts coverage from research analysts at international banks and brokerage firms, which in turn attracts more foreign investors.

In fact, a growing market capitalisation can sometimes make it easier for companies to get even bigger. Indian companies that tried to raise small amounts of capital, say $US10 million, on the equity markets in the past were passed over by most big foreign institutional investors, said Shriram Iyer, the head of research at Edelweiss Securities in Mumbai. Now that they have grown, and want to raise $US50 million or $US100 million, "it becomes a meaningful investment".

So far this year, Indian companies have issued $US42.6 billion in debt and equity worldwide, according to Thomson Financial, up from $US32 billion in 2006. In 2003, the amount was $US5.8 billion.

Chinese companies also jumped in market value as investors bought stock. But that growth has not translated into a boom in deals, in part, bankers say, because of foreign opposition to takeovers by state-run Chinese companies.

Indian companies can use a high share price in several ways, from making all-share acquisitions of cheaper-valued companies, to raising cash by stripping assets, to recruiting employees using shares as compensation, said Nilesh Jasani, an India strategist for Credit Suisse in Mumbai.

Indian companies may be smart to start translating their high public market values into other forms of collateral. There are constant concerns that Indian markets are overblown - even within the Indian Government. The Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, warned this week that retail investors should use caution if entering the market, and do their homework or buy mutual funds instead.

Raising funds in the current credit cycle is not a cakewalk, no matter how well the markets are performing.

"Indian companies and their global ambitions are not immune to what is going on in the credit markets globally," Mr Entwistle said. They often relied on overseas financing to do deals, he said, and that needed to be taken into account before predicting any big takeovers.

Still, the mood in India is bullish. "There aren't too many large acquisitions you can make within India, because there are no willing sellers," Mr Iyer said. Instead, "everyone wants to grow".

India's success will help halve world poverty (http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14539075)

Monday, 08 October , 2007, 08:41

Geneva: Spectacular poverty-cutting gains made by India will help the United Nations meet its goal of halving world poverty by 2015, a renowned Singaporean public policy specialist has told the World Trade Organization (WTO).

But at the same time, the United States and the European Union must match the pace of trade liberalisation that India and China have unleashed rather than fear competition from them, Prof Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said.

"We will probably reduce the number of people living on less than a dollar a day from 1.25 billion to just over 600 million by 2015," Mahbubani told the opening of the WTO Public Forum Wednesday.

"This would be a spectacular achievement and enhance significantly human happiness all round the world," he added.

The main reason for meeting the goal would be the gains made by India and China over the past few decades, Mahbubani told a distinguished audience of policymakers, diplomats, academics and civil society groups gathered for the annual event.

In 30 years, the number of poor people in China has gone down from 600 million to 200 million. India started its economic liberalisation later. Hence the number in India has gone down from 323 million to 260 million.

"The success of China and India, the world's two most populous countries, in reducing global poverty explains why we will meet the UN Development Goals by 2015."

Mahbubani, former Singaporean Ambassador to the UN and a fervent advocate of economic liberalisation, said the reason why India and China are succeeding is that "they have bought into and are implementing the essential WTO vision that both they and the world will be better off by opening and liberalising their economies, especially in the field of trade."

The world was better off because the global trade had exploded from seven per cent of the world Gross Domestic Product in 1940 to 30 per cent in 2005, and total global exports had ballooned from $58 billion in 1948 to $9 trillion in 2004, he said.

But Mahbubani warned that the US and Europe were now in the process of withdrawing their traditional support for free trade - a move that could spoil global economic gains spurred by India and China.

"The great tragedy that the world could face today is that just when we have figured out how to eradicate global poverty and make the world a better place, the traditional champions of trade liberalisation - the EU and the US - are beginning to lose heart."

"Both the EU and the US are making a massive U-turn away from trade liberalisation while simultaneously pretending that they are not."

This about-turn, he added, explains why the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations - aimed at harnessing trade to benefit the developing world - is struggling.

Mahbubani's comments come amid considerable uncertainty over the future of the Doha negotiations - so called because it was launched in the Qatari capital - primarily due to the high subsidies paid out by the US and EU to their agricultural sector.

Developing countries such as India and China argue that these subsidies run against the WTO's belief in free trade because they skew global markets with their low prices and therefore risk making poor farmers in developing countries even poorer.

"I am amazed by the new trend of pessimism sweeping across America and Europe. More and more of their citizens believe that they cannot compete with China and India. Hence, instead of reducing trade barriers, they have begun to quietly increase them. If this trend gathers pace, it would be fatal - both for the developed countries and the world at large," Mahbubani said.

The Singaporean expert's optimism about China and India's role was shared by others among the 1700 experts gathered at the two-day WTO forum - an annual event where specialists thrash out urgent issues of international trade. But some warned that there were danger signals that should be heeded by both countries.

"While it is true that the number of poor in India and China has come down, there has also been a massive rise in economic inequality," said Amy Barry, head of media at Oxfam, an international nongovernment organisation.

"We must also remember that both China and India implemented economic and trade reforms at their own terms, at the time of their own choosing. We cannot cut poverty by forcing liberalisation down the throats of countries, as is happening in parts of Africa," she added.

Speed zone: India’s firing on all cylinders (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Investors_Guide/Speed_zone_Indias_firing_on_all_cylinders/articleshow/2437656.cms)

As I write this article, the Sensex would have probably reached another milestone of 18000 from the time it started its journey in 1979, thereby giving a compounded annual return (CAR) of around 16%. Very few investors must be running this endless marathon from the beginning, while others would have joined the race at different entry points on this Indian superhighway.

India is beginning to build its economic superhighway on sound infrastructure at a much faster pace and at a much larger scale. Hence, the ride hereafter can be smooth if it is maintained and overhauled from time to time.

The beginning of the 21st century saw India being recognised as a global IT outsourcing hub. International investors started considering India as a global socio-economic power driven by its young demographic profile, with higher disposable incomes offering a big domestic market for products and services. During the same phase, the decadal gross domestic product (GDP) grew from a meagre 4% to the current 8% and the stock market indices reflected this change.

The financial market in India has also metamorphosed into a more mature, well-regulated sector of the economy. The acceptance of derivatives products is evident in the huge volumes seen in this segment. Our market has emerged as one of the largest stock options and futures markets in the world. This reflects the maturity level and understanding of various market players.

On the one hand, retail volumes are surging and on the other hand, institutional participation through mutual funds, insurance companies and foreign institutional investors (FIIs) is increasing. This augurs well for investors as a class since there’s no domination by any single class of market participants.

With raising of capital no longer being an issue, and the government acting as a catalyst for investment and more visibility of demand for goods and services, the corporate growth story across sectors is set to unfold over the next few decades against the backdrop of double-digit GDP growth. Globalisation will also have an impact on corporate competitiveness, which will open up other geographies for Indian products and services.

Great collection of articles and effort bro! Keep up the good work!

yep, I'm with that.
good on yer.

Indian Professionals Return Home as Economy Booms (http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-10-08-voa8.cfm)
By Anjana Pasricha, New Delhi
Voice of America, United States
08 October 2007

Tens of thousands of highly qualified Indian professionals migrated to Western countries in recent decades for better job opportunities. But as India's economy booms, a lot of them are now opting to return to their homeland. Anjana Pasricha has a report from New Delhi.

Software engineer Sandeep Kaimal went to the United States a decade ago. He was, in his words, part of the "bandwagon" - the thousands of engineers, doctors and other professionals attracted to Western countries by better jobs, more money and higher living standards.

Life in the U.S. was a new experience for Kaimal.

"Before I moved out of India, I did not know what to do with the ATM card or what to do with the credit card, and when I moved in there everything was new…a totally new learning experience from day one…," Kaimal said.

In the U.S., he achieved the American dream - a good salary in a top company, a nice suburban home. He became accustomed to Western amenities like a centrally heated home and the best consumer electronics - and he shopped for brands he had never seen in India.

But during his annual visits home, Kaimal noticed that India was undergoing a dramatic transformation, triggered by the economic liberalization implemented in the 1990's.

"Every time I came I could see there were changes happening…Things that I had only seen in U.S., I started seeing them here: big malls, a lot of items which you could not get here before, it was readily available. India was opening up," Kaimal said.

Three years ago, the new face of India prompted Kaimal to take up the offer of a lucrative job with an information technology company in Chennai, his hometown.

It was not just the promise of a lifestyle similar to what he had in the U.S. that lured him back home. He also wanted to spend more time with his aging parents, and to expose his four-year-old son to Indian culture.

Kaimal is not an isolated case. He is among an estimated 60 thousand IT professionals who have returned to India in recent years, mainly from the U.S. and Great Britain.

IT professionals make up the bulk of these reverse migrants, because they are finding easy opportunities in the country's thriving technology industry. But other professionals, such as doctors, have also started moving back home. They are relocating to cities such as Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi.

Noticing that the tide is turning homeward, a recruitment Web site organized a job fair in the eastern U.S. state of New Jersey last month to recruit Indians for jobs in India. The site's head, Michael Bala, says the response was overwhelming.

He says three thousand people between the ages of 25 and 40 turned up to inquire about potential jobs back home. He says most came because they realized that opportunities had blossomed since they left.

"Most important reasons to top it all is India - the economic growth and India itself, and companies offering jobs which is equal or more than what is there in America itself…. It might not be equivalent to the dollar rate but the lifestyle they would be able to lead would be equivalent," Bala said.

Bala is already planning his second job fair for Indians in the United States, this time on the West Coast.

Economists say the returnees are helping to add value to an expanding Indian economy that is rapidly integrating with the rest of the world.

Economist P.K. Chowdhury of the Indian credit rating agency ICRA says their experience in the West will benefit Indian industry.

"They are…ultimately creating some kind of contact between the two countries, USA or Europe and Indian service sector, so it is having positive outcome, and it will help India in the long term. I think the persons who are coming, they are bringing with them lot of knowledge, technology," Chowdhury said.

It is not as if everything in India is attractive to those opting to come back. As in China, success is creating its own problems.
The traffic is more chaotic since they left, and the noise and pollution in the teeming cities is increasing. Some worry about the impact of India's competitive school system on their children.

But in the end, for many, it came down to a decision as to who they were. The West was like living in a well-organized guesthouse. India is home.

India's Youth Set Sights Beyond Call Centers (http://www.forbes.com/markets/commodities/2007/10/08/employment-preferences-india-markets-econ-cx_rd_1008markets03.html)
Ruth David,
FORBES, NY
10.08.07, 6:36 AM ET

As India’s economy booms, its young workers are no longer so keen on trying to soothe the irate customers of the global companies that outsource their call center jobs in the country. Industries like aviation and retail are among the new favorites for job seekers, says a study.

The business process outsourcing sector, which now has attrition rates ranging from 25% to 30%, could see that number climb to 30% to 40% over the next two years, says the study on urban youths’ emerging career choices, conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Call center jobs, which have limited job security and entail working odd hours and in shifts, are losing their sheen as new sectors like hospitality, aviation and retail gain popularity. These three sectors are also seeing workforce shortages of between 25% and 30%, creating ample opportunities.

Outsourcing centers are also cutting back on operating costs amid stiff competition and the appreciation of the rupee, which eats into the cost rationale for sending jobs to India. The Indian currency has appreciated over 11% against the dollar since the start of 2007.

A majority of 12th-grade graduates, whose predecessors made a beeline for jobs in BPOs and call centers, “are now curious to join other leisure[-related] yet attractive areas of animation, journalism, designing (apparel, jewelry) and entertainment, besides aviation, hospitality and retail,” said chambers of commerce President Venugopal Dhoot, who ranks No. 26 on the most recent Forbes India rich list.

Aviation, expanding at a rate of 30% annually, is expected to create more than 200,000 jobs by 2012, as airlines like Jet Airways and Kingfisher add to their fleet. The industry will add 140 airliners to the current fleet of 270 airliners as it copes with high growth, especially in domestic travel.

Hotel management courses are also gaining popularity as new projects spring up over the country. To meet demand for hotel rooms for the 2010 Commonwealth Games that will be held in New Delhi, 34 new hotels are coming up in the “national capital region” in and around the city. The survey estimates that more than 95,000 trained personnel will be required by the hotel industry over the next five years.

India’s retail revolution is likely to generate 200,000 jobs by 2012, of which 40% will be captured by young people in the cities. The retail market, estimated at about $350 billion, currently consists overwhelmingly of mom-and-pop stores. But large companies like Reliance Industries and global giants like Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) are making inroads into the sector. Ground is expected to be broken for around 250 malls over the next few years.

In a country where more than 50% of the population is under 25 years of age, there’s a large English-speaking workforce. But as development proceeds apace and the economy grows at rates in excess of 9% annually, problems like the lack of industry-specific training and intense competition for talent that induces frequent job hopping are making the going tough for employers across the spectrum of services.

It's whoopee for the rupee (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/3/story.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10468672&pnum=0)
By Paran Balakrishnan
New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
Tuesday October 09, 2007

Is Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani about to become the world's richest man? The calculators are coming out as India's stock market soars to stratospheric levels. Ambani, the chairman of petrochemicals-to-oil conglomerate Reliance Industries, was reckoned to be worth $48 billion and climbing just a few days ago. In the global wealth stakes that puts him in fourth spot just behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Or consider property tycoon K. P. Singh who, exceeding the wildest dreams of any king in his counting house, became $5 billion richer in one single day of furious stock market action. Singh's company DLF listed in July and has almost doubled in value since then. The property tycoon, who owns huge swathes of land on the outskirts of the Indian capital, New Delhi, is now reckoned to be worth about $33 billion.

What would Alan Greenspan have said if he had happened to stop by in India last week? Yep. You guessed right. The legendary chief of the US Federal Reserve would have unequivocally pronounced that the Indian stock market was suffering from a serious case of irrational exuberance.

In three hectic, vertigo-inducing weeks the benchmark Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index or Sensex has soared by 2154 points (about 14 per cent). On Friday the market was at 17,773 after a winning streak that had brokers and analysts breathless with amazement. There's an element of a bubble which has built up because of a liquidity surge, says Abheek Barua, chief economist, HDFC Bank.

The trigger, just like everywhere else in the world, was the US rate cut on September 18 that has sent a veritable tsunami of money flooding into emerging markets. In India the effect was felt instantaneously with a tidal wave of $4.2 billion coming into the country in nine days. As the cash gushed in, the market climbed from 16,000 to 17,000 in five trading sessions.

Even at these heights there's still a lot of irrational exuberance out there. Take Credit Lyonnais which has just offered the uber-bullish prediction that the Indian economy is going great guns and that the Sensex could be at 40,000 by 2010. Others also see the market climbing higher but not at such a rapid pace. This market could be at 25,000 to 30,000 in the next five years. It could even reach there quicker, says Deepak Lalwani, director, Astaire & Partners, a London-based brokerage.

Despite the steep climb, most players reckon that the downside looks limited. The market is expected to take a break in the near future but it won't fall very far. Valuations are becoming stretched but I do not see a slowdown in the economy, says Lalwani, who sees support for the market at 14,000.

Why is the foreign money heading to India? There's a combination of factors pushing the cash tsunami. First, there's the muscular rupee that has climbed to a nine-year high against the beleaguered dollar. The rupee is defying central bank efforts to keep it down.

For the foreign market players the strong rupee adds to profits when they convert it back into ever-weakening dollars. Says Barua: There's a sense that the upward trend on the currency will continue. That itself is encouraging investors.

If that's not enough, there's also the safe haven factor that's bringing the dollars into India. The foreign buyers reckon that India remains a relatively closed economy. They say its export numbers are piffling and that the economy is driven by domestic factors. So India, according to the theory, should be relatively unaffected if the sub-prime crisis takes a heavy toll elsewhere in the world.

All this wasn't supposed to be happening this year. In five booming years, the Indian market has risen by 500 per cent and back in January most foreign institutions reckoned that the India Story would need time to catch its breath. So many figured that it was time to pull money out and go underweight on the country. But the market has caught everyone by surprise and brought the foreign money back in a hurry.

Nevertheless, investors now are betting on different horses. Five years ago everyone was snapping up software stocks like Infosys and Wipro, which have been growing in leaps and bounds. Now the software stocks have been hit by the rising rupee and have fallen out of favour with stock market players.

Instead the buying tempo has changed and everyone's looking at infrastructure and real estate stocks. Evidence of that came recently when the Government-run Power Grid Corp listed for the first time and rose 94 per cent on the first day. Says Lalwani: India lacks capacity. Anything that adds to capacity is worth looking at.

What are the negative factors that could come into play and bring the India Story to a grinding halt or at least slow it down temporarily? Well, for a start there's the Congress-led coalition government which is ambling towards the precipice.

The Government is determined to push ahead with a path-breaking nuclear deal with the US. But it's facing stiff opposition from the communists who lend support to the Government and who are determined to stop any deal with the US.

Any change of Government could take the fizz out of the economy.

One caution comes from an unusual corner. Back in 2002, stock market player Rakesh Jhunjhunwala was almost laughed out of court when he offered the startling prediction that the Indian stock market would rise to 25,000 in a few years. Now he reckons that the markets could rise a bit further to 18,000 or 19,000. But that will be followed by a huge correction.

And where was Jhunjhunwala as the action reached fever pitch last week? On vacation at a health farm and he didn't sound like he was in a hurry to get back.

India media biz focusing on producing content (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/television/news/e3i450ef4cf79b6d94b81ac3ee954929fad)
By Scott Roxborough
Hollywood Reporter, United States
Oct 9, 2007

CANNES -- Bolstered by a soaring economy and bursting with creative confidence, India's media industry wants to seize control of its destiny by moving from a service provider and market for Western productions to a producer and exporter of media content.

At a MIPCOM panel Monday titled "Indian Content on the Move," some of the subcontinent's leading executives briefly sketched India's eye-popping media boom before calling for more homemade productions.

Although Bollywood is a massive producer and exporter of feature films, India lags behind many Western territories when it comes to other forms of production, be it TV drama, video games or mobile applications.

But things are changing fast.

Tapaas Chakravarti, head of animation giant DQ Entertainment, this year became the first Indian producer to win an Emmy when the Egyptian-themed cartoon "Tutenstein," a co-production with PorchLight Entertainment for Discovery Kids, won a Daytime award for outstanding special class animation series.

"We are not just a service provider anymore; now we are looking for (real) partnerships," he said, adding that India media companies can now bring in "hard cash" as well as production expertise, particularly in the area of animation.

Soundarya Rajinikanth, managing director of Ocher Studios and daughter of Bollywood action star Rajinikanth, gave a glimpse of where India animation is going with a trailer for her upcoming feature film "Sultan the Warrior." A fantasy epic that features an animated version of her dad, "Sultan" is India's first-ever 3-D animation feature. Rajinikanth said she hoped the film would set new benchmarks for what Indian content can be.

But to listen to other members of the panel, the real future of India programming could be mobile. With 200 million mobile phone users and a growth rate of 8 million-10 million users a month, India quickly is becoming a major market for all forms of mobile content.

Vishal Gondal, head of video game publisher Indiagames, dismissed television as "boring" for the 54% of Indians under 25. "But games rock," he said, citing figures that Indians pay for half a million mobile downloads every day, the bulk of them games.

Gondal also believes that the major game producers slowly are catching on to the fact that India can be a hub for the international distribution of mobile properties.

"We have the exclusive worldwide mobile rights for NBC's 'The Office' and handle properties like 'Spider Man' in some 80 countries," he said.

Anurradha Prasad, whose BAG Films & Media produce content for India's leading channels ZEE, Sony Entertainment and Star TV, summed up the industry's newfound confidence and ambition.

"Today, anyone who wants to do business with India can't view India content in a limited sense but see it in a 360-degree context," she said. "... India is becoming the lab, the research lab (and) recasting the image we present to the world."

Ambani set to join world’s richest (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/44452fd6-75cc-11dc-b7cb-0000779fd2ac.html)
By Joe Leahy in Mumbai
Financial Times, UK
October 8 2007 19:51

India’s stock market boom has catapulted the country’s biggest industrialist Mukesh Ambani within reach of becoming the richest Indian and one of the world’s 10 wealthiest people.

In a vivid illustration of India’s economic rise, Mr Ambani’s personal wealth has doubled to about $44bn (€31bn, £26bn) in the past year thanks to a more than 100 per cent increase in the share price of Reliance Industries, his flagship oil and retailing group.

The only businessman of Indian origin richer than Mr Ambani is Lakshmi N. Mittal, the London-based Indian whose 44.8 per cent stake in his steel company, Arcelor Mittal, is worth about $48bn alone.

The 50-year-old Mr Ambani took over the petroleum refining and textile arms of the family business empire after a high-profile feud with his brother, Anil, over control of the conglomerate built from scratch by his late father Dhirubhai.

He drew headlines earlier this year because of a controversial plan to build an extravagant family home due to rise as high as a 60-storey office building over the site of a former Mumbai orphanage.

The billions of dollars of cash generated by his giant refinery in north-western India, which will be the world’s largest such complex once a second phase of the project is completed, has helped make him India’s most powerful businessman.

But the bull-run taken by Indian stocks over the past few years on the back of increasing investor interest in emerging markets and an economy growing by more than 9 per cent annually, has turned him into one of the world’s richest men.

In the past 12 months, the Benchmark Sensex index has risen nearly 50 per cent, pushing the country’s market capitalisation to well over $1,000bn.

The Indian market’s rise has only been helped by the credit squeeze elsewhere as foreign investors continue to see Indian blue chips such as Reliance as attractive due to the economy’s continuing growth. “If other markets start to look problematic, India benefits. It is seen as a safe haven because of its secular growth story,” said Vijai Mantri, chief executive officer of DWS Investments, part of Deutsche Asset Management.

Shares in Reliance Industries have risen at double the rate of the broader market. Together with the strengthening of the rupee against the dollar, this has increased the value of Mr Ambani’s 47 per cent beneficial stake in the company to about $41bn, based on company estimates of his holdings. His other investments are worth about $3bn.

This year’s Forbes list of billionaires ranked him 14th with $20.1bn. Based on the latest moves, he would now be ranked about number five, although many of the others’ wealth has also risen.

Anil Ambani has seen his paper wealth rise to $33bn from the $18.2bn reported by Forbes. The share price of his company, mobile phone provider Reliance Communications, has increased about 80 per cent in the past year.

Other Indians who have benefited from the boom include KP Singh, who this year listed DLF Group, India’s largest property company, and who is thought to be worth nearly $30bn.

Firing Up India's Factories

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2007/gb2007104_657544.htm

India Clusters Growth

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2007/gb2007109_676107.htm

Kuwait short of skilled workers (http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MzY1MzcyMzE3)
By Rania El Gamal, Staff Writer
Kuwait Times, Kuwait
Published Date: October 10, 2007

KUWAIT: Kuwait is at a crossroads. Booming businesses and expanding industrial projects in Kuwait are affected by shortages of skilled personnel. The increasing market demand for experienced staff is exceeding the supply of talented skilled labor. Rising inflation, low salaries, restrictions on work visas and no opportunities for career advancement are some of the reasons discouraging skilled expats from working in Kuwait. Though expatriates make about 67.9 percent of Kuwait's total population and 83.1 percent of the total labor force, thousands of the 2.16 million expats living in the country are menial workers.

According to a study conducted by GulfTalent.com, a leading online recruitment portal, several executives complained that while market demand in the Gulf was extremely healthy, shortages in skills were limiting their companies' abilities to grow, forcing them to turn down new businesses or in some cases causing them to miss targets on their existing projects. The study warned that if continued, this could limit overall growth in the non-oil sector of the economy, hampering the region's plans to diversify away from oil.

Human resources experts and business executives agree that Kuwait is facing a shortage of skilled laborers. "There is a huge demand for skilled people in every industry and every field in Kuwait," said Rakhi Tara, a recruitment consultant at S.O.S. Recruitment Consultants, Kuwait. Sectors such as banking, real estate, trade and commerce, IT (Information Technology), and retail and fashion undergo a lack of skilled laborers. Job positions such as sales and business development executives and engineers are among the highly demanded positions in the country. "Overall shortages are more in sales positions. You don't have really good people in the sales and it is very difficult to get them. Staff for the banking sector are not easily available either," she said. "In the real estate sector, there are too many properties being built but no good staff who can actually sell those properties or put them on lease," said Tara.

Business executives in the motor trade also complain about the lack of skilled workers. "The problem is that everybody is expanding their operations in Kuwait and everyone needs skilled laborers," said a service manager in a Kuwaiti-based motor trade company. "Salaries for skilled mechanics in Dubai and Qatar are very high compared to Kuwait though the cost of living in those countries are also high, but we can't match their salaries here in Kuwait," he added. Being inexperienced in high-end luxury cars is another problem facing motor trade companies. "About 50 percent of the staff we employ through recruitment agencies from India or the Philippines, are usually not experienced in high-tech cars so we have to spend time training them," he said.

Kuwait is not an attraction for the ambitious career-oriented workers. "People from Dubai don't come to Kuwait. Earlier there were some people who understood the saving potential in Kuwait, but not now. The atmosphere and culture in the UAE is different than in Kuwait," said Tara. "Sometimes people feel that Kuwait is not the market where they can actually grow. Most of the multinational companies and airlines' headquarters are based in Dubai; all businesses are there. And even the big investment companies are moving out of Kuwait because of the problems they are facing here; (companies) feel that they can't grow here," she explained.

The unfriendly business environment, restrictions on work visas and low salaries in Kuwait are some of the reasons that deter many from coming to work in Kuwait, although the country's potential is still attractive for other nationalities. "Kuwait is growing...With the market growing, there is a strong requirement for very good bilinguals; fluency in Arabic and English is needed," said Tara. "Most of the clients prefer Lebanese, Jordanians, mainly Arabs because of the language. But companies also understand that they need to have diversified nationalities," she added. Lebanon and Egypt are the main Arab countries who 'export' their skilled nationals to Kuwait. "Lebanon is one of the (recruiting) countries recently because of the war. Egypt is now also growing with a lot of call centers and IT companies (coming up)," she noted.

Though traditionally Asian nationals like Indians are the first choice to fill in executive positions in certain sectors such as IT and banking, many Indian nationals will not move to Kuwait because the Indian economy is booming and they would make more money back home. "In the banking sector, people from India don't want to move. The sector is already so growing there (in India) and the salaries are lower here (in Kuwait)," said Tara. "IT is almost the only market which looks for Indians. Other sectors don't look at Asians at all...(However) the salary packages back in India are much better than here in Kuwait. It's very difficult to get Indians on board here because they know what they want; they realize that the market they are coming from has much more potential than the market they would be coming in," she added.

According to Tara, though Kuwait's economy is growing, many companies choose not to go through professional HR companies and rather depend on recommendations of family members and friends.

A lot of companies don't go through recruitment companies but would go through references and get (their employees)," she said. "It's cheaper that way (for companies) but they don't realize the actual caliber and abilities of the staff. Companies should understand that employees shouldn't be coming through references (only) but through education and the experience they have," she concluded.

New Boyden Report Explores How India’s Executives Are Changing the World’s Economic Axis (http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071009005496&newsLang=en)
Business Wire (press release), CA
October 09, 2007

--Top Global Executive Search Firm Details How Multinationals and Entrepreneurs Can Harness India’s Executive Talent in Global Tug of War--

MUMBAI, India--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A new series of quarterly reports by leading global executive search firm Boyden makes its debut today in India. The Boyden Report – The Sun Rises on the Indian Executive provides a detailed analysis into how executive talent in India has transformed the country from an outsource economy to a major global competitor.

“The appeal of the Indian executive has moved to a higher level and it’s no longer just about cost advantage,” said Chris Clarke, President and CEO of Boyden World Corporation. “Their education, business acumen and the rise in the quality of Indian management are impressive. Today multinationals seeking to recruit Indian executives face a new challenge in that it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will leap at an offer outside India.”

The Boyden Report focuses on talent issues in emerging markets, and it examines four groups of Indian executives and non-resident Indians driving indigenous and global growth:

1. The First Generation Entrepreneur

The first generation entrepreneur typically starts from a strong family and a solid education. They represent some of the best “home grown” executive talent having developed their skills in India rather than by studying abroad. The rise of graduates from Indian business schools such as the Indian Institute of Technology and the Institutes of Management have swelled the ranks of entrepreneurs.

2. The Family Entrepreneur

The second group encompasses those that have inherited a company. In India, where in the days before privatization, many major firms were state-owned but family-run, many successful executives grew up watching family members at work. Now, inherited private businesses benefit from a new generation of executives from these family-owned businesses.

3. The ‘Corporate Crossover’

The third group of Indian entrepreneurs is the “corporate crossovers.” Typically, these entrepreneurs worked outside mainstream corporate India until recently. Many gained an MBA or other post-graduate qualifications from prominent international business schools and worked for multinationals in the UK or U.S. Now they are returning to India with invaluable international experience as well as an ability to help non-Indian businesses to navigate the complex Indian business environment.

4. The Intrapreneur

The fourth group comprises the Indian intrapreneurs. Individually they achieve what many US and European firms wish to develop in their own executives - an ability to take advantage of commercial opportunities as an entrepreneur would, but to leverage the resources of an established firm at the same time.

“The skill of the intrapreneur is their ability to tease out an entrepreneurial streak across the workforce, gather it into a collective vision and master-mind a confluence of opportunity and ability,” said Dinesh Mirchandani, Boyden’s Regional Managing Director Asia/Pacific.

“What Indian entrepreneurs are particularly good at is implementation through people,” said Suren Dutia, CEO of the Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), which operates in 47 cities in 11 countries and is linked to an estimated $200 billion in economic development. “Not only do they have the vision, industry knowledge and drive, but they also know how to make things happen through personal motivation from one individual to another.”

The Boyden View

The Boyden Report offers advice in attracting and retaining executives. Highlights from the India report include:

Hiring and Retention for Multinationals Inside India:


Remuneration salary levels may be lower, but today packages including bonus and equity need to be on par with international standards.

Entrepreneurs who have chosen to go back into the arena of big corporations may have a great deal to contribute and may flourish with support of a large company.

Career progression and a sense of being valued are essential to personal pride.

Top candidates may be looking at a number of opportunities at one time. Companies should move quickly and decisively once an offer is made to involve the candidate in the company as soon as possible.


Hiring and Retention for Multinationals Outside India:


Opportunities at home are always going to be attractive.

Building a repatriation option can serve as retention incentive for a specific number of years, open to negotiation.

Career development needs to be a prime focus to attract and retain NRIs.


Hiring and Retention for the Entrepreneurial Enterprise:


The hiring process needs to take place in a variety of settings so that a full range of characteristics can be assessed.

The “bargain of trust” is critical. It’s imperative for companies to ensure candidates that they won’t just be used for their contacts.

Candidates will want particular assurance that their careers will develop and that the company’s intellectual property and other critical business issues will not come under threat.


“The future for India is truly exciting,” says Boyden’s Chris Clarke. “But those inside and outside India will only share in India’s success if they understand and nurture the talent that lies at the heart of India’s growth phenomenon, which includes a new generation of business executives, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and pioneers.”

South Africa: Didiza Punts Indian Model for New Jobs (http://allafrica.com/stories/200710090371.html)
David Christianson, Johannesburg
Business Day (Johannesburg)
9 October 2007

SA IS considering a revolutionary Indian employment model to consolidate SA's Extended Public Works Programme, says Public Works Minister Thoka Didiza.

The model, pioneered in Maharashtra state, which includes the city of Mumbai, guarantees at least 100 days of work a year to every poor rural household.

Speaking yesterday at the 12th International Labour Organisation regional seminar for labour-based practices, Didiza called the local Extended Public Works Programme a "success story".

Launched in July 2004, it was "an important second economy initiative" intended to create a million jobs over five years. It uses government spending -- mostly on infrastructure programmes and environmental schemes such as Work for Water -- to create work opportunities and training.

At the end of the programme's third year, in July, it had generated 661000 work opportunities. According to public works department officials Bongani Gxilishe and Maikel Lieuw-Kie-Song, the programme has reached 7% of SA's unemployed.

The biggest beneficiary group were those with "some secondary or high school education" (41,4%), followed by high school graduates (30,5%). The average wage per participant was R2225.

While saying the programme was successful and "largely being implemented as planned", the officials did pinpoint "some challenges" and argued that the programme could have more impact.

Municipalities in particular had "not performed as planned and are behind target". Provinces, however, were "collectively exceeding their targets".

Didiza said the government's commitment to the programme was demonstrated by budget allocations that prescribed the objectives of labour intensity and skills development as central to the delivery of infrastructure and social and economic services. She said this year's programme budget of R15b n had been increased by R3b n - allocated to the provinces for labour-intensive construction and maintenance of access roads.

Didiza pointed out that "the physical infrastructure challenge in SA offered considerable opportunities" for labour-intensive programmes.

"We need to invest more than R120b n a year in maintenance alone," she said.

Gxilishe and Lieuw-Kie-Song said the programme's biggest challenges were to increase its labour intensity and the duration of work opportunities. It needed to "scale up and reach more unemployed".

It was this last challenge that appeared to be on the minister's mind when she made specific reference to the Indian Employment Guarantee programme that was introduced in Maharashtra state about 30 years ago. It guaranteed work for the unemployed at a specified minimum wage. In 2004, the programme was extended to the whole of India by the Employment Guarantee Act.

The act makes certain concessions to fiscal realities. In particular, rather than guaranteeing every individual 100 days' work a year, it offered the guarantee to every rural household. Of the cost, 70% is paid by the central government and 30% by state governments.

Officials from SA's public works department visited India last year to meet the task team responsible for implementation of the act. Didiza said the purpose of the regional seminar was to "learn from other countries".

Officials pointed out one reason the Indian model could not be adopted in SA without modification was that Indian state governments had far greater revenue-raising capacities than SA's provincial governments.

OECD urges more reforms to lift India’s annual growth to 10% (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article2624570.ece)
Ashling O’Connor in Bombay
The Times, UK
October 10, 2007

India could sustain annual economic growth of 10 per cent by 2011 if the Government persists with market reforms, including a removal of the foreign investment cap in the insurance sector, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said yesterday.

The Paris-based agency’s first survey of India called on policymakers to further liberalise the economy to deliver “additional growth dividends” to the world’s second-most populous country.

India has reported average GDP growth of 8.6 per cent for the past four years, making it the fastest-growing economy behind China. The OECD noted that India was now the third-largest economy in the world after the United States and China, in terms of real prices and purchasing power, accounting for nearly 7 per cent of global GDP.

The report was published in Delhi as the benchmark BSE index broke through 18,000 points for the first time, its thirteenth record in the past 14 sessions.

The OECD highlighted rapid progress since India’s economy was opened up in 1991. Inflows of foreign direct investment have risen to 2 per cent of GDP, from less than 0.1 per cent in 1990. GDP per capita is rising by 7.5 per cent annually.

However, it said that India needed a “comprehensive reform package” to enhance growth and to spread the country’s increasing wealth more evenly among the 1.1 billion population, most of whom are still on or under the poverty line.

Recommendations include a freer labour market, less red tape and a reduction in tariffs, more foreign competition, the privatisation of loss-making state enterprises, a modern bankruptcy law to reduce the role of the courts and improvements to physical infrastructure.

The OECD called for a removal of the 26 per cent foreign investment limit in the insurance sector and unfettered entry for foreign players in the retail market. Banks should be moved gradually out of the public sector to improve capital allocation, it said.

Proposed market reforms by the Congress-led Government have been shelved in the face of resistance from the party’s allies on the Left.

India's growth could be even better, says OECD (http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article3043807.ece)
By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi
Independent, UK
10 October 2007

India's already impressive economic growth could improve even more if it further opened its markets and relaxed government controls, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The pro-free market organisation said that while the current growth that has averaged 8.5 per over the past four years was sustainable, a rate of 10 per cent was possible if greater reforms were introduced.

"The impressive response of the Indian economy to past reforms should give policy-makers confidence that further liberalisation will deliver additional growth dividends and foster the process of pulling millions of people out of poverty," said the Paris-based group's first report on India.

The report will further fuel a broad economic and political debate in India where many have questioned whether the economic growth of the past decade has helped more than a small portion of the population. While growth has been concentrated in areas such as telecommunications and information technology, rural India has seen few benefits.

Indeed, many economists say that during that period of growth the gap between rich and poor has grown, and a recent government report said that more than 800 million people survived off 20 Indian rupees, or 25p, a day.

"This growth is meaningless if it is not inclusive," Isher Judge Ahluwalia of the Indian Council of Research in International Economic Relations told the Associated Press.

But the OECD report argues that ongoing economic liberalisation, which India began to adopt in 1991, could help to see the country double its per capita income in a decade. It said it would have taken India 55 years to double average incomes if it had stayed on the growth path experienced in the three decades following independence in 1947.

Hundreds of Western companies, including retailers such as Tesco and Wal-Mart, would love to see a reduction on restrictions which make it very difficult for them to operate here. At the moment, foreign companies require a partner holding – with a handful of exceptions – the majority stake. Retail and insurance are key areas the OECD report called to be opened up further; the Indian government has said it would raise the cap on foreign direct investment (FDI) in the insurance sector to 49 per cent from its current 26 per cent, but the move was blocked by the government's leftist partners in the ruling coalition.

"Lifting the ban on FDI in retail trading would help to improve productivity, supply chain management, reduce the exceptionally high rate of waste of agriculture produce and so lower retail prices and raise producer prices," said the report.

Meanwhile yesterday, India's main stock exchange, the Sensex, went past the 18,000 mark to reach a new intraday high, the second such record in less than a fortnight. In 2007 Indian shares have risen by more than 25 per cent.

The strange rise of India (http://www.excal.on.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3873&Itemid=2)
Written by Hilton Yip, Senior Staff Writer
Excalibur Online, Canada
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
http://www.excal.on.ca//images/stories/2007-10-10/17-IndiaBook.jpg
While a lot of attention is focused on China as a future superpower, its neighbour to the south and the other potential Asian world power may be more diverse, chaotic and colourful. India, which boasts a rising economy and geopolitical profile, is a complex land of contradictions beset by significant problems. In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce is a fascinating account of modern India and its quirks, successes and shortcomings.

Luce is a veteran reporter who was based in New Delhi as London’s Financial Times’ South Asia bureau chief for several years. In his first book, he takes on several major issues including politics, religion, economics and foreign affairs. Written with insight, clarity and anecdotes, the book takes an intensive look at these issues with chapters on: Hindu nationalism, the governing Congress Party and its Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, India’s Muslims, the extensive, inefficient state bureaucracy (such as the “licence raj”) and tahe struggles of the lower castes and untouchables.

India’s booming economy is led by its technology and service sectors and powered by strong tertiary technical institutions and a highly-educated, English-proficient workforce. However, Luce points out that the capital-intensive nature of these sectors (which only employ about one million workers) cannot provide adequate employment for the vast majority of Indians. In short, India’s technological progress and rising standards of living contrast sharply with its ancient culture and traditions and its sizeable rural poor.

Luce also shows how religion and caste are deeply ingrained in society, even though modern values, especially materialism, are becoming popular. When it comes to attaining jobs, social relations and especially politics, caste matters, as illustrated by the joke, “In India, you do not cast your vote, you vote your caste.”

One of the more interesting chapters is ‘The Triangular Dance,’ which looks at the relationship between India, China and the United States. They form the “big three,” which Luce feels will play very important roles on the world stage in the 21st century.

Luce asserts that whether it wants to or not, India will play a major international role as a counterbalance to China’s regional dominance. This was the motive for American recognition of Indian nuclear status in 2005, which ended an embargo of sensitive technologies and led to another agreement for nuclear fuel transfers to India. At the same time, strong anti-American sentiment still remains in India and co-operation with China also exists.

Not surprisingly, India’s old enemy Pakistan is mentioned in some detail as it features prominently in India’s foreign affairs, especially in the Kashmir dispute.

While the book places a large focus on India’s problems, it also highlights the robustness of India’s democracy, the booming service and technology industry and a brilliant diversity of cultures, faiths and languages. In the end, Luce outlines major challenges India faces and then lists some opportunities for progress.

This book will not disappoint those who are looking for an in-depth understanding or just an entertaining read of modern India.

India Goes International (http://www.screenafrica.com/news/television/622471.htm)
Screen Africa, South Africa
Tue, 09 Oct 2007

MIPCOM, Cannes: With all the opportunities presented by a huge broadcast and digital market within India, why would the Indian entertainment industry even need to look outside its borders for more business? At the MIPCOM JUNIOR conference session on original content and co-production opportunities for animation in India, it was evident that Indian animation companies believed that it was time for them to achieve international recognition and extend their business capacity by becoming partners on some of the world’s best projects.

The India panel participants, representing some of the major animation companies in India, were clear on the point that India did not try to pitch for business on the basis that it was inexpensive to do animation in India. They did not want to be known as a service industry. “We have moved on from service to creating our own content. We have a rich culture and are forging partnerships with companies across the world,” said Munjal Shroff, co-founder, Graphiti.

Ashish Kulkarni, founder & executive producer, Anirights Infomedia Pvt Ltd said that in 2001 they realised that catching up with traditional international animation was going to be difficult. They embarked on an ambitious training programme but found that it required six to 12 months before any of the trainees were ready to contribute in a meaningful way to animation projects.

They also had to overcome barriers on acceptable careers. Indians had always aspired to becoming doctors and lawyers. Slowly, they became to realise they could make a career in the areas of drawing, painting and acting which were previously looked down upon. “Now we have 20 000 students being trained on different levels of animation,” said Kulkomi who has established several long term programmes with companies from Canada, the UK and the US.

Biren Ghose, CEO and president, Kahani World Inc, explained that cost of production was not necessarily India’s strong point. When dealing with international animation partners, one of the attractions was distribution as India has over 120 million children between the ages of eight and 12 years in a population of 1.2 billion. “We are also prepared to discuss sensible risk projects.”

Elizabeth Koshy, CEO of Animation Dimensions, USA, who has a chain of animation outfits in India, said that India animation was determined to grow up the value chain. “So we are getting into co-production and content creation.”

In a summary of some of the benefits international animation companies had by working with India was that Indian companies were prepared to invest cash, they could ensure a project was completed quickly and still retain quality, they were English-speaking and their technology was very advanced. Koshy made the observation that one company could allocate more than 2,000 people to roll out 25 genres at the same time.

Animation in India does not rely on government funding and it was not considered as necessarily an advantage to have government involvement which could be slow and cumbersome.

India animation companies are involved in number of major animation projects around world and have concluded deals with amongst others ABC Disney, France 3 and NBC Universal.

Catering to India’s young millionaires (http://www.asianinvestor.net/article.aspx?CIaNID=62886)
By Jame DiBiasio
Asian Investor, Hong Kong
11 October 2007

ICICI says the growing number of Indian rich requires a new way to approach wealth management.

ICICI Bank’s wealth management business is growing 18.3% per annum in terms of new customers thanks to an upsurge of newly rich Indians, says Anup Bagchi, global head of private banking in Mumbai.

He argues that India offers a more attractive stomping ground for private bankers than China. It is growing millionaires faster than any market bar Singapore.

“Many people think that if the economy grows, you have more wealthy people, but that is not entirely true,” Bagchi says. “China’s GDP growth is faster than India’s, but it has fewer millionaires. That’s because India’s growth is driven by entrepreneurialism. We have a huge service sector. China’s growth has been state-driven. GDP growth is not enough.”

India’s newly rich are younger, which creates a new set of challenges when it comes to managing wealth. They have a longer investment horizon, which means they can accept more volatility – and demand higher returns.

Bagchi adds confidence is high, so customers are more eager to embrace higher-risk products. “The new segment of wealth is not about preserving wealth but capital appreciation,” he says. The nouveaux riches are also in a constant hurry. They are less interested in long periods of consultation, and more keen on dealing with the bank via email or over the internet.

“It’s not so much about the personal touch,” Bagchi says. “Face-to-face time is decreasing, and clients now request it just to close a deal.”

The complexity of new products and strategies also makes the personal relationship more difficult, because few private bankers know all the details about structured products, hedge funds, private equity and real estate investments. They rely more on a team approach to supply best products and advise clients.

This in turn impacts how private banks present themselves. ICICI, for example, brands itself as innovative and adaptive, in contrast to what it would consider staid private banks in mahogany-panelled offices in Europe.

Developing a business model to fit the new Indian millionaire is not straightforward, however, as the team approach and reliance on IT does not mitigate the need for talent, which is rare.

Another generic problem is the lack of knowledge about cutting-edge products among financial institutions. “There are cases were the patient is wiser than the doctor. We have to be sure we add value,” Bagchi says. “It’s not like a traditional relationship, where the client used to look to us for everything.”

This means ICICI stresses its relationship managers possess “learnability” skills rather than outstanding knowledge, and be comfortable with the firm’s IT platform, which can be used to access information on any of its available products.

Bagchi would not disclose the bank’s private assets under management but says it is considered India’s largest wealth manager. ICICI’s wealth management business has grown 100% year on year for over two years, and caters to clients worth up to $10 million or more. For India-based clients it may provide a range of products sourced from international fund managers, while for non-resident Indians in the Gulf and the West, it is used for India exposures.

Copyright AsianInvestor.net, a subsidiary of Haymarket

Home Affairs woos Indian talent (http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=&fArticleId=5021550)
Business Report, South Africa
October 11, 2007

Johannesburg - Home affairs officials have embarked on a road show in India in an effort to close South Africa's skills gap, the department said on Thursday.

Spokesman Mantshele Tau said the department together with the department of trade and industry and business had embarked on a five day road show, ending on Friday.

"The road show is an investment so that we can close the skills gap. The purpose of it is to identify particular skills needed and explain the requirements in terms of documentation that skilled people will need to come to South Africa," said Tau.

He said all skills qualifications would be verified by the SA Qualifications Authority and that people planning to work in the country needed a minimum of five-years experience.

Tau -- who was speaking from India -- said the road show had visited Mumbai and New Delhi.

This followed the release of quota work permits in 53 different fields.

Home affairs minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula has announced the availability of 34,825 quota work permits.

"Home Affairs believes that the road shows will go a long way in closing the skills gap. They will help grow and sustain our economy so as to improve the living conditions of ordinary South Africans, in line with objectives of Asgisa and Jipsa."

Tau said the South African delegation led by the minister in the presidency Essop Pahad had met with Indian business representatives as well as India's minister of trade and commerce Kamal Math.

By Siddharth Srivastava

NEW DELHI - The way that urban Indians commute and travel is set for a major transformation over the next few years. Following the widely hailed success of the Delhi Metro, which at times transports nearly a million passengers a day, other major Indian cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata are likewise looking to overhaul their public transport systems.

With the rapidly rising needs of overstretched public transport and cargo movement systems, India’s estimated US$5 billion

passenger bus and truck market is also in a state of flux. Public transport has long been an area of neglect in India and the systems as they exist are rudimentary and fail to cater effectively to rapid urbanization, economic growth and the population’s rising incomes.

Hundreds of thousands of cars daily congest India’s cities, creating a traffic and pollution nightmare due to the absence of comfortable, safe and reliable means to commute. However if things go to the government’s plan, like many other neglected aspects in India, this is set to change fundamentally, providing important efficiency gains and a potential boost to overall national competitiveness.

A total of 12 mass rail transport projects are on the drawing board. By the 2010 Commonwealth Games, scheduled to be held in the national capital, Delhi Metro will crisscross and connect technology vibrant suburbs Noida and Gurgaon and will move further into other suburbs such as Ghaziabad and Manesar.

Japan has been closely involved with the development of the Delhi metro, which is set to increase its coverage to 400 kilometers of track from its current 64km. Road traffic has reportedly declined by 50% in areas where the system is already in operation. That record is winning the attention of other major, traffic-clogged urban areas.

This week the Punjab government signed an agreement with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) to implement metro services in Ludhiana and also possibly in the cities of Amritsar and Mohali. Metro construction has already begun for Bangalore, while Mumbai will begin shortly. With a planned length of 33km, the $1.5 billion Bangalore project is expected to carry more than a million passengers per day.

In the first phase, three lines have been proposed in Mumbai: Colaba to Charkop (the longest route at more than 38km and at a cost of $1.5 billion), Versova to Ghatkopar and Bandra to Mankhurd. Altogether, the planned Mumbai Metro will cost more than $4 billion and the deadline for all three phases is 2021. The government has also given clearance to an elevated light railway project - to be called the sky bus - with three corridors within Mumbai city.

Private real estate developer DLF is planning to build and run its own metro rail in townships in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi. “We will be tying up with an equipment manufacturer and a rail automation-solution company in the next four to six months,” a DLF spokesperson said.

The government has also earmarked more than $1 billion to implement mass transit systems in more than 60 different Indian cities and attract the required foreign capital to complete the projects. Smaller cities such as Lucknow, Patna and Bhopal could pitch either for monorail networks from Germany or more conventional systems from Japan, analysts say. At least 35 cities have already crossed the 1 million population mark and require some type of rapid transport systems.

Foreign drivers
Big construction contracts are being distributed, including big ticket projects involving prominent foreign firms. Among the early winners are ITD Cementation India Ltd in joint venture with its promoter Italian-Thai Development Public Co; infrastructure development company Hindustan Construction Company in a tie-up with undisclosed Austrian and South Korean corporations; and a consortium consisting of RITES Ltd, PCI of Japan, PBI of the US and SYSTRA of France. Others set to get in on the building action include Larson & Toubro, Bombadier, Siemens, Samsung, Mitsubishi, an-Alstom consortium, and Itochu.

The bus and truck production sector, long dominated by Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland, is also set for a major expansion. The sector is already growing at around 30% and currently the bus market is estimated at over 50,000 units per year. Big global multinationals, such as DaimlerChrysler, Nissan, Isuzu, Volvo and Toyota, are all drawing up plans to enter or ramp up their manufacturing presence in the market.

Tata Motors has recently formed an alliance with Brazilian Marco Polo to assemble and deliver buses by mid-2008. According to news reports, Japanese auto maker Toyota is in talks with the Rajasthan government to procure land to set up a new manufacturing facility dedicated to the production of buses, trucks and light commercial vehicles (LCV). The investment is provisionally expected to be in the range of $500 million.

Toyota has an established presence in the premium car and multi-utility vehicle segment. Recently German automaker DaimlerChrysler, manufacturer of luxury Mercedes-Benz cars, announced that it was looking to launch premium buses in India during the next calendar year to add to its rollout of trucks.

The company has entered into an agreement with Sutlej Motors, a Punjab-based bus manufacturer. Chief executive officer of DaimlerChrysler India, Wilfried Aulbur, said that the company was looking at the truck and bus segments in the country. Currently Merdedes cars are being manufactured at a facility near Pune, in the state of Maharashtra, where parts of the bigger vehicles will be produced.

In August Japan's Nissan Motor, in which France's Renault is the biggest shareholder, tied up with Ashok Leyland to jointly manufacture annually over 100,000 small trucks and LCV’s in India. “Our LCV business and overall expansion into India represents two of the biggest growth opportunities for Nissan in the medium and long terms,’’ Carlos Ghosn, Nissan's chief executive officer recently said. Renault already has joint ventures with utility maker Mahindra & Mahindra to produce the mid-size car Logan and Bajaj Auto as part of a strategy to challenge Tata’s plans to make India’s cheapest car.

Volvo buses, too, are making market inroads. The Swedish auto company is looking at a target of 10,000 units over the next five years. “We can achieve this by introducing different global brands in India. We are looking at the twin entry of Nissan Diesel and DongFeng Company’s trucks,’’ Volvo India head Eric Leblanc recently said.

The company has a production facility in Bangalore, Karnataka and is looking to introduce fully built buses with an initial capacity of 500 units for intra and inter-city transport. Volvo has entered into a joint venture with Jaico Company for a bus bodybuilding unit at Bangalore to pursue those plans.

Japan’s Isuzu Motors also has big production plans, with targeted sales to increase to 6,000 units by 2012, six times the 1,000 it expects to sell next year. Punjab-based Swaraj Mazda Ltd, in which Japan’s Sumitomo Corp, has a big stake, will produce mid-size buses for Isuzu.

Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IJ12Df03.html

India From the Inside Out (http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/international-news/portfolio/2007/10/12/An-Interview-With-Ranan-Tata)
by Pranay Gupte
Conde Nast Portfolio, NY
Oct 12 2007

Ratan Tata believes in India's future, but is frank about its present. A question and answer session with one of the major players inside the flowering of a potential economic superpower.

http://www.portfolio.com/images/site/editorial/News/brief/2007/10/12-ratan-tata-large.jpg
Photograph by: Punit Paranjpe/Reuters/Landov

There are many reasons to be optimistic about India's economic future: A vast potential consumer market; a large and growing middle class; many well-educated and motivated workers; and the widespread use of English, the lingua franca of global commerce.

Why, then, is India still not quite as big a rising star as China? Ranan Tata, chairman and chief executive of Tata Group, the diversified Indian conglomerate, offers some insight on where his country is going, and what it must change to realize its potential.

PORTFOLIO.COM: Do you believe that India is headed toward economic superstar status?

RATAN TATA: "Economic superstar" is perhaps too strong a term to use for India, even looking to the future. While India's already large economy will certainly grow faster than the more mature economies, and take its place among the 3 or 4 largest economies in the next two to three decades, this will happen due to our population, demographics and resources.

I think to be an economic superstar would mean growing at, or close to, our full potential. This would require much deeper and broader economic reforms on the one hand and effective government intervention in areas such as health, literacy, and infrastructure, especially in rural areas, on the other hand.

PORTFOLIO.COM: What do you see as the investment possibilities in India, especially in the various sectors in which Tata is involved, and in infrastructure elements such as airports?

RATAN TATA: India has tremendous investment potential across a very wide variety of sectors, due to our relatively early stage of economic development. If you look at the per capita consumption practically of any item, there is potential for large increases over the next few decades as the economy grows and per capita incomes increase.

You see this potential reflected in the investment plans of many Tata companies -- we plan to expand capacity many-fold in sectors ranging from auto, steel to hotels and power.

Regarding infrastructure sectors, we actually have a large deficit in almost every infrastructure sector whether airports, power, roads, etc. This is an area that needs large amounts of investment, perhaps two, or may be even, three times the amount that is being currently invested each year. Many of the impediments in infrastructure investments are being addressed and India now has telecom as a success story; ports and roads have seen major investment, while airports is an opportunity area and so is power -- though there are still major issues in the power sector that need to be tackled.

PORTFOLIO.COM: What are your concerns and reservations about India that you feel may thwart its economic ambitions?

RATAN TATA: There are several concerns and reservations. The most fundamental is that doing business in India is far more difficult than in most countries that I see us being compared with. Some of the major items that contribute to this are excessive regulation, red-tape and bureaucracy in many sectors, the lack of infrastructure, frequent changes in government policy and most importantly, the fact that vested interests often so easily subvert the system for personal benefit at great cost to the country. I also see economic reforms moving in fits and starts -- as a nation we seem to reform only during a downturn or a crisis. When the going is good, our appetite to push further reforms diminishes and therefore our rapid growth phases are rarely sustained beyond three to five years.

PORTFOLIO.COM: Do you see prospects of strong economic, commercial and political ties between the West and India? What more might be done?

RATAN TATA: We have already seen the strengthening of economic, commercial and political ties between the West and India, especially in the last decade. I think the Doha Round is a great opportunity to strengthen economic and commercial ties in a multilateral framework and I am concerned that it may be delayed for two or three years, unless some of the recent efforts are built upon aggressively. I also hope that the Indian government concludes the civil nuclear agreement with the US -- that is a very important initiative and the US has invested a lot in that effort to build stronger ties.

PORTFOLIO.COM: Could you offer some insights about the corporate community's expectations with regard to a blossoming India?

RATAN TATA: One of the things I noticed during our US-India C.E.O. Forum interaction was that in the US, and perhaps in most O.E.C.D. countries, there is an explicit and synergistic partnership between the Government and industry with both of them keen to promote economic growth. To elaborate, the government in the U.S. views U.S. industry as the primary driver of employment creation and generator of tax revenues, and therefore engages in an open and transparent dialogue as to how conditions can be created, both within the country and in terms of international trade and investment relationships, to increase employment and accelerate economic growth. I think this requires a fundamental change in the political and bureaucratic mindset in India, which, if it happens, would benefit the country enormously. I see only a few senior politicians that have adopted such a mindset and Kamal Nath is one such person.

PORTFOLIO.COM: [I]How could this be India's "century," given the country's low literacy rate, the percentage still below the poverty line, the percentage of children under five who are malnourished?

RATAN TATA: We could call this India's "century" because we will be given an opportunity to address the issues that you have raised -- illiteracy, poverty, and malnourishment. There is a chance for us to make rapid and significant progress in addressing these key development issues though faster and more inclusive economic growth.

PORTFOLIO.COM: What are the challenges facing India today in terms of growth?

RATAN TATA: The key challenges facing India today in terms of growth is to "de-bottleneck" the system so that we can attract global capital and talent, increase capacity rapidly across industries and sectors and grow to our potential.

PORTFOLIO.COM: What does a young, vibrant population in India mean in terms of the economy?

RATAN TATA: A young, vibrant population provides favorable demographics that are an opportunity for India -- due to the potential of a large workforce, greater savings and investment leading to rapid economic growth. I say "opportunity" because these outcomes are not assured but will need coordinated efforts from the Government and industry to tap into the young population's potential. Tapping into this potential requires major investments in education at all levels from primary to technical and post graduate. It also needs better infrastructure -- both urban and rural. Lastly, we need to remove bureaucracy and red tape so that there is much greater investment in manufacturing and services that can productively employ the large increases in workforce that are anticipated.

PORTFOLIO.COM: How can India make growth all-inclusive?

RATAN TATA: Growth can be made all-inclusive by providing opportunity to all. By "opportunity" I mean that we need to ensure that we make education and basic infrastructure available to all -- especially to the economically weaker sections, remote and rural areas and women.

PORTFOLIO.COM: What role do you see community organizations play in India's sustainable development, especially when it comes to women and children?

RATAN TATA: Community organizations can perform a range of functions -- from monitoring government programs relating to literacy, health, malnutrition, etc., to preventing exploitation of child labor or women.

PORTFOLIO.COM: Is India a better place to do business than China?

RATAN TATA: The Tata Group does not have a major presence in China as yet so it would be hard for me to compare the two countries' on specifics. Broadly, I feel that China is more open and easy to invest in, whereas India is more fulfilling and rewarding in terms of returns, once investments have been made.

PORTFOLIO.COM: Can the government, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations work together for their mutual benefit?

RATAN TATA: I certainly think they should. The fact that they do not is one of the key reasons for many large and economically important projects being delayed. India's ability to grow rapidly is being impaired by projects getting stalled or delayed due to disputes over land, rehabilitation and resettlement and compensation claims. Of course, there are sometimes vested interests at work that want to ensure that some projects get delayed.

I also feel that there should be less suspicion from the Government towards the private sector, as this leads to the private sector and the Government not maximizing the synergies of working together.

PORTFOLIO.COM: How is the ethos of Indian society different that enables it to be so flexible and accommodating to business?

RATAN TATA: Indian society is intrinsically pluralist and perhaps that is what makes it flexible and accommodating. However, that does not necessarily make for a good place to do business, as there are other factors that are important for investment and business -- such as predictable and consistent policies and some of the other items I have mentioned earlier like infrastructure, and less red tape.

PORTFOLIO.COM: What is the best way to promote entrepreneurial spirit in rural India?

RATAN TATA: Processing of agricultural produce in my view is a key to generate employment at the most basic, rural level. We currently process a very small quantity of our total produce -- increasing this will not only generate employment; it will also increase rural revenue, and reduce wastage. Agro-processing will bring with it, employment in a host of supporting industries -- logistics, cold chain, packaging, etc. We also need to look at industries such as tourism that can provide employment distributed across the country and contribute to maintaining our natural and historical ‘tourism' assets. Handicrafts also need to be promoted, especially in developing foreign markets for them to sell to.

I think the entrepreneurial spirit is very strong in India regardless of rural or urban. What is lacking is often the means to translate ideas or proposals into reality -- financing and banking penetration, market access, and infrastructure would be some of the key facilitators for promoting entrepreneurship in rural India.

PORTFOLIO.COM: How will India meet the challenges of environmental pollution, degradation and global warming, if it is to protect its population from floods, droughts, and water and air pollution in cities?

RATAN TATA: There would be two themes that I could think of -- the first would be that we balance industrial and economic development and environmental preservation. Today, it is often an "either-or" situation where in some cases pressure groups and environmentalists totally delay a project and do not let it happen or, in the opposite case, a polluting project is implemented without being required to take mitigating measures to reduce pollution. Very often those who can manage the "system" are not affected by concerns for the environment and their projects move ahead with no protest from N.G.O.'s and no strictures from the government. We need to develop an even-handed and balanced approach where neither objective is sacrificed. There are sufficient examples from countries such as Australia, Brazil, and Canada on how even the most polluting industries can thrive alongside environmental preservation.

The second theme would be that we must lay far greater emphasis on sectors such as tourism that not only have a low impact on the environment but even pay for environmental preservation. Many of Africa's game reserves are an outstanding testament to this.

PORTFOLIO.COM: How can India curb corruption?

RATAN TATA: Corruption is one of the most debilitating problems that India faces and needs to be tackled at multiple levels. In terms of the government to industry interface, the key thing would be to reduce discretionary interpretation in our rules, procedures and laws. In terms of electoral process, we need to move further on the transparent funding of elections. In terms of law enforcement, perhaps reducing political control over the police force will be required. These are just some ideas -- as I said, corruption is deep rooted and endemic and we need to tackle it at multiple levels.

PORTFOLIO.COM: Can India absorb the values of the globalizing world, and yet retain its traditions?

RATAN TATA: Yes, I think so.

PORTFOLIO.COM: What best gives you hope as an Indian citizen?

RATAN TATA: The energy of our youth, the richness and diversity of our culture and the pockets of world-class excellence that one sees in many different areas.

The Tata Group comprises 96 operating companies in seven business sectors: information systems and communications; engineering; materials; services; energy; consumer products; and chemicals. The Group was founded by Jamsetji Tata in the mid 19th century, a period when India had just set out on the road to gaining independence from British rule. Consequently, Jamsetji Tata and those who followed him aligned business opportunities with the objective of nation building. This approach remains enshrined in the Group's ethos to this day.

The Tata family of companies shares a set of five core values: integrity, understanding, excellence, unity and responsibility. These values, which have been part of the Group's beliefs and convictions from its earliest days, continue to guide and drive the business decisions of Tata companies. The Group and its enterprises have been steadfast and distinctive in their adherence to business ethics and their commitment to corporate social responsibility. This is a legacy that has earned the Group the trust of many millions of stakeholders in a measure few business houses anywhere in the world can match.

Medical Tourism in India — A Healthcare Revolution? (http://www.howestreet.com/articles/index.php?article_id=4899)
By Aaron Gentzler
HoweStreet.com, Canada
October 15, 2007

“Medical tourism” is the act of traveling to foreign locales in search of high-quality, affordable healthcare.

India, for example, is currently trying to figure out how to best advertise and support a growing medical tourism industry. Resort-like hospitals that cater to medical tourists are raking in clients by providing a level of care and comfort that’s…well…foreign to some Americans. Here’s the kicker: It’s also insanely cheap.

For example, let’s say John Q. Public elects to have a back surgery but his insurance is balking at covering it. In the United States, his out-of-pocket cost might be $30,000 if he chooses to pursue the procedure without insurance clearance.

John wants/needs the surgery, but he doesn’t have the cash to make it happen. Normally, John is out of luck. But wait…

For the price of a plane ticket to and accommodations in India — say $10,000 — John can save up to 80% on the surgery itself by getting it half a world away.

The bottom line here is that instead of paying $30,000 in the U.S., John Q. Public might be able to get the same surgery in India for around $6,000.

Flights, lodging and the surgery come to a hypothetical total of $16,000. That’s nearly a 50% total savings (46.6667%), and John gets a chance to sightsee in one of the most rapidly growing and dynamic countries in the world.

There’s also a burgeoning medical tourism “travel agency” business here in the States. They offer all-inclusive packages at hospitals worldwide, depending on exactly what procedure a patient requires. That can lower costs even further.

This scenario might seem downright silly (more on that in a minute). But it’s happening every single day at a fantastic rate.

Studies suggest that 150,000 Americans left the country last year to have a medical procedure. Other sources put the number closer to 500,000 — presumably including such “travel” as having a root canal performed in Tijuana or tooth veneers installed in Juarez.

That’s as many as half a million breast augmentations, liposuctions and open heart procedures that were (I hesitate to use the word) “outsourced” because Americans would rather find a better price and travel to get it than get worked over one more time by a broken and inefficient domestic healthcare industry.

Maybe I’m putting too fine a point on it. And maybe the thought of jetting off to Vietnam, India or Thailand isn’t your cup of tea — especially when you consider the thought of traveling there while in pain or pre-surgery distress.

But I believe it was Frank Zappa who said: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Zappa jokes aside, medical tourism may be the brightest example yet of Americans, albeit out of extreme necessity, embracing a true global economy and spending their dollars in such a way that maximizes return on medical investment.

When you look at it like that, traveling a great distance to receive priority treatment and save money seems downright…smart.

While researching this issue, I expected to find tons of information on the things that would prevent an American from engaging in medical tourism. For example, I expected to find articles and blog posts shouting about under-trained and unprofessional doctors.

I expected to read about substandard facilities and arcane witch-doctor practices. I knew I’d come across at least one post-op horror story about bandages, scissors and exotic bacteria being found inside patients once they returned to the States.

Evidently, those expectations amounted to nothing more than my own prejudices.

While the medical tourist does have to be sublimely careful and diligent in their research and planning, there most certainly are high-quality and cost-effective doctors around the world who can perform most procedures for just a fraction of the cost a patient would encounter in America.

Continuing with the example of India, it’s obvious that medical tourism is yet another industry in which Indian expansion is helping to break new ground. In time, opportunities for investors will emerge, and the issue of medical tourism will surely break into the consciousness of the mainstream press. From there, the sky is the limit.

As a start, simply Google “Medical Tourism India” and sift through the results.

Just be careful to avoid the websites written in broken English.

This much is certainly clear: Regardless of who wins the White House in 2008, it appears as if a revolution in how we access our healthcare may be on the horizon.

India: how’s it growing? (http://www.developments.org.uk/articles/india-how2019s-it-growing)
Sixty years after independence, India is accelerating fast, but is everyone in the same race? Martin Wroe and Malcolm Doney report.

Developments, UK

How many Indias are there? “Three,” claims the 23-year-old assistant manager at the upscale Oberoi Hotel in Kolkata. “The rich, the neo-rich and the poor.” And to which one does she belong? “I’m from the upper middle class.”

No, insists a taxi-driver in Delhi, there are five Indias, bracketed at either end by the super-rich of Bollywood and the extreme poor of urban slum and remote village. “I live with my wife and children in a single room, I am in the fourth class, one up from the bottom.”

An international development consultant in in Bhubaneswar, Orissa also counts five Indias, but explains it more lyrically: “There is India on two feet, on four legs, on two wheels, on four wheels… and then there’s the jet set.”A go-getting 26-year-old brand manager in a dynamic IT company in Noida, near Delhi, takes a more Darwinian view.There are two Indias, she says: “There are those that are ready to do something, and those that don’t want to do anything.”

Sixty years after gaining independence from Britain, India is changing like never before. If no-one can agree on how many Indias there are, more and more are coming round to the view that one India could be history – the India that was the world’s most populous poor country.

“India is booming,” explains Ranna Gill, one of the country’s leading fashion designers, speaking at her new shop in the library-quiet and gleaming opulence of Delhi’s Crescent fashion mall.The new edition of Cosmo is on the counter, the cover featuring Bollywood actress and UK Big Brother star Shilpa Shetty, resplendent in a dress made by Gill.The pair epitomize contemporary global India.With its shimmering skyscrapers and booming IT sector, glamourous stars and billionaires, this is the India of such powerful economic growth that, if all goes to plan, it could power South Asia into meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

IT has been critical in the rapid globalisation of India with exports from this sector alone expected to top $60 billion by 2010. HCL Technologies, specializing in software design and ‘Business Process Outsourcing’ (BPO) services, is the country’s fastest growing ICT company and epitomizes this boom. Back in 1976 it was the original garage start-up, with six men in a lockup building computers before Silicon Valley was even heard of. Now it has 40,000 employees in 17 countries, revenues of around $4 billion, and employs more UK citizens than any other Indian company – including more than 2,500 of them in call centres in Armagh and Belfast.

BPO is a sensitive issue for many Indian companies, with pay and working conditions variable, and a 2005 VV Giri National Institute of Labour report describing some BPO centres as ‘Roman slave galleys’. Nonetheless young graduates with good English are queuing for jobs in the sector, where salaries are currently rising by 12-15% a year.

In cities from Delhi to Mumbai, Kolkata to Bangalore, it is not hard to see the evidence of India’s unprecedented economic boom. If present growth rates of 8% plus continue it will be the fourth largest economy in the world within 20 years. A country, for so long typecast by images of the Catholic nun Mother Teresa tending the malnourished poor of urban Calcutta, now Kolkata, is now seeing an alarming surge in Type Two Diabetes, a disease normally associated with the overindulgence and sedentary lifestyle of the US and northern Europe.

But if the booming India of Bollywood, and business outsourcing is headline news, the deeper question is whether the new rich in India are leaving the old poor behind – or whether the benefits of a careering economy can help lift the poorest from poverty.

“I compare India to the Wild West,” says restaurateur Andrea Adtab Pauro, sitting at a table in his smart new Italian restaurant in New Delhi. “The middle class is on the move, but we’re in a huge transition which could take many years. How come there is so much money pouring into the country, and yet still every day I pass naked, five-year-old children living alone under bridges?”

The Government does not dispute the challenge, which is captured succinctly by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. “If those who are better off do not act in a more socially responsible manner, our growth process may be at risk, our polity may become anarchic and our society may get further divided.We cannot afford these luxuries.”

So can the new wealth help end poverty for India’s majority? The signs are mixed. Deaths of children under five, for example, fell from 123 per thousand to 90 between 1990 and 2002, but 47% of children in this country of 1.1 billion remain malnourished. While a promising 90% of children now attend primary school, each year a million women and children die due to lack of health care.

If, anecdotally, there are multiple developmentally it’s possible to outline three distinct identities:

Poorest India describes the 350-400 million people who live on less than $1 a day, notably in the Hindi belt in the central north and east and among historically excluded groups such as scheduled castes and tribes (see box, right), and also including Muslims and many women and girls.

Developing India captures, in developmentspeak, the India where average annual per capita income is just $630. There are 500 million people who have their heads above water – but only just. They have enough to eat, somewhere to live and can send their children to school… but not much more.

‘Global’ India by contrast is riding the wave of annual growth of over 8% since 2002 which, by 2012, will see average per capita incomes passing $825 and India graduating to the ranks of a ‘Middle Income Country’.

But perhaps such generalisms are unreliable, and only the poorest people can really tell us whether national economic prosperity is providing a stepping stone from endemic poverty.

Making over the slums Kolkata, the tenth most populous metropolis in the world and gateway of South Asia has long been an attractive destination for thousands in search of better livelihoods.The main road out of the city to the Kishane Pully Slum is regularly flooded during the rainy season, cars ploughing through the water like speedboats, while screaming children paddle at either side. But at the slum itself the newly paved walkways are clear of water – and while the field backing onto it has become a small lake, a newly erected flood barrier keeps its waters from overwhelming the hundreds of one-storey shacks.

“When I was a child the very worst bit of living here was the flooding,” recalls Sheila Das, 28 , a resident for 20 years who today shares accommodation with both her and her husband’s parents.“We had to walkalong slushy,muddy roads to get our water – and there was only a single tap for the whole slum.There was no paved road before, no water supply, no electricity.”

But life has changed: “When the standpipes and drains arrived, this was one of the biggest improvements because flooding is now very unusual. Now some people even have their own taps, it is so much better.”

Life in the slum has been transformed since Kolkata Urban Services for the Poor (KUSP) began supporting 40 urban bodies in improving urban planning and governance, helping create access for the poor to services like water, sanitation and health. DFID has been a key player in the scheme, committing more than £100 million for improvement in roads, drainage, sanitation and water supply in 339 slums.There are around 750 people in the Kishane Pully Slum – the men are taxi drivers, rickshaw pullers or factory workers, while the women, if they work, are domestic helpers or home workers. Improvements to the infrastructure have multiple benefits from health to education and employment and, slowly, they are offering some of the poorest people in West Bengal a route out of grinding poverty.

Since KUSP intervened, says Sheila, it’s not just the physical environment that is better. “There is a general improvement in health and a big drop in people getting diarrhoeal diseases.”

Back to school

There are other spin-offs – school attendance for one. “Installing brick pathways or roads instead of mud ones has a striking effect on school attendance, for example girls are much more likely to go to school if the road is a good one.”

Sheila’s daughters of 10 and 8, go to the local primary school, with every prospect of staying several more years. While she stayed in school until Class 5, her mother went to school for only a year.

Israh Parveen, 24, now works in a KUSPsupported community embroidery project. As a Muslim, she underlines how important clean, safe roads are in opening up access to education. “Previously Muslim girls had no access to education simply because of the state of the roads, but now wecan travel to school which is changing our prospects.”

Other benefits, she says, are harder to explain but just as real, such as strengthened communal and social bonds. “There used to be a lot of fights between the men, it could be very violent if a dispute broke out but now we have a new system for people to resolve disputes through arbitration.”

“Once the infrastructure is improved,” explains Gobinda Ganguly, Chairman of Kamarhati Municipality, “the people can afford to improve their residences. The land value also goes up whichmeans some people can get a partner to invest in helping them build a house instead of a shack.”

The key to the success of slum regeneration is including the poor in the decision making process.“We are trusting the poorer people in developing their slum areas,” Mr Ganguly continues “and the awareness of people is coming up, they are feeling that they must make their slums better and that it is worthpaying the user charges – for water for example – in order to keep them well.”

When mother doesn’t know best With around 70% of India’s population living in rural areas, key developmental challenges in the country as well as in the city have to be faced – and no challenge is greater than improving child and maternal health.

In the remote village of Maltore, a half hours drive from Purulia in West Bengal, the local community’s maternal health and children’s nutrition adviser, is sitting in her cramped ‘consultation room’ and talking to a circle of pregnant women or new mothers.They listen carefully – aware that what they are being told could be the difference between life and death for their children.

“I weigh their babies regularly,” she explains. “I talk with them about the need for immunisations, I explain how to wash a new baby with clean water, I talk all about good diet. If I think a child is in need of special help I help them get a eferral to a doctor.” Under the nationwide Integrated Child Development Scheme, an ‘anganwadi’ worker, is provided for every population of 1,000, and trained in health, nutrition and child development. Traditionally, for example, many new mothers in rural India, have chosen not to begin breastfeeding their babieson the first day of life – a time when such feeding is particularly beneficial, not least in boosting a newborn’s immune system. The anganwadi will try to dissuade them from this practice and, in tandem with other health advice, child health is improving.

“I used to be upset that so many children got sick and died,” says one mother. “But there has been a change and now I am so happy at what is happening.”

Paid a monthly fee of about £20 by the State government, the local anganwadi works with 99 children in the village where, she says, previously there would have been “at least three deaths every year”.This year there have been no fatalities.

A map of the village on the wall of her consulting room shows all the local households and indicates where the most vulnerable families are living. Posters explain the importance of the right diet. Stick-figure drawings of babies, indicate which mothers have turned up to appointments and which have not–dramatically, a missing leg or arm on a stick figure shows a missed session. The shock tactics seem to work – most of the drawings are complete.

Countryside alliance

Creating viable livelihoods is critical if people are to take advantage of social investment in improved living conditions and health. And around 400km away in the village of Budamunda,Western Orissa, Purhami Dharua has taken a gamble on an innovative form of new income. She has persuaded her 12-strong women’s Self Help Group to purchase 20 ducks as a way of generating income. She’s even handed over a small area of her meagre land, and the hut that was once her home, as an enclosure to house the birds. Starting a duckery is not a complete shot in the dark. “I used to have a couple of ducks myself and it worked quite well,” she explains, “So I suggested the idea and the others agreed.”

They did their research and selected a breed known as ‘moti’ (literally ‘pearl’) from the distinctive ‘bubbles’ on the birds’ heads.These are hardy, disease-resistant birds which do not require a pond to swim in, so they can be kept in an enclosure like chickens. Six of the ducks are male, so that they can raise ducklings as well as sell eggs.There is a local market both for the eggs and the meat. However, the women are cautious, they want to see whether this will work and have therefore limited their investment to a trial. Purhami Dharua is optimistic. “I’m confident this will succeed.”

One compelling ground for hope is that they are not doing this as individuals, but as a group. “By doing this together,we can keep all the ducks in one place,we can buy feed in bulk, which cuts down the cost, and there are other benefits as well. We help one another. If one of us can’t afford to send one of our children to school, the group helps. And at festivals we celebrate together too.”

Co-operative ventures like this are backed by the Western Orissa Rural Livelihoods Programme (WORLP), a DFIDsupported initiative which works with poor communities in four districts to foster long-term social change.These districts are among the poorest and least developed in India, with up to 70% of the 4 million people earning less than $1 a day. Levels of infant mortality, maternal mortality and literacy are also poor, with some social indicators rivalling those of sub-Saharan Africa. A high proportion of these people are from scheduled tribes and castes (see page 6).

Watershed moment

WORLP also works with the Orissa Development Watersheds Mission, an Indian government programme, to address problems caused by erratic rainfall in the region and a poor record of water harvesting. Surveys have identified watersheds in the area and support provides help to communities to restore existing means of water capture such as ponds and reservoirs as well as to create new ones. “Basically, where water runs, we want to make it walk,” says Sudin K, a technical support worker with WORLP, “Where it walks we want to make it stop”.

The Watershed Mission is of most benefit to those who have land, but the forest dwellers, and those with poor land were being left behind until WORLP introduced ‘watershed plus’.This intensive programme brings together local people in order to identify their needs and then help them decide what action has to be taken. This is a slow and arduous process in any community, but doubly so where such a high proportion of people have been socially excluded.“We have to recognise that India’s growth has not been inclusive,” says Sudin K. “For centuries such people have been disadvantaged, stigmatised as ‘primitive’ and excluded.”

As a result there is a kind of cultural inferiority complex which makes it hard for many people to see the potential of new opportunities or to take advantage of them. It takes at least nine months to build rapport with village communities, and to persuade them of the value of developing committees in order to assess needs and institute plans. Unpredictable factors, such as personal animosities, local political rivalries and other disputes inevitably slow the process but in Budamunda village it is possible to see how worthwhile that effort has been. Just over 600 people live here and around a half of the women have joined some form of Self Help Group, such as the Maa Mangala group which has bought the ducks. Others are involved in breeding fish, raising goats, and growing mushrooms. An enterprising group of young women who have embarked on tailoring training is already reaping rewards as they produce clothes for sale in the local market.

A group of 15 men have joined together to raise goats and Shyamsundar Sandha, who acts as secretary for the goatherders, says it makes all kinds of sense. “Together we can access loans,we can share our animal husbandry experience, and the vet only needs to make one visit which saves us money,” he enthuses. “And we’re also banding together to save money for drugs so we can treat the animals ourselves.”

It’s early days, but the new income is already boosting living standards and the prospects for development.“ I want to send my children to school,” says one. “I’ll extend my house,” chimes another. “I’ll be able to feed my family better”, says a third.

Organised into groups, not only can the people in Western Orissa access grants and small loans, they are gaining confidence in their ability to make change. One small but significant change, says Dipti Behera, human resources officer for the Bolangir district, “Before, if anyone arrived in a village with a car, people would hide.Now, they come out to see what’s going on.”

More ambitiously still,women in a number of villages, have discovered to their surprise that traditional ponds or ‘ghats’ – which had always been monopolised by richer landowners – were actually commonly held, and that they too had rights to their use. As a result it is not unusual for women’s Self Help Groups to outbid landowners at annual ‘auctions’ in order to use the water for fisheries.

A multiplicity of similar stories in and around Western Orissa, are founded in a complex and much needed multi-agency approach bringing together healthcare, sanitation, education, conservation, agriculture and the development of human resources.The success of an organisation like WORLP has been in integrating these essential ingredients and unsurprisingly other parts of India are beginning to sit up and take notice. “We gather together,we discuss things,” explains Purhami Dharua, of her duck-raising collective. “It’s good. I’m sure the ducks will work, but if it doesn’t we’ll try goats.”

City living

A similar tale of rising incomes and sustainable livelihoods can also be told in urban India, this time with another group of homeworkers on the outskirts of Delhi. A group of ten women, sitting in a one-room house, are describing the difference in their lives as embroiderers and jewellery makers, since they enrolled with SEWA – the Self-Employed Women’s Association.

“I am now getting a much better rate of pay for doing the same eight hours a day,” explains Asma, 18. Not only has her take-home pay doubled, but working conditions have also improved:

“The contractors used to pressure us a lot,” recalls Zeenet. “Sometimes we had to work day and night to be sure we would be paid but that has changed and we are now working for ourselves, which means we have time for our families.”

Best of all,” says Fareeda, 32, her young baby sleeping under her sari,“We are becoming independent women. I used to have to rely on my husband for money but now I can earn money myself and do what I want with it.” I feel so good that I can earn money for myself and my children, not only for the school fees but also to do some saving.” SEWA, started by Elaben Bhatt in 1972 as a small trade union of women workers in the informal economy, is transforming life for tens of thousands of women in India. Focused on organising women through Self Help Groups, co-operatives and federations, its work extends from micro finance, Social Security and housing to education and creating market linkages. Employment, says Renana Jhabvala Chair of SEWA Bharat is the vital link between economic growth and poverty. If the 30 million women in India’s informal homeworker sector can be paid properly for their role in a growing economy, they will be instrumental in helping their families climb from poverty. The UK’s Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), she says, has been vital in persuading household name,multi-national companies to introduce codes of conduct through their supply chains. “A few years ago the big companies weren’t bothered about ethical trading, but now they are very concerned and it’s connected to the pressure of their consumers in the West.”

No sooner had the spotlight of publicity been shone on the supply chains of some of these companies, than the changes came. “The rates of pay rose and our people started being paid on time.”

Shenaz, 35, who works up to 12 hours a day in the one room she shares with her seven children, pays tribute to SEWA for boosting her take-home pay.“With regular work you get good money now,” she says, methodically sewing bangles onto purses for sale in western high streets. “I have some independence now, I can spend my money on my children.”

A key achievement of SEWA has been to shrink the length of the supply chain–cutting out the take of middle men so that producers can earn more for their work. Successfully introducing micro-finance and savings schemes has enabled many women to put money aside for important events – from schooling to weddings.And all the research suggests that when a woman has an income she will reinvest a far greater amount of it in the wellbeing of her family than a man with the same amount.“Women are gaining financial power,” says Renana Jhabvala. “They will play the critical role in helping India climb from poverty.”

Spreading the benefits

While the hi-tech corporations of the new India grab the headlines for the profits they deliver, some of them are also trying to foster broader development.The HCL Group, for example, has established a leading university, the SSN Institutions in Chennai, to provide education and research in biomedical engineering, IT and management.The company, says Saurav Adhikari, Corporate Vice President for Strategy, is also “trying to bring employment opportunities to poor areas of cities and increase their skill sets. By no means is it enough, but our head and heart are in the right place”.

The stories of Purhaumi Daura with her duck raising collective and Rana Gill with her fashion empire, of embroiderers in one-room shacks and the giants of IT world might seem to come from different countries. But from urban slum to remotest rural village, the signs are in this sprawling and complex sub continent, that the rising wealth of India may yet transform the lives of the country’s poorest people.

What nobody can predict is how long it will take. If the speed of Global India’s progress is breathtaking, the progress of the poor is more dogged.The rise of global India is measured in ‘lakhs’ (hundreds of thousands) of rupees.The struggles of the poor are counted in hundreds. As the country celebrated sixty years of independence from Britain this summer and Delhi’s Red Fort echoed to the sound of cannon, India’s flag flying free where the British Union Jack was lowered forever in 1947, it cannot afford to be too triumphalistic.

“Sixty years ago we started a new journey,” said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as he raised the flag.“We were inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s thoughts and views. But in the true sense,” he added,“we will have freedom and independence only when we get rid of poverty.” Only, maybe, when there is one India.

Castes and outcasts

Indian society is divided into three broad ‘social’ categories: the caste communities, the outcaste communities and the indigenous peoples. These last two categories are referred to in the Indian Constitution respectively as Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs).

The term ‘Scheduled Castes’ refers to anyone who falls beneath the four caste communities (the Brahmans – priests, the Kshatriyas – rulers and warriors, the Vaishyas – merchants and the Shudras – labourers), which are established on the basis of varna, an ancient cosmic-moral scheme of fixed-categorisation.

The precise origins of caste and untouchability are unclear shrouded in myth and history. However, the development of the caste system and the practice of untouchability are generally ascribed to the (disputed) Aryan invasion of India around 1500 BCE.

Previously known as the ‘untouchables’, SCs nowadays refer to themselves as ‘Dalits’ (meaning ‘oppressed’ or ‘broken’). They make up about 20% of the Indian population and still suffer from social and religious exclusion and economic exploitation by upper castes. They are among the poorest of India’s poor.

The Scheduled Tribes (STs) comprise various indigenous and tribal people who do not fall within the Caste System and who prefer to be called ‘Adivasis’ (the original inhabitants of the land). Their existence is threatened by rapid modernisation and industrialisation which, along with cultural erosion, lead to displacement and alienation from land, which is their principal source of livelihood. As a result, they too are most likely to be extremely poor.

But in modern India, change is under way. The opening of the country to global market forces has virtually destroyed the traditional jajmani distinctions which determine which castes undertake which occupation. The boundaries limiting interaction between upper and lower castes are now much more porous. Nevertheless, caste is emerging as determining factor in Indian politics. For example the Bahujan Samaj Party whose central tenet is to seek retributive justice on behalf of Dalits is now a major political player in Uttar Pradesh.

Nevertheless, despite these transitions which seem to subvert the traditional operation of caste-based power, the paradox of India is that Scheduled Castes in several parts of India continue to face discrimination, exclusion and exploitation.

India Poised To Accelerate? (http://www.forbes.com/emergingmarkets/2007/10/16/india-lehman-forecast-markets-econ-cx_rd_1016markets9.html)
Ruth David,
FORBES, NY
10.16.07, 8:21 PM ET

MUMBAI - India may already be booming, but Lehman Brothers believes it could get hotter still. The brokerage said Monday the economy is poised for takeoff, and could grow 10% annually over the next decade.

“We judge that India could grow even faster" than it is at present, the report said. But Lehman’s forecast is dependent on the country actively pursuing “structural economic reforms.” For the fiscal year ending in March, the economy expanded 9.4%. It has averaged annual growth of 8.6% over the last four years.

“Pushing through structural reform will remain a political challenge in the face of headwinds from vested interests and coalition politics,” Lehman said. “That said, there should be a new window for reform after the next general election in 2009.” The government’s term expires in May of that year.

Lehman believes reforms should include developing a corporate bond market, which today accounts for about 3% of the gross domestic product, to support a boom in business investments. The study said India’s gross domestic savings ratio could rise to 40% by 2025 from 34% at present.

To mobilize these savings into investments, the government must liberalize the pension and insurance business. About 88% of the workforce doesn’t contribute to pension schemes and 80% of Indians don’t have insurance coverage, the study said.

The ruling coalition’s communist allies are opposed to liberalizing foreign investments and to reforming labor laws that would allow state-run companies more freedom in hiring and firing. They also oppose sealing a nuclear energy accord with the U.S., threatening to withdraw support from the coalition over it.

On Monday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told President George W. Bush the government would not be able to operationalize the deal, which would allow India to import U.S. civilian nuclear technology, although India has tested nuclear weapons and not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Last week, Singh acknowledged he would relent to the domestic opposition. (See: “ Indian Prime Minister Casts Doubts On Nuclear Agreement”)

“India has learned a great deal from its structural policy reforms of the past decade; and we believe that these lessons will be carried forward, and built upon, in the coming years,” said Tarun Jotwani, chairman and chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers in India.

Last week, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development said India would be able to meet its target of 10% GDP growth by 2010 if it pushed ahead with privatization and improved infrastructure, a key stumbling block. (See: “ OECD Urges India To Speed Up Reforms”)

India’s economy, which touched the $1 trillion mark in April thanks to a strengthening rupee, is poised for “takeoff,” Lehman said in its report, referring to a term coined by U.S. economist Walt Rostow, who theorized that economies evolve in stages. A “takeoff” is the stage at which traditions and structural impediments that retard steady growth are finally overcome.

Lehman believes that India is at this stage. Per capita income has almost doubled to $800 since 2000, and the middle class has swelled -- defined as households with incomes between $4,400 and $22,000 -- to 13 million households, or about 50 million people.

With an expanding middle class, the country is experiencing surging demand for consumer durable goods such as cellular phones, ownership of which has increased exponentially to 148 million in August 2007 from 49 million two years earlier, the report said. The growth of the mobile market has prompted players like British mobile giant Vodafone to bet on the country.

And if you need more proof of growing buyer aspirations, Lehman quoted a study that found sales of high-end “frost-free” refrigerators are growing faster than traditional “direct cool” ones.

International Monetary Fund: Indian Economy Will Not Overheat If It Maintains Current Monetary Policy (http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7008849692)
Vittorio Hernandez
AHN News Writer
October 16, 2007 8:29 p.m. EST

Washington, DC (AHN) - The International Monetary Fund said India's economy will not overheat if it maintains the current monetary policy and its independence strengthened.

While India is considered the second best foreign direct investment spot next to China, it however needs to improve infrastructure and introduce educational reforms.

In a press briefing, IMF managing director Rodrigo de Rato said the fund is impressed with India's economic performance, logging a 9.7 percent growth in 2006 and an expected 8.9 percent for 2007. IMF projects a slightly lower 8.4 percent growth for India for 2008.

De Rato said he found the monetary response by the Reserve Bank of India appropriate and measures to liberalize the financial markets on the right track. The next steps are for India to improve infrastructure particularly in the power and transportation sectors and to upgrade labor skills to global standards.

India's improved economy is further reflected in its selection Wednesday by the World Investment Report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development as second best spot for foreign direct investment in 2007. It is next to China and followed by the U.S. and Russia.

Its 2007 ranking is a quantum leap forward for India, positioned 113th in 2006 and 121st in 2005. UNCTAD said the two Asian giants are emerging as major players in FDI outflows, "beginning to challenge the dominance of the Asian newly industrializing economies - Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan ...as the main sources of FDI in developing Asia."

India's petroleum export to be $ 497 billion by 2012 (http://mathaba.net/news/?x=567316)
Mathaba News Network, UK
Posted: 2007/10/16

India is likely to become a net exporter of petroleum products worth $ 497.01 billion by fiscal 2012-13 in the wake of their exports growing at a much faster pace than imports despite crude prices touching an all time high, said an ASSOCHAM Eco Pulse Study.

As per its projections, imports of petroleum products in value terms would be to the range of $ 429.45 billion in next 5 years.

The ASSOCHAM Study on "Petroleum Trade" for the period financial year (FY) 1999-2000 to 2006-07 has found that petroleum products exported by India have been growing at a whopping rate of 73 per cent for last three years.

The Petroleum Oil and Lubricants (POL) imports hiked at a comparatively lower rate of 40.6 per cent. The Study analyzed that if the same growth trend continues, value of oil exports will surpass its imports in next six years. In fact, the trend for the current fiscal shows that imports grew only by 11.4 per cent, while exports went up by 89 per cent in the month of April.

The ASSOCHAM President, Venugopal N. Dhoot said, "Petroleum exports were valued at $ 0.03 billion in the FY 1999-00, which increased to $ 18.53 billion in the fiscal 2006-07 growing at the compound annual rate of 96.5 per cent. Imports on the other hand, increased from 12.6 billion in the FY 1999-00 to 57 billion in FY 2006-07 recording a CAGR of 32.7 per cent".

Even as the energy requirements of the Indian economy are rapidly increasing, capacity expansion of the refineries both at public and private level would help maintain the growth momentum of the exports of petroleum products, he added.

Petroleum exports for the financial year 2006-07 stood at $ 18.53 billion registering an increase of 22.77 per cent as compared to USD 11.63 billion worth exports incurring 13 per cent growth in previous year. With consistent robust growth rate on the exports front, the value of exports is estimated to touch USD 497 billion by fiscal 2012-13.

The growth rate of petroleum imports has declined over the last two years. While in FY 2005-06, the imports grew at 47 per cent at $ 43.95 billion, the growth slowed to 29.7 per cent in FY 2006-07 with the imports amounting to $ 570.36 billion. The imports in current fiscal 2007-08 have shown growth of only 8.32 per cent, despite crude prices touching $ 80 per barrel. The growth in the import bill could be on account of Rupee appreciation of 9 per cent since March 07, which makes the landed price of crude oil cheaper.

The impact of rupee rise on export performance would have been neutralized because of content of import of crude oil. The oil imports would grow to $ 429 billion in next five years, according to ASSOCHAM Study.

497 billion???

Sounds like a ludacris amount....

India's firms build global empires - I (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/10/29/100795475/?postversion=2007101811)
By Clay Chandler, Fortune senior writer
October 18 2007

Once sheltered from overseas competition, Indian companies are now building empires - ramping up exports, making acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe, and attracting billions in foreign capital.

(Fortune Magazine) -- Tulsi Tanti made his fortune building windmills, not tilting at them. But executives at French nuclear energy giant Areva might be forgiven for conjuring images of Don Quixote when the 49-year-old Indian entrepreneur squared off against them this year for control of Germany's leading wind-turbine manufacturer.

Areva - controlled by the French government and boasting annual revenue of $13.7 billion - is one of the world's most powerful power companies. Tanti's Suzlon Energy is a family-owned venture, barely a decade old.

Ratan Tata, Tata Group: purchased Britain's Tetley Tea for $430 million in 2000, followed by Daewoo's truck operations, the Ri tz-Carlton in Boston, and this year Corus steel for $13 billion.

But Tanti's bid for Hamburg-based REpower was anything but quixotic. Back home in India, Tanti had reinvented the model for selling wind power, forsaking the fragmentation typical of the global industry for an end-to-end approach consolidating the entire process - surveying and purchasing sites for wind farms, building and maintaining turbines, and even distributing the power - under a single corporate roof. Suzlon's sales were soaring, its stock hitting record highs on India's stock exchange, and foreign bankers were tripping over one another to lend Tanti money.

When Areva, which already owned 30% of REpower, offered $148 a share for the remaining stake, Tanti outbid the French Goliath, then outmaneuvered it at every turn. By May, Areva conceded defeat, clearing the way for Tanti to lock up 86% of REpower in a deal valued at $1.7 billion. To hear Tanti tell it, the contest's outcome was never in doubt.

"I can take a company with a 4% margin and turn it into a company with a 20% margin. They can't," he says with a shrug, sipping a glass of watermelon juice between meetings in Mumbai. "So I knew from the beginning: Whatever they offered, I could pay much more."

These days Tanti isn't the only Indian executive who feels the wind at his back. Buoyed by a robust economy, a booming stock market, and the sharp appreciation of the rupee, India's flagship firms are pushing beyond their home market into the wider world.

Once sheltered from overseas competition by a government fearful of foreign domination, Indian companies now are building global empires with impressive speed, ramping up exports, striking cross-border corporate alliances, snapping up firms in the U.S., Europe, and emerging markets, and attracting billions in foreign portfolio capital to India.

More on Indian companies -

India's largest IT-services companies, which count on foreign customers for more than 90% of sales, remain at the vanguard of India's outward expansion. In little more than a decade, firms like Wipro, Infosys Technologies, and Tata Consultancy Services have evolved from niche players handling basic debugging projects for foreign multinationals into giants in their own right, with operations in every major foreign market, tens of thousands of employees, and equity valuations in the tens of billions of dollars.

But Indian manufacturers are going global too. Consider Bharat Forge in Pune: After six foreign acquisitions in three years, Bharat has emerged as the world's second-largest manufacturer of axle beams, crankshafts, and other forged auto components. CEO Baba Kalyani says he's ready to spend another $250 million on foreign acquisitions and expects to overtake Germany's ThyssenKrupp as industry leader by the end of next year.

Across town Bajaj Auto, squeezed by competition from Japanese motorcycle manufacturers in the Indian market, has repositioned itself as the premium-brand leader at home - and is now taking the battle back to Japanese and Chinese rivals in markets like Indonesia, Egypt, and Brazil.

Ranbaxy Laboratories, India's largest pharmaceutical company, manufactures generic drugs in 11 countries, distributes and markets them directly in 49, and counts on foreign markets for 80% of its revenue. CEO Malvinder Singh touts Ranbaxy as India's first true multinational. "Our headquarters may be in India," he says, "but we have learned to operate locally and in a very decentralized manner."

India Inc. still wrestles with the old demons: bad roads, an inadequate education system, shortsighted politicians. In the most basic categories of development, India's economy lags behind China's. Morgan Stanley estimates that China outspends India on infrastructure by a ratio of seven to one. The result: India's manufacturers pay twice as much for electric power as do their Chinese counterparts and three times as much for railway transport.

It's estimated that 40% of India's perishable goods rot before reaching market. India's vaunted technology institutes graduate hundreds of thousands of engineers each year, but their skills are uneven, and India's broader educational institutions have neglected the rest of the nation, leaving 30% of the population unable to read and write.

India's dysfunctional political system - riven by caste, religion, party, and faction - bears much of the blame for these failures. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and members of his economic team win high marks for policymaking savvy. But they answer to a fractious political coalition whose leaders seem indifferent to the realities of the global economy. Little wonder that while China attracted $70 billion last year in foreign investment, India took in less than $10 billion.

And yet, for all those handicaps, India is barreling forward. Indeed, for the past two years its economy has managed growth rates of 9%, only a percentage point or two shy of China's. In many ways Asia's two emerging giants have embraced development models that are polar opposites. China's strengths may be India's weaknesses - but the reverse is also true. Says CLSA equities strategist Christopher Wood: "China's economy grows because of its government, while India's economy grows in spite of it."

China's broad highways and bustling factories are the product of an authoritarian regime that puts a premium on control. Growth is stoked by government spending and exports, and the economy is dominated by state-owned companies. India's more chaotic business landscape is dominated by family-owned conglomerates, many founded generations ago during India's years as a British colony.

After India won independence in 1947, state planners parceled out monopolies to these dynasties under an arrangement known as the license raj. When a 1991 balance-of-payments crisis forced planners to loosen up, the family firms scrambled to adapt. Now many of them - including groups bearing names like Tata, Birla, Godrej, and Mahindra - are reemerging as well-managed, globally competitive players.

Lightly regulated sectors like software programming, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals spawned new players such as Narayana Murthy, who launched Infosys (Charts) from his Pune apartment, and Sunil Mittal, who parlayed a bicycle-parts company in Ludhiana into Bharti Airtel, India's leading mobile-phone company.

The success of Indian ventures, whether old or new, owes much to the quality of their domestic capital markets. Deng Xiaoping launched mainland China's exchanges in the early 1990s as an experiment. More than a decade later they remain badly regulated, wildly speculative, and mostly off-limits to both foreign investors and private Chinese firms.

The Bombay Stock Exchange, by contrast, has been around twice as long as India has been independent. It is one piece of infrastructure India's regulators have gotten right: encouraging new ventures, punishing poor management, and accelerating growth of established players. India, CLSA's Wood argues, "has by far the best growth story of any of the emerging economies."

Infosys co-chairman Nandan Nilekani claims the India model is evolving into "something unique. On the one side, there's this array of entrepreneurs and a large pool of inexpensive talent. And on the other we've created a very market-oriented mechanism for raising capital. Put those things together and there's a real ferment. In India all it takes is a little deregulation, and whole sectors go from sleepy oligopolies to highly competitive environments almost overnight."

The bullishness of India's business Brahmans was on display in New York City last month during a four-day, $10 million marketing blitz. The campaign, billed as a celebration of India's 60th year of independence, featured billboards in Times Square, Bollywood dancers performing atop a replica of the Taj Mahal in Bryant Park, and posh dinners attended by dozens of business and political leaders flown in from India.

The objective, said Bharti's Mittal, president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, which organized the events, was to "present the picture of a confident nation ready to engage with the world."

That willingness to engage is manifest in a rising tide of Indian acquisitions. In 2000 the Tata Group, one of India's oldest and proudest conglomerates, made headlines by paying a then-record $430 million for the company that invented the tea bag, Britain's Tetley Tea. Indian purchases of that magnitude are now routine.

In April, Hindalco Industries, part of India's Aditya Birla group, paid $3.6 billion for Canadian aluminum company Novelis. In May, as Suzlon closed its deal on REpower, Vijay Mallya's United Breweries snapped up Whyte & McKay, the world's fourth-largest distiller of Scotch whisky. In August, Wipro (Charts) pocketed New Jersey software house Infocrossing for $600 million. In the first three quarters of this year, Indian companies announced 150 foreign acquisitions with a total value of $18.1 billion, according to Dealogic - a fourfold increase over all of 2005.

But none can match Tata Group for ambition. In April, Tata Steel paid $13 billion for Corus, an Anglo-Dutch steel company, securing mills in Ohio and Pennsylvania and quintupling its steelmaking capacity. That remains India's biggest foreign purchase to date. But between Tetley and Corus, Tata scooped up a slew of other overseas assets: an undersea-cable business, the truck-manufacturing operations of South Korea's Daewoo group, a stake in one of Indonesia's largest coal mines, and a raft of foreign hotels, including the Ritz-Carlton in Boston.

This year, for the first time, the group will take in more revenue overseas than it does at home. Tata is well on its way to becoming India's first truly global brand. And chairman Ratan Tata, who wouldn't talk to Fortune for this story, is still shopping. In August he declared his interest in buying Jaguar and Rover, now owned by Ford Motor.

India's firms build global empires - II (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/10/29/100795475/index2.htm)
By Clay Chandler, Fortune senior writer
October 18 2007

In Mumbai, India's financial hub, bankers joke about "reverse colonization." An oft-heard lament is that the deals reported in the financial press are nothing compared with the ones considered and then rejected. Ranbaxy, which gobbled up no fewer than eight firms last year, passed on an opportunity to buy Germany's Merck. The drugmaker was sold instead to Mylan Laboratories in the U.S. for $6.6 billion. "Acquisitions, yes," says CEO Singh, "but not in a reckless manner."

Ranjit Pandit, managing director of the Mumbai office of General Atlantic, a U.S. private equity group, says it wouldn't surprise him to see a $50 billion deal. "Suddenly," he says, "bankers the world over are beating a path to India."

Remarkably, few of India's foreign acquisitions have gone awry. For now at least, there is no Indian equivalent of TCL, the Chinese TV manufacturer still struggling to digest its 2004 purchase of the troubled television division of France's Thomson. Nor have Indians encountered the sort of political backlash that thwarted efforts by CNOOC, China's state-owned petroleum giant, to purchase U.S.-based Unocal in 2005.

Tata's bid for Jaguar and Rover, which are expected to go for at least $1.5 billion, will test his limits. That deal would bring Tata's automotive unit new technologies and a broad international sales network. But industry analysts question how Tata Motors, whose products and sales service finished at the bottom of J.D. Power's 2007 India customer-satisfaction ranking, would revitalize the two money-losing British luxury brands. It's hard to see how either company will mesh with Tata's push to produce the world's cheapest passenger car, at about $2,500.

Anand Mahindra, CEO of Mahindra & Mahindra, India's largest manufacturer of tractors and SUVs, wonders whether India's global expansion resembles corporate Japan's buying binge during its 1980s bubble economy. "Is this really the carpe diem moment for India?" he asks. "Is this part of a well-considered strategic roadmap? Or is it all just steroids?"

Mahindra won't comment on reports he dropped out of the bidding for Jaguar and Rover. But he is hardly shrinking from other opportunities. Over the past several years he has purchased a tractor plant in China and diversified into the forging industry by purchasing companies in Germany and Britain. Each acquisition made sense, he argues, because it brought new technologies, new customers, or significant economies of scale.

Mahindra has also entered into an alliance with Renault to build a passenger car based on the French automaker's low-cost Logan sedan. Together with Renault and Nissan, he is investing in a $900 million passenger-car plant on the outskirts of Chennai. That facility, which will be India's largest auto factory, is scheduled to open in 2009 with an annual capacity of 400,000 vehicles. That same year Mahindra plans to launch a range of compact pickups and hybrid SUVs in the U.S.

The surge in Indian outward investment has been matched by rising interest from overseas private equity funds in deals that go in the other direction - $28.8 billion so far this year. Blackstone, Carlyle, TPG, and others have all raised funds for Indian investment. The model is Warburg Pincus, which cashed in an early investment in Mittal's Bharti Airtel for a billion-dollar profit. But so far most foreign private equity deals have been limited to small stakes in successful firms that don't confer management leverage.

"The mindset here is different," says Mickey Doshi, head of Credit Suisse's investment banking arm in India. "For the most part these are family-controlled businesses, and it's just not in their DNA to sell."

Multinationals seeking to expand their presence in India are having better luck. For companies like Wal-Mart (Charts, Fortune 500), Citigroup (Charts, Fortune 500), or Procter & Gamble (Charts, Fortune 500), the sheer size of the Indian market has obvious appeal. McKinsey expects Indian incomes to triple over the next two decades, lifting 290 million people out of poverty and expanding the ranks of India's middle class to 580 million.

Increasingly, foreign firms describe India, with its deep pool of technical and engineering talent, as not only a market but also a vital link in their global value chain. Accenture, EDS, and Google are all expanding aggressively in India. Cisco is building a sprawling campus in Bangalore and wants to fill it with 10,000 employees. At IBM, CEO Sam Palmisano has increased the company's India workforce to more than 50,000 - twice its size in 2004 - while slashing payrolls in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

Consultants at Paris-based Capgemini, reviewing the results of a survey of 340 of the world's largest manufacturers, last month declared that India "could challenge the position of China as the manufacturing center of the world within the next three to five years."

But direct investment in India remains a tricky proposition. To conform to restrictions protecting India's small shopkeepers and wholesalers, Wal-Mart has been obliged to enter into a complicated alliance with Bharti's retailing arm, and the company faces popular protest when the venture's first stores open later this year.

Meanwhile, U.S. and European tech companies that rushed to India in search of inexpensive knowledge workers are finding the talent pool smaller than they imagined - and with so many foreign and domestic firms fishing in it, wages for engineering graduates are rising 15% a year.

On the outskirts of Chennai, a city of seven million on India's southeastern coast, a sprawling manufacturing plant run by South Korean carmaker Hyundai Motor highlights India's promise as a manufacturing export hub - and its peril. Hyundai came to Chennai in 1995 after Beijing rebuffed its request to build passenger cars in China. Tamil Nadu state officials granted Hyundai permission to build a factory and retain 100% ownership.

Today that plant is arguably India's finest manufacturing facility, capable of cranking out 1,000 cars daily - six different models, with right- or left-hand steering, and in a rainbow of colors. One in three cars built there are for export, and all conform to European safety and emissions standards. A second assembly line, kicking into operation this month, features state-of-the-art Korean robots capable of welding an entire auto frame in 54 seconds.

Hyundai sources 90% of its parts locally. It is Tamil Nadu's top taxpayer and, together with the more than 50 suppliers that followed Hyundai from Korea, accounts for about 30,000 jobs in Chennai. But unlike China, or for that matter most U.S. states, officials in Tamil Nadu offered no assistance with infrastructure, power, or water. Talk of a railway line linking the Hyundai plant directly to Chennai's port remains just talk. To ease congestion, the city of Chennai restricts large trucks from using its roads until after 8 P.M. Even then it often takes three hours to traverse the 19 miles from factory to port - leaving just enough time to unload cargo and return to the plant before the morning rush.

One hundred miles south of Chennai, near Pondicherry, trucks bearing state-of-the-art wind turbines and 130-foot rotary blades emerge from the gates of Suzlon's gleaming plant, then snake slowly through rice fields and around thatched-roof huts along a dusty rural lane.

But if bad infrastructure is an impediment to Suzlon's growth, it is also the source of its success. Tanti's first venture was a polyester factory launched in the 1980s after a stint managing the family construction business. Electricity was a constant headache. India's power grid is notoriously erratic, obliging even small producers to operate their own generators. To cope, Tanti turned to wind power in 1995, purchasing two turbines for his plant.

But operating and servicing the giant contraptions proved a full-time proposition. As it dawned on him that other manufacturers faced similar problems, he threw caution to the wind. Abandoning textiles, he rounded up a group of former engineering classmates, rented a factory, and hired a German consultant on a 90-day contract to teach them the business. For their first customer they built ten wind turbines in four months.

Tanti decided early on that the key to holding customers was to make wind power hassle-free. "Other companies were just equipment vendors," he explains. "They'd give you the turbine, and that was it. Maintenance? 'Not my problem.' Parts? 'That's someone else.' The way we do it, it's like selling a model home. All the customer has to do is pick the model."

Today Tanti controls all the links in his supply chain, including site selection, design, manufacture, installation, and customer service. Suzlon builds engines in Germany, gearboxes in Belgium, and rotary blades in Pipestone, Minn. It operates one of the world's largest wind farms in Mahashtra, with 500 turbines spanning 1,300 acres. For the past three years, Suzlon has clocked average annual sales growth of 126%, and it recently overtook Siemens as the world's fifth-largest wind-power supplier.

I-banks gain in Mumbai's bull market -

The success of Suzlon's October 2005 debut on the Mumbai exchange was a milestone for the industry, one that got the attention of global investors who had previously dismissed wind as a marginal, low-growth technology dependent on government subsidy. Suzlon's market value has swollen to $12 billion, making Tanti one of India's richest men. "Our IPO changed the image of the whole industry," says Tanti. "Suddenly everyone saw the potential."

To stay focused on Europe, his biggest market and home to the industry's most advanced design and manufacturing, Tanti has moved Suzlon's international headquarters to Amsterdam. To keep pace with his global ambitions he has raided GE for his CEO, ABB for his CFO, and Shell for his HR chief. Yet Tanti insists an enterprise as cosmopolitan and convoluted as Suzlon could only have been invented in India.

"We have a business model that's completely counterintuitive," he says. "The concepts and design come from the Netherlands, the engineering from Germany, the commercialization from Denmark. And large-scale application comes from India. Only an Indian brain could dream up such a thing."

Increasingly, Indian dreams are shaping the reality of global commerce. Those dreams, like the currents of Tanti's turbines, offer great potential as a force for future growth.

..

Sounds like a ludacris amount....

yeah its rubbish. Ignore it

Let's have a look...

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/1408/petroleumoj9.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Almost every major news service has quoted the news. Atleast I would give some credibility to it.

It has actually been calculated mathematically using the fact that Petroleum products have reportedly increased at a compound annual growth rate of 73% per annum. So, going by the calculation it should increase to $497 billion by 2012-13. Although, the calculation is correct based on the existing data but I am not sure of the current capacity of our handful of refineries to match this figure. But still, I guess so many newspapers that have reported this news know something that I don't

It has actually been calculated mathematically using the fact that Petroleum products have reportedly increased at a compound annual growth rate of 73% per annum. So, going by the calculation it should increase to $497 billion by 2012-13. Although, the calculation is correct based on the existing data but I am not sure of the current capacity of our handful of refineries to match this figure. But still, I guess so many newspapers that have reported this news know something that I don't

I think it is insane to expect such a growth rate to continue. It's easier for something small to double in size each year, but as it gets bigger that's less likely to happen. The fast growth of most things tends to be logarithmic rather than exponential.

I think it is insane to expect such a growth rate to continue. It's easier for something small to double in size each year, but as it gets bigger that's less likely to happen. The fast growth of most things tends to be logarithmic rather than exponential.

I agree to the point. I think it would be better if GoI can get McKinsey or some other consultant to do some research study on this.

But again, we don't exactly know what constitutes for Petroleum products. There are several derivatives that are obtained by refining the crude oil. Do they constitute in total petroleum exports?

Sizing up India -- both of them (http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1494056.html)
Pawlenty's trade delegation will see a country where so much has changed, yet so much remains the same. But that can represent opportunity.

Fred De Sam Lazaro
Minneapolis Star Tribune, MN
Published: October 19, 2007

As it makes its final approach into Bangalore, the city that symbolizes India's embrace of modernity, Gov. Tim Pawlenty's trade delegation might spot a large building that bears a prominent Minnesota symbol of pop culture, if not global trade. It is the headquarters of Target in India.

I wish I were there, for such a trip would have been unthinkable to me when I arrived from Bangalore in the late 1970s to attend college in Duluth. (I subsequently worked as a journalist in almost every corner of Minnesota, then across the world.)

Back in those days, the Mesabi iron mines were a competitive alternative to college; meatpackers were almost all white and could afford to send their children to college, and a governor who championed international trade was nicknamed Goofy. No one knew where Bangalore was, and India evoked images of hungry children -- images that parents used to coax their kids to eat their vegetables.

So much changed in so short a time.

Today it seems the best hope for sustaining an iron industry in Minnesota is a new ore and steel plant that probably will be owned by an India-based company.

However, it is in the record growth of Minnesota's Asian Indian community that the growing ties to Minnesota are most evident -- evident in the Minneapolis skyways on weekdays and in the aisles of Costco or Ikea on weekends. Asian Indians number perhaps 30,000 -- second among Minnesota's Asian populations behind the Hmong -- and, because they are cherry-picked from among India's most-skilled, they are first of any ethnic group in median household income. It is a group of earlier arrivals from this diaspora who urged the governor to make the trip to India, who will shepherd his entourage and who will manage the sensory overload for the first-timers.

Bangalore has seen explosive growth, but it is no Minneapolis or Shanghai. And the Target isn't a real Target, but rather a giant back office. Malls have arrived, and Wal-Mart is trying, but retailing is still largely the domain of small shopkeepers and street vendors.

India's new economy -- the raison d'être and the itinerary for the delegation -- is largely behind the walls of new office parks and on the campuses of global companies, including new Indian ones like Wipro and Infosys. They have transformed Bangalore beyond recognition from the sleepy leafy haven for retirees that was its reputation when I was a child.

Yet plenty is all too recognizable and impossible not to spot for the visitors.

So long a time, so little change.

Cities like Bangalore have become magnets for migrants from rural areas, where 72 percent of Indians live. As many as 800 million people must get by on less than $2 a day. The call-center operator may be India's mascot today, but the starving children have not gone away. There are more malnourished children in India than any other nation on Earth.

"There are two Indias," says S. Ram Krishnan of St Paul, borrowing from the slogan of presidential hopeful John Edwards. Krishnan grew up in Chennai (formerly Madras) and worked for Target early in a 30-year engineering career. Now he spends four months of each year in India, in places nowhere near the governor's itinerary. His passion is to bring clean water and sanitation to rural areas. And he's quick to point to countless other long-time Indian Minnesotans who've come -- or gone -- full circle.

There's retired Honeywell engineer Abul Sharah, who started a public-health clinic in his native Uttar Pradesh, or Franklin Gummadi, who has started microlending and self-help projects. On a larger scale, Bloomington entrepreneur Rajiv Tandon is using online learning to sell what he calls one of America's most exportable commodities: education and training. Of the 3 million graduates who emerge from Indian higher education each year, Tandon says only a tenth are up to world standards. He has contracted with Indian industries to deliver course work from such Minnesota institutions as Dakota County Technical College to India. They train not just information technology workers but also plumbers, welders and auto mechanics, the people you need to build a modern society. India's skills gap provides an enormous market for Minnesota, says Tandon.

It brings to mind another icon from my early Minnesota days. Bill Norris, the late CEO of the late Control Data Corp., promoted the idea that there were good business opportunities in serving the unmet needs of society. The question now is whether that notion can be reborn, like Bangalore, in modern form.

Fred de Sam Lazaro is a correspondent for PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" and director of the Project for Under-Told Stories at St. John's University, Collegeville.

Italy-India - Cooperation in film a 'fantastic marriage of convenience' (http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/CultureAndMedia/?id=1.0.1448655911)
Adnkronos International Italia, Italy
Rome, 19 Oct.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/Assets/Imgs/Personaggi/B/KB-Jpeg--200x150.jpg

In India, he's the Bollywood star who made it big internationally as the villain Gobinda in the Bond flim, Octopussy, and as Prince Omar in the popular American soap, The Bold and the Beautiful.

But mention Kabir Bedi's name in Italy and the response is overwhelming. Faces of men and women in their late 30s, light up and they instinctively burst into the theme song of Sandokan - the TV series that ran on state-run RAI television in the 1970s and 80s.

Bedi (photo) played the title role of Sandokan, a pirate in Malaysia who falls in love with an English girl as he fights the British colonial powers.

Based on books by the Italian writer Emilio Salgari, the Italian-German-French co-production was a phenomenal hit in Europe and led to merchandising as had never been seen before in Italy with books, games and even action figures for sale.

"It was something that took everyone by surprise even me," said Bedi in an interview with Adnkronos International (AKI) the Italian capital, Rome. "No one could possibly imagine this kind of success with a series. So I owe a lot to Sandokan."

Despite his success with Sandokan, Bedi said it was hard initially to find more work in Italy as noone in the local entertainment industry could see him in any other role. This forced him to look elsewhere.

Bedi made the transition to Hollywood where he has had success with roles in film and television. In his 30 year career he even returned periodically to India and has some 60 Bollywood films under his belt, including director Raj Khosla's film Kuchche Dhaage and Main Hoon Na, the box-office hit produced by Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan, who also had a role in the movie.

But Italy kept calling Bedi back.

There was the Return of Sandokan, movies like Il Cosaro Nero and Marco Ponti's Andata Ritorno, TV series like Italy's own medical drama, Un Medico in Famiglia, and currently he even has a radio programme.

"I must say that there were years in Hollywood that weren't comfortable years, that were lean years because you don't always get work," said Bedi in his characteristic deep, husky voice.

"But Italy always kept a constant stream of work coming my way. So I was able to lead my life with dignity as an actor which is saying a lot and for which I am very grateful."

Straddling the film worlds in Italy and India, gives Bedi a unique insight into possible cooperation between Bollywood and Italian cinema.

It may not seem like an obvious partnership, but earlier this year Italy signed a film co-production agreement with India .

The purpose of such a deal is to increase the use of Italian locations for Indian movies, to boost collaboration in animation and post-production and to foster the transfer of techniques and know-how in areas such as old movie restoration.

"So far the cooperation between Italy and India has been very minimal. But I think there's room for hope," said Bedi.

"Many Italian producers get their financing from the state and earlier people that entered into co-productions were not always eligible for the benefit that they would get from the state. Now they are," he said.

For Bedi, there also isn't any cultural conflict when Italians and Indians get together.

"We all have the same sense of hospitality, we all gesticulate with our hands, we have a great sense of importance of religion and religious beliefs in our lives. We believe greatly in the family. We have a great variety of food in every region of our countries. And we like the same kind of films," said Bedi.

One concrete example of this collaboration is the strong presence of Indian cinema in the second edition of the Rome Film Festival that began this week.

Indian films will be featured and a round table debate has been organised on Roberto Rossellini, the acclaimed Italian film director who profiled both Italy and India in his works.

The festival organizers also promise talks by screenwriters, directors, actors and producers of recent Indian films - both Bollywood and independent cinema.

"In Bollywood now there is a whole new generation of film makers coming out who are really bright and who fully understand the techniques of the West, who fully understand the idiom of Western film making," said Bedi. "I think their films will travel well and will make an impact here."

Bedi believes that in the same way many young Italian film makers will find an audience in India, particular as the distribution of films has also changed in India, with multiplexes screening a number of films at one time and no one group monopolising the distribution of films.

"Plus right now within India, there is a lot of corporate finance coming into the business, and they are looking for films with greater quality," he said.

"Even banks in India are lending to producers, They don't have to hawk their homes every time they make a film."

For this cross-continental and multi-lingual actor, the time is ripe for Italy and India to become the best film buddies.

"In Italy, the biggest problem in film is finance and in India the biggest problem is breaking into an international market," said Bedi.

"If India become the gateway to help finance Italian film and Italy become the doorway to Europe for Indian films, it will be a fantastic marriage of convenience," he said.

Manufacturing takes off in India (http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/18/news/international/India_manufacturing.fortune/)
India is overcoming its reputation as an inefficient, low-quality producer and learning how to compete globally. Can it give China a run for the money?
By John Elliott, Fortune
October 19 2007: 5:19 PM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- The sleek, clean factory in the Delhi suburb of Noida seems more Taiwan than India. Engineers in white overalls and goggles watch over an automated production line that spits out four billion state-of-the-art DVDs and CDs a year. To get to the factory floor, you have to pass through three air-cleaning passages - a process that makes it clear you're no longer in crowded, dirty Delhi.

This is not some futuristic vision of India. It's the main factory of Moser Baer, a 24-year-old Indian company that was one of the first in the world to make high-definition DVDs and is now starting on flash memories and solar panels. And while not typical of most Indian factories, Moser Baer is one of a number of companies utilizing the same brainy ability that fueled the country's IT boom to remake its manufacturing landscape.

The companies range from Bharat Forge, Bajaj, and Tata in the auto sector to Larsen & Toubro and Godrej & Boyce in specialist engineering, Ballapur Industries in paper, and others in pharmaceuticals and textiles, as well as Moser Baer. And they are showing that India is beginning to shrug off its reputation for appalling quality and reliability, and that it can compete internationally.

India is also emerging as an outsourcing design and production base for manufacturing, as it has been for software, with most of the world's autos companies - and many others such as Finland's Nokia (Charts) and Taiwan's Foxconn in mobile phones - sourcing components and assembling products.

Another example of the future is Tata Technologies, a Tata group design house based in Pune that operates in 12 countries. It has been involved in the design of Tata Motors cars and vans but does 74% of its work for foreign clients, including Chrysler, General Motors (Charts, Fortune 500), Boeing (Charts, Fortune 500), and Airbus.

An inside look at manufacturing in India

These successes show how wrong pundits were when they said five years ago that India had missed out on manufacturing because it could not sustain on-time deliveries and high levels of quality, and that the country's future therefore lay in software-led services. Manufacturing was then in the doldrums, at the end of a recession that started in the late 1990s before the economic reforms that began in 1991 had time to generate much change. There was a lack of both entrepreneurial self-confidence and industrial investment.

"People were disheartened and used software as a way of talking up India, saying - wrongly - that manufacturing was not material to the future," says Saumitra Chaudhuri, economic advisor to ICRA, a ratings agency part-owned by Moody's.

That belief was off target, though it reflects manufacturing's relatively small contribution even now of only 16% to India's GDP - less than half of what manufacturing contributes to the Chinese economy - and the fact that it only employs about 11% of the country's workforce. Government ministers have talked about increasing manufacturing's GDP share to 30%, which will gradually be achieved if the sector continues to grow at its 12% average of the past year (though it has slipped in recent months). That in turn would enable India to expand its exports and feed a growing home market.

The turnaround in Indian manufacturing began in the early 1980s when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told government-owned Maruti to make a "people's car." She didn't get what she wanted because Maruti ended up producing a small car for the middle class, followed by larger models. But she did get a successful 50-50 joint venture with Japan's Suzuki that sparked the foundation of today's automotive industry, which has annual sales of $34 billion and $5 billion in exports.

The Maruti Suzuki joint venture began to unlock manufacturing strengths that had been suppressed after independence, when bureaucratic restrictions were imposed by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister, and then increased by Gandhi, his daughter. Nehru's aim was to develop a self-sufficient, socialist, and centrally controlled economy that benefited the poor, with a dominant public sector. Gandhi, who wanted to increase state control and curb the clout of powerful business families, extended public ownership. What they unwittingly created was an inward-looking, highly protected, and inefficient economy that did little for the poor, negated private-sector entrepreneurship, allowed public-sector inefficiency, and guaranteed infrastructure decay.

Generations of employees from the 1950s onward had little pride in their work nor any awareness of the need to satisfy or care for customers. "The concept of quality used to be that if it works somehow, it's okay, but it doesn't need to work all the time," says Baba Kalyani, chairman of Bharat Forge, which has grown in the past few years into the world's second-largest forging company. "No one could create a high-technology, high-capital-cost business. You waited a year for an equipment-import license, got less than you wanted, then paid an 80% import duty."

It has taken the 25 years since Maruti Suzuki started for manufacturing to emerge from the legacy of those dark years. Only now, as India celebrates the 60th anniversary of its independence, are some manufacturing operations emulating the country's successful software industry.

"It has taken all this time for us to become confident in ourselves," says Surinder Kapur, founder and chairman of the Sona group, which makes steering systems for Maruti and other companies, including Toyota Motor (Charts).

Pride is growing in meeting customers' needs and doing even better than necessary - especially if it means beating China. Bajaj Auto, India's second-largest motorcycle manufacturer, used to be famous for its exhaust fumes and for persuading the government to delay strict emissions regulations.

"Now we are proud that our vehicles beat the norms by 50%," says managing director Rajiv Bajaj, who has turned the family-controlled company around since taking over the top job from his father a few years ago and streamlining operations with robotic machines. "China can't challenge us on three-wheelers because they can't meet the norms."

India's retail revolution

Before Maruti Suzuki's cars appeared, the streets of India's cities were dominated by British Morris Oxfords and Italian Fiats based on 1950s designs - along with bullock carts and scooters. Only 46,000 cars were made annually, and there was no incentive to upgrade them because of small production runs and scant competition.

"Maruti brought to India the concepts of tight cost control and process engineering," says Gautam Thapar, chairman of Ballapur Industries, which he has built into India's largest producer and exporter of paper. "It brought the first wave of modern component technology with the concept of Indian entrepreneurs and Japanese companies together supplying Maruti as an anchor client."

There were no adequate component suppliers in India when Maruti started, and there was no concept of partnership. Maruti changed that with a Japan-backed supplier-development program, taking 25% equity stakes in some companies it helped to start and encouraging Japanese component manufacturers to do the same.

Clusters developed in three locations, one of them around Maruti's factory in Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. Workers and suppliers were sent to Japan to learn lean manufacturing and quality-management techniques. The links continue today: Maruti design engineers worked in Japan on the Swift car that Suzuki launched in 2005.

Many tasks that would be automated elsewhere are done manually in Maruti's and its suppliers' factories by less-skilled labor. "Our body-assembly shop is 60% to 70% automated - in Japan it would be 90%," says Rajiv Gandhi, a Maruti general manager. "We could put in lots of robots, but we would have to justify it in terms of investment."

Maruti Suzuki, now majority-owned by Suzuki, expects to produce 770,000 vehicles this year for a market share of more than 50%, even though foreign and domestic competitors that have emerged since the early 1980s include names like Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, Ford, and Tata.

But there is still room for improvement. One supplier was seen delivering car seats to a Maruti factory last month in rusting trolleys, underlining the lack of pride in quality traditionally associated with Indian manufacturing. Maruti's priority now is to persuade its suppliers to put pressure on their second and third levels of vendors, where there has not yet been much change.

Moser Baer began making eight-inch recording discs around the time that Maruti was set up. "We stumbled on quality and deliveries, but we learned to be honest with customers and not to overpromise," says Deepak Puri, founder and managing director. "Since then we haven't looked back." It is still a small business - sales totaled $500 million in the year ended March 31 - but it is growing by 25% to 30% annually.

The company is now the world's second-largest producer of DVDs after CMC of Taiwan. It exports 85% of its output and supplies 60% of the Indian market. It is also one of three primary suppliers of optical discs to Imation, a U.S. data-storage company. Imation says it chose Moser Baer because its costs, quality, and ability to produce in quantity are similar to those of Taiwanese companies.

Products have been developed by mixing in-house expertise - including that of Indians enticed back home from jobs overseas - with inputs from international technical and financial partners. One of those partners is SolFocus, a photovoltaic company in California that had planned last year to produce solar cells and panels in China. It chose India instead because it has much better intellectual-property protection, says SolFocus CEO Gary Conley.

He was also impressed with the focus on cost and reliability. "Moser Baer controls the thickness of the silver applied to their DVDs and CDs to within one micron," Conley says. "They have spent years shaving microcents off the cost of manufacturing."

There was another center of excellence in the 1980s - Larsen & Toubro, founded as an import company 100 years ago by two Danish engineers. It has grown into a highly regarded heavy-engineering firm, with sales last year of $4.1 billion and an order inflow of $7.9 billion. One of the company's strengths is that, unlike other Indian manufacturers, it has always been run by professionals. M.V. Kotwal, a board director in charge of heavy engineering, calls it "an Indian company with European foundations," adding that in contrast to many family-controlled companies, management "does not have to look at what serves family interests."

Larsen & Toubro started manufacturing when imports were restricted under Nehru. It made dairy equipment, then fertilizer-plant heat exchangers, then cement plants. "When we see a competitor come in and we don't have an edge, we upgrade ourselves to higher-technology products," says Kotwal.

In the 1960s the company moved into nuclear technology and rocket casings. Its current work includes building reactors for the nuclear industry in India and abroad, ten coal-gasification plants for China, and a nuclear submarine hull for India's navy. Along with a few other companies, it is also starting to build ships - India accounts for only about 1% of world shipbuilding - in the belief that demand will outstrip the capacity of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese shipyards.

The company sees defense as a major growth area and hopes to build complete ships for the Indian navy. Only a few private firms, including Larsen & Toubro, Godrej & Boyce, Tata, and Mahindra & Mahindra, have dabbled in defense, mainly because it is dominated by the public sector.

But it has also been difficult to get orders abroad. "Indian companies have not been welcome in the West to participate in strategic programs because of the international worries over leakage of dual-use technologies," says Jamshyd Godrej, chairman of Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing, which makes rocket parts. "Ever since India's two nuclear tests, we have been isolated." India's proposed nuclear deal with the U.S. could open up new areas, he says, because "NASA might then consider an Indian company, which today it will not."

India's global reach

The nuclear deal could also provide more sophisticated work for joint ventures with foreign suppliers such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, General Electric, and Raytheon. Orders are expected from a new government program, under which foreign equipment suppliers will have to spend 30% to 50% of defense contracts in India. Such offsets could generate as much as $10 billion in orders over five years.

For all of India's gains in recent years, two problems threaten to slow manufacturing growth. One is a serious labor and skills shortage. Pune, an old industrial city about three hours' drive from Mumbai, where Bharat Forge is based, illustrates both the problem and some of the solutions. Kalyani says Pune's 30 engineering colleges turn out 6,000 engineers a year, but demand, boosted by software companies and call centers expanding from Bangalore, is for 15,000, and will rise to 20,000 next year. "The best ones go abroad," Kalyani says, "the next go to IT, the next do an MBA, and manufacturing is at the bottom of the heap."

Bharat Forge's workforce of 4,000 is 85% white collar, compared with 85% blue collar 15 years ago. "We took farmhands and made them into factory workers," Kalyani says, "and now we take engineers out of university to run the shop floor." He has an engineering college on Bharat Forge's Pune campus running a 30-month master's program with Britain's Warwick University.

It "creates my future managers," says Kalyani, adding, "Sending them away is okay, but then you lose half of them, and the colleges don't teach what we need." He also has a bachelor's program run with an Indian institute "enabling workers to become engineers." Below that, there's a "talent pipeline project" with technical colleges in rural towns, developing courses and identifying bright students who work at Bharat Forge during vacations.

The second problem is India's infrastructure, especially power shortages and the grossly inadequate highways and ports that make it difficult to transport goods. New highways are helping, but growing urban congestion is making the problem worse, and there are seemingly endless bureaucratic and physical delays at ports.

"Moser Baer avoids power shortages by having its own power plant, but it cannot construct the roads and ports which its products must traverse to enter the stream of international commerce," says Joe Gote, Imation's European director of legal affairs and corporate strategy.

The government is trying to help industry in others ways, with reduced duties, simplified tax structures, fewer restrictions on small-business activities, relaxed foreign-investment rules, and encouragement for industrial clusters that share infrastructure facilities.

Special economic zones, or SEZs, can also help - Moser Baer has one on part of its Noida site for its solar-panel production. Nokia and Foxconn both have factories in southern India on small SEZs, where they are showing that Indian farm workers can be trained to do low-technology production making mobile-phone cases and assembling finished products.

As India begins to shed its image of inefficiency and poor workmanship, it is proving that it can produce internationally competitive products. Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault, which is manufacturing its Logan car in India with Mahindra, has talked admiringly about India's "frugal engineering," where costs are controlled more instinctively than in Europe.

But perhaps only a third of Indian manufacturing deserves these plaudits. The rest is stuck in its old ways, with little care for, or pride in, quality. And until its infrastructure is improved, India's full manufacturing potential won't be realized.

America's Strategic Opportunity With India (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0710/S00500.htm)
Saturday, 20 October 2007, 9:48 am
Press Release: US State Department

R. Nicholas Burns
Under Secretary for Political Affairs
Article in Nov/Dec issue of Foreign Affairs
October 18, 2007

America's Strategic Opportunity With India

Summary: The rise of a democratic and increasingly powerful India is a positive development for U.S. interests. Rarely has the United States shared so many interests and values with a growing power as we do today with India. By reaching out to India, we have made the bet that the future lies in pluralism, democracy, and market economics.

As we Americans consider our future role in the world, the rise of a democratic and increasingly powerful India represents a singularly positive opportunity to advance our global interests. There is a tremendous strategic upside to our growing engagement with India. That is why building a close U.S.-India partnership should be one of the United States' highest priorities for the future. It is a unique opportunity with real promise for the global balance of power.

We share an abundance of political, economic, and military interests with India today. Our open societies face similar threats from terrorism and organized crime. Our market-based economies embrace trade and commerce as engines of prosperity. Our peoples value education and a strong work ethic. We share an attachment to democracy and individual rights founded on an instinctive mistrust of authoritarianism. And in an age of anti-Americanism, according to the most recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, nearly six in ten Indians view the United States favorably.

In the past decade, both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush recognized this opportunity and acted to construct a completely new foundation for U.S. ties with India. Our relationship with India now is our fastest-developing friendship with any major country in the world. I have visited India eight times in the last two years to help construct this partnership.

I have seen firsthand the remarkable growth in trust between the leaderships of the two countries. I have also observed the corresponding explosion in private-sector ties, the greatest strength in the relationship.

The progress between the United States and India has been remarkable: a new and historic agreement on civil nuclear energy, closer collaboration on scientific and technological innovation, burgeoning trade and commercial links, common efforts to stabilize South Asia, and a growing U.S.-India campaign to promote stable, well-governed democracies around the world. And the United States is only just beginning to realize the benefits of this relationship for its interests in South and East Asia.

Still, there are obstacles that the United States and India need to overcome before they can attain a true global partnership. The two countries need to work more effectively to counter terrorism, drug trafficking, and nuclear proliferation. Progress so far has shown how effectively we can work together to settle past differences and meet future challenges. If it is sustained, we will have an even greater opportunity to put American and Indian principles and power together and shape a more stable, peaceful, and prosperous global community.

Missed Opportunities

The realization of this vision of a broad U.S.-India friendship has long eluded U.S. presidents and Indian prime ministers. When India broke free from the British Raj 60 years ago, it was entirely reasonable to think that the United States would become one of India's foremost friends and partners. President Franklin Roosevelt had been an ardent champion of India's cause; many Americans saw the vision of the United States' separation from the British Empire reflected in the hopes and dreams of Indian freedom fighters.

But despite some successes in those early years, U.S.-India relations during the postwar period consisted largely of missed opportunities. The two countries found a common connection as large multiethnic, multireligious democracies. The United States was India's largest aid donor in the first decades after its independence; collaborated on India's extraordinary "green revolution," which helped end India's famines; and rushed military assistance to India during its border war with China in 1962. Yet none of this was enough to bridge the chasm of the Cold War. From the American point of view, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's nonalignment policy and warm relations with the Soviet Union made close political cooperation unachievable, and Nehru's mostly autarkic socialist economic policies limited trade and investment ties. President Richard Nixon's "tilt" toward Pakistan in 1971 and India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974 planted the United States and India squarely on opposite sides of the political and nonproliferation barricades.

As is so often the case with proud and great countries, this rather bitter history overwhelmed efforts to mend fences and postponed the long-desired partnership between India and the United States. Even as the Cold War came to an end, Washington focused on deepening its alliances with Europe and Japan and engaging a rising China. India was left off the list of U.S. foreign policy priorities.

But all that is history. Over the past 15 years, three significant developments have helped bring about the recent dramatic strengthening of U.S.-India ties. First, the end of the Cold War removed the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as the principal focus of U.S. foreign relations and the rationale for India's nonalignment policy. Second, India's historic economic reforms of the early 1990s, led by Manmohan Singh, then finance minister and now prime minister, opened India to the global economy for the first time and catalyzed the extraordinary boom in private-sector trade and investment between the United States and India that continues today. Finally, as the twenty-first century began, the global order started to undergo a tectonic shift, and India's emergence as a global force was obvious for all to see.

The arrival of globalization as a defining feature of the age caused Americans to understand that Washington needs like-minded global allies to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world. As Washington thought about how best to contend with the greatest of globalization's challenges -- international drug and other criminal cartels, trafficking in women and children, climate change, and especially the rise of terrorism and its potential intersection with weapons of mass destruction -- it became clear to most of us in the U.S. government that we needed to combine forces with powerful emerging countries such as India (Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa are others) to respond to these threats. In this radically changed global landscape, the basic interests of India and the United States -- the world's largest democracy and the world's oldest -- increasingly converged.

That this new U.S.-India partnership is supported by a bipartisan consensus in both countries considerably strengthens the prospects for its success. In India, both the ruling Indian National Congress and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party have worked for over a decade to elevate India's ties with the United States. In the United States, shortly after the beginning of India's economic liberalization, President Clinton signaled Washington's desire to forge a new era of commerce and investment between the two countries. And after India's May 1998 nuclear tests, then Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott engaged India's then foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, in 14 rounds of talks over two and a half years. Talbott's negotiations with Singh were Washington's first truly sustained strategic engagement with the Indian leadership.

When he entered office in 2001, President Bush recognized early on the power and importance of India's large and vibrant democracy in global politics. He essentially doubled the United States' strategic bet on India, pursuing an uncommonly ambitious and wide-ranging opening toward it and displaying the courage and foresight to take on the complex nonproliferation issues that had separated the two countries for three decades. President Bush called for the two countries to jump-start their relationship in four strategic areas: civil nuclear energy, civilian space programs, high-tech commerce, and missile defense.

Nuclear Spring

When Condoleezza Rice visited India in March 2005, shortly after taking office as secretary of state, she set out to lay a new cornerstone for the transformed relationship. She emphasized to Prime Minister Singh that the United States would alter its long-held framework that tied and balanced its relations with "India-Pakistan." We would effectively "de-hyphenate" our South Asia policy by seeking highly individual relations with both India and Pakistan. That meant an entirely new and comprehensive engagement between the United States and India. Secretary Rice also told Prime Minister Singh that the United States would break with long-standing nonproliferation orthodoxy and work to establish full civil nuclear cooperation with energy-starved India.

At the start of President Bush's second term, we knew that the nuclear issue was the proverbial elephant in the room in the U.S. relationship with India. We also understood that resolving it would allow us to define a more truly ambitious partnership. India had decided not to participate in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in the 1970s, and the United States and other NPT countries had, for three decades, sanctioned India for developing a nuclear weapons program outside the NPT regime. The result was India's isolation from the rest of the world on all nuclear issues.

Yet by 2005 it had become clear -- especially to those of us who wished to see a more effective nonproliferation regime -- that this state of affairs benefited no one. One of the world's largest and most peaceful states with advanced nuclear technology was outside the regime, whereas countries that cheated, such as Iran and North Korea, had been inside it. Despite India's outsider nuclear status, it had been a largely responsible steward of its nuclear material and had played by the rules of a system to which it did not belong. By bringing India into the nonproliferation regime, we would modernize and strengthen it while allowing India and the United States to forge a larger and more ambitious partnership.

When Prime Minister Singh visited Washington in July 2005, President Bush made this bold proposition: after 30 years, the United States was prepared to offer India the benefits of full civil nuclear energy cooperation. We would not assist India's nuclear weapons program, but we would help India construct new power plants and would provide it with the latest in nuclear fuel and technology to run them. In New Delhi in March 2006, President Bush and Prime Minister Singh announced the realization of this vision through the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative.

Nine months later, in December 2006, a strong bipartisan majority in Congress passed the Hyde Act, which approved the initiative, permitting American investment in India's civil nuclear power industry. These steps marked a huge change in U.S. and global thinking about how to work with India. They transformed India overnight from a target of the international nonproliferation regime to a stakeholder in it. Beyond those first moves, the U.S. Atomic Energy Act required a formal agreement to lay the legal basis for bilateral nuclear collaboration. We concluded the "123 agreement" this July, after long and sometimes difficult negotiations.

The benefits of these historic agreements are very real for the United States. For the first time in three decades, India will submit its entire civil nuclear program to international inspection by permanently placing 14 of its 22 nuclear power plants and all of its future civil reactors under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Within a generation, nearly 90 percent of India's reactors will likely be covered by the agreement. Without the arrangement, India's nuclear power program would have remained a black box. With it, India will be brought into the international nuclear nonproliferation mainstream.

Some have criticized this dramatic break from past orthodoxy, especially the decision to grant India consent rights to reprocess spent fuel. But in fact, the United States has granted reprocessing consent before, to Japan and the European Atomic Energy Community. Moreover, these rights will come into effect only once India builds a state-of-the-art reprocessing facility fully monitored by the IAEA and we agree on the specific arrangements and procedures for it. The agreement with India will not assist the country's nuclear weapons program in any way. And should India decide to conduct a nuclear test in the future, then the United States would have the right under U.S. law to seek the return of all nuclear fuel and technology shipped by U.S. firms.

In short, the civil nuclear agreement serves the national security interests of the United States. It has already become the symbolic centerpiece of the new U.S.-India friendship and is wildly popular among millions of Indians who see it as a mark of U.S. respect for India. Despite the objections voiced by the Communist Party of India in August of this year, the Indian government has stood firm and is meeting its commitments under the agreement. This agreement will deepen the strategic partnership, create new opportunities for U.S. businesses in India, enhance global energy security, and reduce India's carbon emissions. It will also send a powerful message to nuclear outlaws such as Iran: if you play by the rules, as India has, you will be rewarded; if you do not, you will face sanctions and isolation.

Several further steps remain. India must conclude a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, following which the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group must change its international practice to permit free civil nuclear trade with India. Then Congress will vote a final time to permit, once and for all, U.S. firms to work with India to construct nuclear power plants to meet its need for electricity.

During the two years of this diplomatic marathon of negotiations, my Indian counterparts and I worked more closely and intensively than we ever had before. We were sometimes forced to dig deep into our reserves of creativity and tenacity. But the outcome demonstrates that Americans and Indians can work together to achieve important goals on the most vital international issues -- something once thought impossible.

Securing South Asia

Another fundamental change in the United States' relationship with India has been newfound cooperation in South Asia. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, South Asia has been viewed in Washington as a region of vital importance to our future. It is the region from which the United States was attacked by al Qaeda. It is home to Pakistan, the most important U.S. partner in the struggle against al Qaeda. And it is home to the United States' friend and partner Afghanistan.

India is, of course, the region's largest country and its dominant economic and military power. We are now working closely with India for the very first time to limit conflict and build long-term peace throughout South Asia. We see India as a stabilizing force in an often violent and unstable part of the world.

The United States and India share a particular interest in defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and in helping to support that country's fledgling democracy. India has made important contributions there. It has pledged over $750 million for reconstruction, making it the largest South Asian donor to the government of President Hamid Karzai. It has helped renovate and build hospitals, granaries, and schools; it is training Afghan parliamentary officials in governance and parliamentary processes; and it has committed to building dams, roads, power projects, and a new parliament building. India's continuing involvement in Afghanistan is essential to that country's stabilization and long-term success, and cooperation between the United States and India in Afghanistan has been close and encouraging.

In Sri Lanka, the United States and India have come together to call for a political settlement with the Tamil minority through a power-sharing agreement so as to end the island's bloody conflict. Our countries have stood together in denouncing the terrorism and human rights violations that have plagued Sri Lanka during the past year. In Bangladesh, we share both influence and similar concerns over instability. We have encouraged the caretaker government there to restore democracy and fulfill the desire of Bangladeshis to replace corruption with good governance. And to the north, we are shoring up Nepal's democracy: helping the government restore its reach into the countryside and supporting the efforts of the Election Commission to hold constituent assembly elections.

The United States places a very high priority on improving relations between India and Pakistan. It is in the United States' strong interest to see the two countries develop a lasting and productive peace, including by resolving the conflict over Kashmir -- a potential nuclear flashpoint. This is a vital U.S. interest and is essential to securing South Asian stability. Both President Bush and Secretary Rice have made it a high priority to encourage both countries to overcome the historic and deep enmity between them. We will continue to support the promising "composite dialogue" between the two governments as well as efforts to stimulate greater contacts between the people on opposite sides of the Line of Control. Prime Minister Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf have achieved more in quiet talks toward resolving their bilateral difficulties than anyone thought possible a few years ago. That the composite dialogue continues as a channel of discussion marks remarkable progress from the 1999 Kargil conflict and from 2002, when the United States feared that India and Pakistan would go to war. In this light, the gradually increasing civil-society contacts between the two countries offer the prospect of a slow but sure development of constituencies for peace on both sides. A considerable peace dividend awaits both India and Pakistan if they can sustain this newfound momentum.

Leadership in South Asia is, of course, just one part of India's increasingly important global role. As India is both a rising power and a democracy, we in Washington view its growing influence in the world as broadly congruent with U.S. interests. Both countries seek to promote democratic principles and institutions around the world because we know that stable democracies are largely peaceful and better able to manage the consequences of globalization. Whether it comes to ensuring that China's rise is peaceful or preventing the Muslim world from turning its back on modernity or stopping rising economies from being ruined by rising temperatures, it is hard to think of two other countries with as much at stake or as much to offer to global stability.

With this in mind, the United States and India have worked hard to come together on global issues in recent years. Prime Minister Singh and President Bush jointly launched the UN Democracy Fund in 2005 and are its largest contributors. The fund is already having a tangible impact, having awarded more than 100 grants to civil-society organizations in countries that are democratizing or strengthening their democracies. Both nations are also active leaders in the Community of Democracies, a group of over 120 nations committed to assisting other countries on their path to democratization.

Together, the United States and India have also made real advances in cooperation on health issues. India is an important participant in the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza, which has helped put avian flu on the national agendas of countries around the world. India and the United States are also actively involved in fighting HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. We are working together to eradicate polio and to promote maternal and child health. We are natural global partners joined by a comparative advantage in science, advanced information technologies, and health services.

A Long Journey

Despite the enormous promise of the U.S. relationship with India, there are still considerable hurdles ahead as we seek to form a truly effective global partnership. First, it is critical that Americans consider their future with India realistically, guarding against undue optimism and excessive expectations. Differing histories, cultures, and geographies will make for a healthy but sometimes argumentative friendship. The United States and India will need to work together more effectively in four primary areas: military and intelligence, agriculture and education, energy and the environment, and freedom and democracy.

The first challenge will be to counter terrorism, drug trafficking, and nuclear proliferation, and to do so, the two countries will have to strengthen their military, intelligence, and law enforcement relationships. The potential of U.S.-India military cooperation became clear in the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami in South and Southeast Asia, when the Indian and U.S. navies and air forces were among the first to rush humanitarian assistance to those in need. Since then, the U.S.-India defense relationship has become much more active, including annual joint air force and naval exercises. Interoperability between the two militaries has also increased, helping to preserve stability in Asia. India's robust navy travels the sea-lanes linking the Middle East and Africa with East Asia, and we are working with it to expand the surveillance of suspect cargo vessels and real-time communication. Washington is also increasing military education and training exchanges, particularly in peacekeeping, an area in which India is a major global force.

Military cooperation is impeded by the fact that much of the Indian military still uses a considerable amount of Soviet-era equipment. Barriers to closer coordination in training and the sharing of military doctrine remain in both governments. A significant Indian defense purchase from the United States -- for example, of the new advanced multirole combat aircraft that the Indian air force seeks -- would be a great leap forward and signal a real commitment to long-term military partnership.

Meanwhile, the United States and India must also achieve more advanced cooperation on counterterrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement, based on the recognition that terrorism is a central threat to both countries. This means, among other things, working more closely to disrupt the flow of funds to terrorists. We also urge India to participate in our Container Security Initiative (which, among other things, allows the United States to check suspect U.S.-bound cargo containers at their foreign ports of departure) and to unleash its proven expertise in information technology to meet a new generation of threats from cyberspace.

The second major challenge is for the United States to help India address some of its most urgent domestic problems, particularly in agriculture and education. When Prime Minister Singh first met with President Bush in 2005, he expressed a strong desire to work with the United States on a second green revolution to help India's rural poor. This is an urgent task: despite India's progress, nearly 700 million of its citizens -- 25 percent of the world's poor -- live on less than $2 a day. Americans such as the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Norman Borlaug were key actors in India's first green revolution, and Prime Minister Singh has suggested that the United States' famous midwestern land-grant institutions could assist India through the implementation of public-private partnerships, market-oriented agriculture, and new agricultural methods. U.S. private-sector expertise and investment could help India create the cold-storage facilities, supply chains, and food-processing technology that form the backbone of a sophisticated agricultural market. The two countries could also collaborate on spreading environmentally sustainable farming methods, such as land conservation and water-resource management.

As India's rural poor become integrated into global markets, the United States and India must also find a way to bridge differences on global trade. We have differed with India on critical issues during the long Doha Round of trade negotiations. We continue to believe that the completion of the Doha Round talks offers the best hope for expanding global economic growth and prosperity. An Indian global trade policy that increases liberalization and stimulates significant and sustained trade in agriculture and manufactured goods would benefit all, and so would the opening of India's retail, banking, and insurance sectors.

As with agriculture, the United States helped establish some of India's finest educational institutions, including one of the Indian Institutes of Management and one of the Indian Institutes of Technology. Now an even more ambitious education agenda with India is needed. Education has been and will be a driving engine of U.S.-India relations -- it will constitute the foundation of a shared future and be a wellspring of personal relationships and dreams that go far beyond government-to-government cooperation. There are now more students from India at colleges and universities in the United States than there are students from any other country. Graduating Indian students have spawned new businesses, with new technologies and extended families that build new bridges between our countries. As India looks to expand educational opportunity for its citizens, the United States will be ready to cooperate. The announcement that the Georgia Institute of Technology will open a campus in India and the variety of joint ventures being considered are signs of much more to come. On the government side, we have agreed to expand the Fulbright Program in India and the exchange of scholars between the United States and India.

The third major area in which the two countries must work together more effectively is energy and the environment. If global climate change will be the most significant challenge of the future, India and the United States must face it together. The United States and China are currently the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, but India is about to join us in that inauspicious grouping. India has traditionally seen global warming as a developed-world problem and has argued that a country's responsibility for it ought to be measured in per capita, rather than absolute, terms. That will have to change. How a hugely populous and rapidly growing India addresses its energy needs is a question whose answer will have urgent consequences for the global environment. Even with clean nuclear energy in the future, India will need additional energy sources to fuel its growth.

Part of the solution will come from drawing on the strengths of the United States and India as increasingly dynamic, creative, and high-tech societies. As the United States invests in alternative energy sources, it can partner with India, home to some of the world's most innovative initiatives: the production of biofuels, the expanded use of compressed natural gas in public transport, and the world's most profitable wind energy company. Indian and American business leaders, scientists, and engineers must become a major part of the solution to the challenge of global climate change. We have already begun that process through the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which seeks to accelerate the development of clean energy technologies and bring together the public and private sectors to tackle this critical challenge. India is also a charter member of the major economies group that met at the State Department in September 2007 to plan for an effective post-Kyoto global regime on climate change.

The fourth major challenge is to work with India more effectively to promote freedom and democracy worldwide. Standing up for people who have not yet secured their right to have a say in their government should be an essential component of the new U.S.-India relationship. Truly moving forward on promoting democracy will require new ways of thinking, and both countries will need to make some tough choices, commensurate with their global responsibilities.

Some of India's fellow nonaligned countries are among the world's most oppressive and antidemocratic regimes. India's defense of those countries in resolutions at the United Nations and its political and military cooperation with some of them -- most notably Burma -- is anachronistic. Burma is a cruel dictatorship, and its continued detention of the heroic dissident and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who lived in India in her youth and studied at the University of Delhi, serves as a rebuke to all who believe in democratic values. India will also need to be careful about its long-term relationship with Iran. Indians will need to ask themselves if their civilizational link with the Iranian people shall be confused with support for the interests of the irresponsible theocratic regime in Tehran.

For its part, the United States must adjust to a friendship with India that will feature a wider margin of disagreement than we are accustomed to -- but a friendship in which the extra effort will be made up for by rich long-term rewards.

Finally, the United States and India should work together more effectively in the United Nations and other multilateral organizations, which I believe will play a larger role in our interdependent world in the future. It remains a curious irony that our ability to work together bilaterally has far outdistanced our sometimes contrary and disputatious work together at the UN. We must find a way to trust each other more and work in common cause in the world's global forums, and to do so with other rising democracies, such as Brazil and Indonesia. The United States welcomes the rise of a responsible, active India that engages on these issues. We urge the world to understand that international institutions, including the UN, will need to adapt to permit a greater leadership role for a rising India.

Natural Allies

As the United States and India look ahead to a new kind of partnership, we in the U.S. government should not forget that the big breakthrough in U.S.-India relations was achieved originally by the private sector. The strength of that private-sector engagement ensures that the change now under way is real -- and will last. In many respects, both governments are playing catch-up with the extraordinary business-led trade and investment growth of the last two decades. Since 1991 -- the year of the launch of the economic reforms in India -- trade between the United States and India has grown more than sixfold, reaching $32 billion in 2006. Boeing alone sold $11 billion worth of aircraft last year to India, one of the world's fastest-growing aviation markets. General Electric houses its second-largest research center in Bangalore. A number of India's blue-chip companies -- in banking, pharmaceuticals, and information technology -- are listed on U.S. stock exchanges.

I saw this phenomenal growth firsthand on a visit to Hyderabad last autumn. Standing in the lobby of the city's state-of-the-art business school, I caught a glimpse of a vast and sparkling office complex in the distance -- Microsoft's largest such enterprise outside of Redmond, Washington. On the same trip, I visited a high-tech Indian firm founded by Indian Americans who got their start in California. The virtual bridge between U.S. high-tech centers and the Hyderabad-Bangalore corridor in India is the most obvious example of the high-tech future. According to a recent Duke University study, more than one in seven start-ups in Silicon Valley is founded by an immigrant from India.

As businesses multiply, our societies are increasingly being woven together, thanks in part to the 2.5 million Indian Americans in the United States, the wealthiest and best-educated immigrant community in the country. People-to-people contacts -- for work, education, and tourism -- have reached new heights. The U.S. embassy and consulates in India are on track to process a staggering 720,000 Indian U.S. visa applications this year; the U.S. consulate in Chennai issues more U.S. visas for skilled workers (43,000 last year) than any other U.S. diplomatic post in the world. Each year, the United States accepts more students from India -- 76,000 this year -- than from any other country. Many of them have gone on to make substantial contributions in both countries and across diverse fields. The Stanford graduates Sabeer Bhatia and Vinod Khosla founded Hotmail and Sun Microsystems, respectively; the Yale graduate Indra Nooyi became the CEO of PepsiCo last year; the Harvard Business School graduate Rajat Gupta went on to head McKinsey worldwide. The late heroic astronaut Kalpana Chawla left Punjab for the University of Texas, parlaying her aeronautical engineering degree into a distinguished career with NASA.

The rise of a new U.S.-India strategic partnership over the last two decades is one of the most significant and positive developments in international politics. If the old U.S.-India relationship could barely lift anchor, the new one has clearly set sail. Today there is more of a strategic upside to our relationship with India than there is with any other major power. Our great opportunity and challenge is what we do with it and how we put it to work to serve our hopes for global security and peace. Indians and Americans have a unique opportunity over the next generation to rewrite history as it ought to have been written in the first place: the world's oldest democracy will finally count the world's largest as one of its closest partners. By reaching out to India, we have made the bet that the planet's future lies in pluralism, democracy, and market economics rather than in intolerance, despotism, and state planning. Sixty years ago, our countries failed to chart a common course. Sixty years from now, no one will be able to accuse us of making the same mistake twice.

Released on October 18, 2007

ENDS

My Indian visa outsourcing nightmare (http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/bangaloretigers/archives/2007/10/my_indian_visa.html?chan=top+news_top+news+index_global+business) :lol: :lol:
Steve Hamm
Businessweek
October 18, 2007

Over the past couple of years, I've traveled to India a couple of times per year, and, each time, I get a journalist visa. In the past, all I had to do was drop by the Indian consulate off of 5th Avenue in Manhattan on my way to work and wait for 20 minutes while a guy named Eugene took my paperwork and processed my application. Then I'd pay $60 and be on my way. Well, those happy days are gone. The Indian consulate decided to outsource its visa processing, which turned the process of getting a visa for my next trip into a nightmare of epic proportions. I had to employ some of my best anger management tricks to get through it.

Oh, the irony....

9:00 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10

I appeared at the front door of the consulate only to find a sheet of paper there notifying me that the visa work had been outsourced. Never one to take no for an answer, I went inside anyway to see if perhaps journalists were exempted. No such luck, I was told by the guy at reception. He handed me a flier with info about Travisa Outsourcing, which was located on 53rd Street between 1st and 2nd avenues--an area of Manhattan not readily served by mass transit. I asked to see Eugene anyway, and after a bit of a wait, I was told by a nice lady that somebody named Stephanie would take care of me. I called the number on the flier a bunch of times to see what I could find out but it was always busy or just rang. After a bit of a wait, Stephanie came down and told me that, yes, indeed, visa processing for journalists was also being handled by the outsourcing company. However, she took my application and passport and made photo copies, which, she said, would speed up the process. She said once I went to the outsourcer and I paid them, they'd bring the paperwork back to the consulate, where it would be processed and then sent back across town. I'd get my visa by the end of the day. Anticipating a major waste of time I told her: "This outsourcing thing must be good for somebody, but it's not good for me. It's not good for your customers."

10: a.m. Since it was raining and there were no cabs available, I walked the mile or so to the outsourcing joint, a tiny suite of rooms on the second floor of an old brownstone. There, it was hot and crowded. People were shouting at a man sitting behind a small desk. When I got to the front of the line, I shouted, too, after he told me that the form I had downloaded from the Indian consulate Web site two days before was no longer valid: applications had to be filled out on the Travisa Outsourcing Web site. The point I made, a few dozen times, was that I had just been to the consulate and my application was fine with them, so why wasn't it good enough for Travisa Outsourcing. I asked to speak to this guys boss, but he refused to let me.

There were a few PCs in the back of the room, and a ton of people waiting to use them to fill out their applications online. One of the Travisa Outsourcing guys advised me that I'd be better off if I walked over to a Kinkos that was on 3rd Avenue. So I did. Only it wasn't where he said it was. It was quite a bit further away. There, I waiting for a PC, finally got one, and wrestled with the Travisa Outsourcing Web site, which had some of the worst Web site navigation I've ever seen. Eventually, I was able to fill out the applications and make a photo copy. Total cost: $10. So I hiked back to the Travisa Outsourcing office.

11:00 a.m.

By this time there was a very long line at the office, which was also very hot. Lots of people were really pissed off. The line barely moved. At noon, a Travisa employee announced that the office was closing for lunch at 12:30. This caused not a little anxiety among the people in line, who, naturally, worried that they wouldn't be waited on before the office closed. I was one of the lucky ones. I handed over my credit card at approximately 12:25 p.m. and got through in the nick of time. The last word from the overtaxed guy who helped me was that there was no way my visa would be ready that day. My last word to him was: "This is the worst customer service experience I have ever had in my life!"

12:30 I walked to work and got there at 1 p.m. Running total: Four hours of time wasted.

I figured I'd wait for a few days to make sure my visa really was processed, so I went back to the Travisa office yesterday afternoon. I expected the worst, but was pleasantly surprised. In less than 30 minutes, I was out of there. (The people on the application end of the process were still piled up like sardines in a can) But, tag on the walking time to the office and back and the whole thing took an hour an a half.

So, in the end, I blew about six hours on this godforsaken process, compared to about one hour in the good old days.

Also, I paid $13 dollars extra to Travisa for the fine service.

Since outsourcing is so important to the Indian economy, I think it would be wise for the consulate to make it work incredibly smoothly for its customers, travelers to India. Unfortunately, they’re blowing it.

Minnesotans seek business as India's economy leaps (http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1497608.html)
There are more than 300 million middle-class Indians, and the Pawlenty-led trade group wants to tap into that giant market.

By Dee DePass,
Star Tribune
Last update: October 20, 2007 – 6:47 PM

Bert O'Donoghue has some advice for Gov. Tim Pawlenty and more than 70 other Minnesotans who will arrive in India today.

"Prepare all of your senses. Be prepared for them to be bashed with the sights, the noise, and the smells" of 1.1 billion people, said O'Donoghue, who lives in Bangalore and manages 3M India. "Just the massive humanity there is staggering. ... Still, it's an exciting place and it's a country whose time has come."

That's what Pawlenty is counting on as his trade delegation -- the state's first to India -- begins a nearly weeklong visit to the world's second-fastest-growing economy.

While an estimated 700 million Indians still live in poverty, an additional 300 million to 400 million have climbed into the country's middle class, making that segment of the population about the size of the entire United States.

"India is essentially new territory to Minnesota.... We think the market is largely untapped," Pawlenty said.

The governor would like to duplicate the success of his 2005 trade mission to China, which helped raise the country to second place among Minnesota's trading partners, up from fourth. (Minnesota exported $1.2 billion of goods to China last year.)

India would seem an easier market to crack. English is commonly spoken, the legal system is similar to that of the United States, many Indian firms are familiar with U.S. companies and the country counts itself an ally.

But India's import duties are exorbitant. Laws prohibit foreign chain stores. And, unlike China, India's roads are so decrepit and clogged that businesses regularly threaten to abandon major cities.

"This is not like selling in Indiana. It's India, and it's tough," said Frank Vargo, an economist with the National Association of Manufacturers International. "Nevertheless, this market is growing.... American companies have got to go and sell in India."

Trade with India is growing

Since 2000, Minnesota exports to India have risen 370 percent, to more than $129 million a year, 22nd on the list of the state's top 25 trading partners. But projections call for the state's exports to grow more than 30 percent a year.

Many observers believe that the Indian market could become as important to Minnesota as China's.

Indian businesses -- from software giant Wipro in Bangalore to Mumbai's Tata Group, a conglomerate that makes everything from software to tea to cars -- also are rising into the top ranks of world commerce. Some of them already have invested in Minnesota: Steel firm Essar Global is buying Minnesota Steel Industries, and will invest $1.6 billion to build a taconite-to-steel plant on the Iron Range, while wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy opened a 300-person plant in Pipestone last year. Tata employs 1,000 consultants in Minnesota; Wipro has 450.

"One of the things we have to do better is figure out ways to plug into the world and to figure out ways to prepare educationally, economically and demographically," Pawlenty said.

Gross Domestic Product leaps

India began relaxing its restrictions on foreign businesses in 1991, and the country has been rapidly emerging ever since. Its economy is growing at a 9-percent annual clip, and last year India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) hit $1 trillion. The incomes of Indian workers nearly doubled between 2000 and 2005, from $12.9 billion to $23 billion, according to the World Bank.

Much of the U.S. attention directed at India has been focused on its role in the outsourcing of American jobs. Indians staff call centers for U.S. companies and perform other services formerly done in this country.

A number of Minnesota firms also boast large Indian payrolls. Minneapolis-based Target Corp. has about 1,000 technology, legal, human-resources and other corporate workers in Bangalore. Maplewood-based 3M Co. has roughly 1,100 Indian workers. In all, Minnesota companies have more than 59,000 workers and about 30 offices and plants in India.

While some view those workers as taking away U.S. wages, Pawlenty is betting that the growing Indian middle class can fuel job growth in Minnesota as demand grows for computer hardware, medical devices and other products designed or made here.

"You can't go to India and not talk about the outsourcing," said Tony Lorusso, director of the Minnesota Trade Office. "But you also have to think about insourcing ... about Indian investment that is coming in this direction."

Pawlenty agrees.

"There will always be some winners, some losers, some gains and some setbacks in trade. But overall, we think that hiding in a global economy is not a great strategy," he said.

Dan Durda, CEO and co-founder of Chaska-based Aeration Industries, joined Pawlenty on his 2005 China mission. The high-level interactions smooth the way for business deals, he said.

"By going with Governor Pawlenty, it opens a lot of doors quickly, so I can cut to the chase," Durda said.

Aeration, which has 50 employees, has secured several contracts for water purification equipment in India. "We have a real good chance to do $1 million our first year," he said.

Because the country is starting to focus on its crumbling infrastructure, companies that specialize in government contracts stand to do well, Durda said.

For Target and Best Buy Co., Indian laws present the biggest obstacle.

Foreign big-box retail chains aren't allowed, so the nation remains one of small, family-run shops that line the busy streets.

Best Buy, which last week opened its largest consumer electronics store in the world in China, is confined in India to circulating compact discs with names such as "Bollywood Beats" and "Best of Indian Sarangi."India is something that we are studying, but there are no immediate plans," Best Buy spokeswoman Sue Busch said.

Target has a headquarters and technology center in Bangalore and a supplier network, but it has no plans yet to directly tap the Indian market.

Economy isn't totally open

3M, Graco and other manufacturers don't face the same issues. That doesn't mean that the Indian market is easy for them.

"The challenge of India is that it is still not a totally open economy," said O'Donoghue, the district manager for 3M India. His unit's sales are expected to grow 30 percent a year, but it is doing all of its manufacturing within the country instead of importing.

"They have taxes, on taxes, on taxes, on taxes on imports. So we end up paying duties in the region of 34 percent," O'Donoghue said.

3M sends raw materials from Minnesota and does "value-added" work in India, O'Donoghue said. For example, 3M ships reflective sheeting from the United States and Japan and enhances it to make millions of motorcycle decals for Indian residents.

Other businesses that cater to automakers say Indian demand is so strong that they can pay stiff import duties and still make a profit.

Minneapolis-based Graco Inc. imports 100 percent of its made-in-Minnesota equipment that it sells in India.

One company product is now doing roughly $10 million a year wholesale in Indian business. "That was up from $500,000 just five years ago," said Chris Koch, Pacific-Asia vice president for Graco, which makes industrial pumps and sprayers.

"India is still new to us," Koch said. "Hopefully, having the governor, with the power and the attraction that he brings ... can help us [see] where we should be investing."

Steel barons battle for India’s ore (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article2701524.ece)
A local hero and an outsider are pitted against each other to secure a thrilling prize

Dean Nelson from New Delhi
The Sunday Times, UK
October 21, 2007

LAKSHMI MITTAL and Ratan Tata have a lot in common. They both come from Indian steelmaking families and both transformed the fortunes of their empires. But they won’t be taking chai together any time soon: they are locked in a battle for control of India’s rich iron-ore reserves, and with them a stake in the country’s growth story.

It is a contest that represents a fight between the face of India’s homegrown industry and the world’s richest Indian, who left the subcontinent’s chaos behind to make his fortune abroad.

Mittal’s successful takeover of Arcelor last year made him the world’s biggest steelmaker, with 10% of the global market, while Tata’s victory in the battle for Anglo-Dutch Corus Group earlier this year put his family at the head of the world’s fifth-largest steel company. Now Mittal is returning to his roots for the next phase in the battle, but he will be fighting on Tata’s home turf.

The jungles of Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are home to some of India’s poorest tribes. This is the frontline in India’s brutal war on Maoist insurgents – and the source of the iron that will build a new India.

These states are now exploiting their mineral potential, tying up multi-billion pound mining and production deals they hope will lift them out of poverty and build crucial infrastructure.

It is this growth story that is drawing Tata and Mittal into the fight. India is the world’s second-fastest growing economy after China, with vast infrastructure projects planned over the next 20 years. It is building hundreds of new cities from scratch.

As steel firm scions, Mittal and Tata both know that demand for steel grows at 1% ahead of GDP, and that the potential rise in demand for steel in India is higher than anywhere else on the planet. It currently consumes only 40kg per capita, compared with 500kg on China’s coastal fringe.

“It has huge potential,” said Jean Lazar, a spokesman for Arcelor-Mittal. “India will follow on the heels of China.”

For Mittal, the Orissa investment alone will top £4 billion over eight years, and produce 12m tonnes of steel, but it is now merely a memorandum of understanding rather than a signed, sealed and delivered deal.

Tata has signed memorandums for a 6m tonne steel plant in Orissa, and a 12m tonne plant in Jharkhand, but it is playing hardball with both state governments to land iron-ore mining rights before it proceeds.

It is these iron-ore concessions that are the real prize. When Mittal announced pretax profits of £8.5 billion earlier this year, he warned that price volatility for raw materials was a cloud on the horizon. Landing mining concessions in India, however, would guarantee supply and prices.

“Both Tata’s and Arcelor Mittal’s hopes for mega steel plants in India hinge round long-term assurance of sufficient long-term iron-ore access, otherwise they would be left to buy at market rates over a very long period.

The economics of such projects could be destabilised with uncertainty – hence the race to win the prize at any cost,” explained Subodh Agrawal, chairman of London-based Euromax Capital, a financier of Indian mergers and acquisitions.

The three states account for 70% of India’s iron-ore reserves. It is high-grade ore, which makes it an even greater prize.

According to Agrawal, Tata’s strategy flows from its buyout of Corus earlier this year. “For Tata, the goal is to own 100m tonne capacity by 2015. So far the overseas acquisitions have added 21.4m tonnes, of which Corus accounts for 18.2m tonnes. Tata Steel will now focus on its greenfield projects in India and outside. The Indian projects will add 6m tonnes in Orissa, 12m tonnes in Jharkhand and 5m tonnes in Chhattisgarh.”

Orissa is the key to the plan because it also has a seaport. According to insiders, Tata plans to ship low-cost primary steel made in Orissa to Corus’s finishing mills in Europe where it will be sold – one of the key factors in the Corus acquisition.

Mittal is anxious not to miss out. According to Agrawal, it sees India contributing 20m tonnes to its worldwide operations, but speed is of the essence, and India still moves slowly.

Tata Steel is playing the patriotic card, stressing its 100-year history, its status as the oldest steel manufacturer in Asia, its role as a symbol of Indian industry, and chairman Tata’s image as an Indian visionary.

Unspoken but implied is Mittal’s role as a foreign Johnny-come-lately.

The steel companies must follow a process of stating their capacity needs to the state governments, which then recommend iron-ore concessions to the central government, which makes the allocation. It’s a political process that has sparked a major lobbying war.

According to government, Mittal is lagging far behind in this battle. While he may have benefited from influential friends in the British government, he has only two in the Indian cabinet – Sharad Pawar, the agriculture minister, and Murli Deora, the oil minister. He has, however, already made enemies over his failure to deliver on a deal to win big oil concessions for the Indian state oil company ONGC.

Tata, on the other hand, is an all-Indian hero. It is known as the “company which built India”, and Ratan is regarded as the visionary who took the empire global while strengthening its Indian roots. His latest vision, a £1,000 car, is expected to hit the showrooms next year.

In the battle for his mother country’s steel industry, Lakshmi Mittal may find he’s not nearly as Indian as he thought.

About the petrol exports:
Erm, I cant see any reliable news service in those links.Only ones that use the main news feeders.So if rueters india correspondent had to produce some copy, ran this story then they all used it.
And poor old steve ham on NY had to wait 6 whole hours for his visa.We in are now very lucky to get it done in half a day.It used to be 48 hrs...

About the petrol exports:
Erm, I cant see any reliable news service in those links.Only ones that use the main news feeders.So if rueters india correspondent had to produce some copy, ran this story then they all used it.

Don't be too skeptical.. Here is the press release from Assocham, the body that conducted the research. I am unable to find the complete report. Maybe its available on subscription or something. But still this article presents yearwise breakdown of how the target would be achieved.

Petroleum Exports Likely To Be Us$ 497 Bln By Fy 2012 , Says ASSOCHAM (http://www.assocham.org/prels/shownews.php?id=1239)

India is likely to become a net exporter of petroleum products worth US$ 497.01 billion by fiscal 2012-13 in the wake of their exports growing at a much faster pace than imports despite crude prices touching an all time high, an ASSOCHAM Eco Pulse Study said. As per its projections, imports of petroleum products in value terms would be to the range of US$ 429.45 billion in next 5 years.

The ASSOCHAM Study on “Petroleum Trade” for the period FY 1999-00 to 2006-07 has found that petroleum products exported by India have been growing at a whopping rate of 73 per cent for last three years. The Petroleum Oil and Lubricants (POL) imports hiked at a comparatively lower rate of 40.6 per cent. The Study analyzed that if the same growth trend continues, value of oil exports will surpass its imports in next six years. In fact, the trend for the current fiscal shows that imports grew only by 11.4 per cent, while exports went up by 89 per cent in the month of April.

The ASSOCHAM President, Mr. Venugopal N. Dhoot said “petroleum exports were valued at USD 0.03 billion in the FY 1999-00, which increased to USD 18.53 billion in the fiscal 2006-07 growing at the compound annual rate of 96.5 per cent. Imports on the other hand, increased from 12.6 billion in the FY 1999-00 to 57 billion in FY 2006-07 recording a CAGR of 32.7 per cent”.

Even as the energy requirements of the Indian economy are rapidly increasing, capacity expansion of the refineries both at public and private level would help maintain the growth momentum of the exports of petroleum products, he added.

Petroleum exports for the financial year 2006-07 stood at USD 18.53 billion registering an increase of 22.77 per cent as compared to USD 11.63 billion worth exports incurring 13 per cent growth in previous year. With consistent robust growth rate on the exports front, the value of exports is estimated to touch USD 497 billion by fiscal 2012-13.

The growth rate of petroleum imports has declined over the last two years. While in FY 2005-06, the imports grew at 47 per cent at USD 43.95 billion, the growth slowed to 29.7 per cent in FY2006-07 with the imports amounting to USD 570.36 billion. The imports in current fiscal 2007-08 have shown growth of only 8.32 per cent, despite crude prices touching USD 80 per barrel. The growth in the import bill could be on account of Rupee appreciation of 9 per cent since March 07, which makes the landed price of crude oil cheaper. The impact of rupee rise on export performance would have been neutralized because of content of import of crude oil. The oil imports would grow to USD 429 billion in next five years, according to ASSOCHAM Study.

The growth in the petroleum exports can be attributed to the increase in installed capacity of the refineries by 18 per cent from 112,040,000 tonnes in the FY 2000 to 132,468,000 tonnes in FY 2006, said Mr. Dhoot. The production of petroleum products has increased by 50 per cent during the same period from 79,411,000 tonnes to 119,750,000 tonnes.

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/6089/petroleumko5.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

**Forecasting of exports @ 73 per cent (Average growth rate of last three years)
***Forecasting of imports @ 40 per cent (Average growth rate of last three years)

As per the ITC-HS classification, the petroleum products category included petroleum jelly, paraffin wax, cryst petrol wax, slack wax, mineral wax registered a triple-digit growth of 182.79 per cent in exports in the year 2005-06. The exports of petroleum coke, petroleum bituminous and other residuals of petroleum oil from bituminous minerals posted an impressive growth of 49 per cent in the financial year 2005-06. Petrol oil & oil obtained from bituminous mineral other than crude, increased from USD 69 billion in 2004-05 to USD 113.9 billion in 2005-06. Its imports, on the other hand witnessed a decline in the rate of growth from 93.42 per cent in the year 2004-05 to 48.71 per cent in 2005-06.

Asia accounted for a significant share of India’s POL exports amounting USD 6.8 billion in the FY 2006-07 and USD 4.3 billion in previous fiscal. Within Asia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Japan are the major oil products importing countries for India with exports worth USD 0.69 billion, USD 0.55 billion, USD 0.42 million made in the financial year 2006-07.

Middle East accounted for second largest petroleum exports from India valued at USD 5.1 billion, followed by Africa and Europe with exports value of 2.5 billion and 2 billion, respectively.

It wont grow at 73% per annum.Nothing grows in size from less that $20 B to almost $500 b in six years its just nonsense.Mr. Venugopal N. Dhoot is bloody idiot if he realy beleives this crap, some twat who has never studyed either basic maths or economics wrote it & Mr Dhoot hasnt bothered to spot it as bollocks...
Or its just some way to get his 'reasearch org' recognised & drum up buiness.Its just complete garbage.Can you imagine the growth in turnover of the industries involved to grow that much? How long would it take to increase capacity?IE to actually build the new factories needed? It couldnt happen anywhere in the world, let alone india with all its 'infra bottlenecks'.Its common sense

Edit; ive just realised what asschom is.Its a bloody government body.This is netas spouting the same old bollocks just to impress thier political bosses.

I don't really think that Assocham would be that foolish to make a blank study which could be just rubbished away. If you could dismiss the figures so easily then I am sure there would be no takers for the report in the petroleum industry. I say let's leave this analysis for industrialists who would actually be interested in this report. Afterall, they would most definately know the inside story, the size of the market & its growth potential & most importantly the current capacity & the ability to expand.

Edit; ive just realised what asschom is.Its a bloody government body.This is netas spouting the same old bollocks just to impress thier political bosses.

ASSOCHAM is an independent automous conglomeration of over 150K Indian companies. It only interacts with the government for providing them quarterly/half-yearly/annual data & for preserving the trade interests of the associated companies. Apart from that it has nothing to do with government.

Ok, well see.Ciao

India and Israel: The great seduction (http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=ea163747-b106-4e32-b231-7eb64de62985&&Headline=India+and+Israel%3a+The+great+seduction)
Like all dreamers, Israeli entrepreneur Harel Cohen had an idea to change the world — well, to be precise, India.

“It’s one of the world’s biggest countries, it will be the world’s biggest economy in 40 years,” said Cohen, 37, an amiable, strongly built former Israeli army officer. “But with 22 languages and 10 scripts, India doesn’t have enough Indian-language keyboards.”

An e-mail and a flight to India in 2004 got him into the door of Vijendra Shukla, head of language technology at the government-run Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing in Noida and a pioneer in the development of Indian-language software.

Cohen is now CEO of FTK Technologies, which has a simple but smart way of programming keyboards for different languages: fit a webcam on a laptop to intuitively track the user’s fingers and create a “virtual” keyboard on screen, which mirrors the keystrokes of the real keyboard.

At the click of a mouse, it can switch from Kannada to Urdu or eight other languages. Indian words that took two minutes to type, now take 20 seconds.

It was December 2005 when, like hundreds of entrepreneurs who populate the tech hubs around Tel Aviv, Israel’s throbbing business capital, Cohen flew to New York. Within hours he sold his idea to a private investor. “I don’t think he’s ever been to India,” said Cohen of his investor. “He said, ‘it’s bound to be good, there’s one billion people there.’” It was as easy as that. “There’s a lot of money in Israel for ideas,” Cohen said. “That’s how it goes.”

People like Cohen are packing the flights to India and fuelling a spiralling but largely unknown trade beyond diamonds and secretive defence buys — India is now Israel's biggest arms customer, with $5 billion (Rs 2,000 crore) in purchases, officially, since 2001 - to infotech, security systems, drip irrigation, even television shows.

Annual trade is expected to touch $5 billion, a 46 per cent rise since 2006.

“We've been around for 24 years, but only recently have we become sexy," said Anat Bernstein-Reich (42), deputy chairperson of the Israel-India Chamber of Commerce, over lunch in downtown Tel Aviv.

Bernstein-Reich has an office and an Indian partner, Alfred Arambhan, in Sherly Rajan village in Mumbai’s upmarket western suburb of Bandra. A mother of three, she advises Israelis on conducting and developing business in India and her firm, A&G Partners, has interests that range from investment banking to Bollywood.

Israelis want to profit from India’s great leap forward, Indians seek opportunities in one of the world’s high-tech hubs. Over the last year, Mumbai’s Mansaria group has bought over Israel’s largest tyre manufacturer, Sun Pharma, has bought a stake in Israel’s largest pharma company, Jain

Irrigation from rural Jalgaon in Maharashtra has bought into a drip-irrigation company, a field in which Israel is a world leader.

In another high-tech hub in the town of Petah Tikva — in the late 19th century the first Jewish immigrants fought malaria and began life here in what was then Palestine — Associate Vice-President Giora Reish said his company, Gilat Satellite Networks, is bidding for one of India's largest telephone expansions, a tender issued this month by state-run BSNL to link 14,000 villages.

“If they want to do it fast, satellite is the best, especially for remote villages,” said Reish. His colleague, Eliot Abraham, director for technical marketing, explained, in a distinctly south-Mumbai accent, how Gilat is now the biggest supplier in India of what are called very small aperture satellite technology for everything from cellular networks to the National Stock Exchange.


Abraham’s accent is soon explained. He is an alumni of the south elite Mumbai school Bombay Scottish.

“Aamir Khan was my classmate,” said Abraham with a grin. Abraham emigrated to Israel when he was 19. There are 70,000 Jews of Indian origin in Israel today and that aids the overall awareness about the subcontinent.

Traditional Israeli interest in Indian culture is high: about 40,000 young Israelis stream into India, mainly after two years of compulsory military service, and given that India has never witnessed anti-semitism, entrepreneurs also see culture as a business opportunity.

Three years ago, a top Israeli producer told Bernstein-Reich he wanted to do an Indian stage show, with all the extravagance of Bollywood. After talking to almost every producer, they signed a deal with Subroto Roy, head of the Sahara Group.

Today, with a $5 million (Rs 20 crore) investment from Sahara and Israeli investors, 60 dancers and 20 musicians — many sourced through the popular Zee TV SaReGaMa show — roam the world. Bharati, as the show is called, is heading next month to booming Eastern Europe.

“It’s a baby I’m proud of,” said Bernstein-Reich. “It brings the beauty of India to the world.” And, of course, the profits don’t hurt.

India hot spot for global B-schools (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/2484011.cms)
Why is there a sharp rise in the number of executives enrolling for management studies? Why are more and more foreign B-schools launching their executive education programs in India? The answer to the last question, in fact, lies in the first two.

As organisations recognise the critical importance of their human capital, the development of it’s people is seen by companies as a core business dynamic and played out accordingly. With huge costs, it becomes serious stuff and demands serious attention from both the buyer and provider alike.

Says Peter Winicov, senior associate director , Wharton Communications, Knowledge@Wharton , "Indian companies today are becoming increasingly global, seeking to benchmark themselves against the best in the business. They have recognised that as they play on the global stage, it becomes critical for their senior executives to learn from global faculty experts and from experiences of the world’s best organizations."

From Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, to Tuck, Insead, Thunderbird, the list of foreign Bschools targeting India for executive education is increasing. Rapid changes in today’s business environment make continuous education vital for executives. Today’s managers can’t rely solely on business concepts that they learned 10 years ago; the new economy requires them to make ongoing learning a staple in their business diet.

That’s what executive education is all about, says M Ashraf Rizvi, chairman, executive education, IIM Indore: "Take , for example, professionals in the 40-50 age group in India. They don’t come from a technical business background. This is because the concept of MBA had not really picked pace back then, as it has today. This is one major reason why foreign B-schools are eyeing India, particularly this segment."

The original idea behind an executive education was seen basically as short-term nonqualification program with specific objectives, such as skills acquisition. Now, of course, those parameters have been stretched, sometimes beyond recognition.

Today, for example, you can actually pursue a qualification program such as the executive MBA (EMBA), which is aimed at working managers. The trigger behind the massive boom in this segment of course, is that today’s professional breed have varying needs and demands. In turn, making executive education programs a big revenue grosser for most global B-schools compared to the traditional full-time MBA programs.

For many, it is their bread and butter, whereas their flagship MBA programs just about break even. Executive education accounts for nearly 23% of HBS’ revenue whereas the full-time MBA accounts for just 21%. At other schools the difference is more stark. Thunderbird, for instance, had about 14% or $7 million of its revenues coming from corporate learning in 2001-01 . In 2006-07 , the projected revenue from the same segment has now grown to 39% or $23.2 million.

And what’s more, as there is more demand, there will be more supply. Says professor David Yoffie, senior associate dean and the chair of executive education programs at HBS: "The global demand for enhanced management education will expand rapidly in the coming years and decades, particularly in countries such as India where there is tremendous potential for businesses to grow and succeed. There is tremendous potential in the Indian economy. There is a deep interest from companies around the world, and inside India, in being better equipped to sustain growth and build successful organizations over the long term in India."

Recent studies have valued the worldwide executive education market at $350 billion. France and Spain are the current hot national markets in Europe, while Latin America is one of several emerging areas around the globe, and now of course, India and China.

India has seen a massive investment in the last five years. With more and more MNCs setting base in India, it becomes indispensable for executives to up-skill themselves as per international standards.

Says Anant Sundaram, faculty director of executive education and a professor of finance at the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business: "It is an understatement to say that India has arrived on the global scene – by this, I don’t just mean the amazing growth and development taking place within India, the inward investment into the country, its world-beating IT firms, or even its rising geopolitical prominence. I am talking about the fact that Indian companies today are globalising like never before. They are beginning to compete in the global arena in a significant way, in such diverse sectors as IT/ITeS, steel, aluminum, and hospitality . Over the past few years, India has emerged as perhaps the largest acquirer of industrialized country assets from any emerging market."

India is the 'destination' (http://www.expresspharmaonline.com/20071031/management03.shtml)
Anil Bhasin talks about networking technology that will help hasten Indian pharma industry's growth as the perfect offshoring hub

Growing at a rate of eight to nine percent per year, the pharmaceutical industry in India is pegged to reach $48 billion by 2007, according to a CII study. This growth has led the players in the Indian pharmaceutical industry to explore newer avenues of drug research, discovery and development, promising higher capital investments in the near future. Also, many multinational companies have entered India to market drugs and conduct clinical trials and research. Thus, Indian pharmaceutical research, manufacturing, and outsourcing have received an impetus, creating the image of a land of opportunities in pharmaceuticals. The same CII study also predicts that India could become a global pharma hub by exporting domestically produced generic products and presenting itself as an off-shoring destination for clinical and pre-clinical research and other support services. In addition, there is tremendous potential presented in the Indian pharma market itself. Consumer spending on healthcare went up from four percent of GDP in 1995 to seven percent in 2007. That number is expected to go up to 13 percent of GDP by 2015. According to a recent McKinsey report, that will turn India into a $20 billion pharma market.

In particular, India is poised to emerge as a key contract research hub. According to a study by Ernst & Young, the total market for clinical research activities in India is expected to touch $1.5-2 billion by 2010. A T Kearney has listed India second (just after China) for attractiveness as clinical trials centers. With pharma majors facing increased pressure on profit margins, spiraling R&D costs and increasing overheads, outsourcing of clinical research processes to third parties in developing countries seems a viable option. By contracting such work to India, they save from 40-60 percent in new drug development.

Long distance

This implies that pharma companies will have a huge R&D, sales and marketing network spread across geographies; and their telecommunication costs can grow exponentially. Therefore, pharma companies need to embrace technology that can offer dynamic lines of communication between global markets and its manufacturing and research centres in India. Ultimately, Indian's growth as a global player hinges on its ability to overcome challenges. Give the current scenario, integrating and facilitating cost-effective communication is a major challenge.

Networking and communications technology is considered the enabler for many aspects of the contract research and clinical trial business. The application of technology has the potential to vastly improve:


Time to market, which is achieved through significant reductions in patient recruitment intervals and more efficient data management

Cost containment is achieved through reduced re-work required for one trial and internal savings on systems development

Improved productivity is achieved by re-use of standard network, study sites and processes across multiple trials that will release key staff quicker

Faster and better informed decisions can be made by implementing web based real-time data access for rapid decision-making and project management reporting


Harnessing technology

Here are some specific challenges that plague the Indian pharma industry:


The "silo effect" in large pharmaceutical companies that prevents clinicians from sharing pertinent data

Lack of standardised data definitions, necessitating duplicate testing and trials

Weak process and systems integration that slows time to market


Internet based communication platforms could help pharma companies overcome the above by developing a fully electronic clinical development system through Internet based initiatives. The edge that they provide include:

Secure extranets for research partners

In the ideal networked pharmaceutical business model, each company keeps in-house only the intellectual capital that is critical to its competitive advantage. The remainder is outsourced in the form of strategic alliances with peers and vendors, both temporary and long-term, domestic and international. Using teleconferences, web-based collaboration tools, and encrypted e-mails, companies can remain in constant contact with virtual partners and sub-ordinate teams for each clinical trial project.

R&D supply-chain management

Supply chain is a term not often associated with information, but pharmaceutical companies handle large data transactions when mapping to gene bank data, or when gathering genotype data from customers. Supply-chain standards allow sharing of critical systems while protecting intellectual property.

E-learning

The learning curve is steep and collaborative work can be supported and enhanced through secure networks providing e-mail, IP telephony, and video conferencing for on-demand e-learning and informal knowledge sharing.

Online project setup

In clinical trials, establishing the protocol and study design constitutes most of the work. Internet-based automated application builders can help clinicians design procedures, capture data, and establish workflow rules.

Clinical portals

Pharmaceutical companies can extend their reach beyond partners with online multimedia environments that speed clinical trial data transactions and exchange with regulatory agencies and non-secure partners.

R&D command centers

Virtual project teams are using a model that provides administrators and clinicians with latest tools and applications for managing the entire clinical R&D life cycle. Command centers, which can be hosted or built in-house, can handle multiple data; and information feeds from extranets, intranets, and portals. This allows a rapid response to unexpected regulatory or clinical problems and also quick redeployment of intellectual property to new projects.

Communication trends in pharma sector

International trends predict that internal and external communication in pharma companies will change immensely as companies focus on this area to improve delivery capabilities and overcome the so called "silos" effect. As indicated by the findings of the Economist Intelligence Unit-Foresight 2020 study, "In the next 15 years, healthcare and pharma executives expect to see more collaborative problem solving within their firms facilitated by technology and will also be using automate simple processes and services. Most (82 percent respondents from pharma and healthcare industry) expect to involve customers more closely in the development of offerings and they expect customers to place higher value on personal attention than on price (79 percent)."

Indian pharma companies will have to adopt these communication trends as they expand their presence globally. Entering the need for solutions that enable pharma companies keep employees, partners, suppliers and customers well-trained and informed in a high impact, cost efficient manner, no matter where they are located. These solutions will enable live and on-demand communication of high bandwidth, rich media to the desktop, using standard web browsers and media players. To get a perspective on its cost-effectiveness consider this-online learning and communication with content networking is typically ten times less expensive than traditional classroom training carried out by pharma companies. Since drug development and other activities are highly confidential, security is always an area of concern for them.

IT in pharma landscape

The Indian pharmaceutical sector is highly fragmented with more than 20,000 registered units. It has increased its footprint dramatically in the last two decades. The 250 leading pharmaceutical companies control 70 percent of the market with the market leader holding nearly seven percent of the market share. Furthermore, it is an extremely fragmented market with severe price competition and government price control by bodies like National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA). Prior to the product regime, there was a stiff price war amongst companies focusing on reverse engineering of complex molecules at lower costs and manufacturing me-too products with same therapeutic properties. Now, Indian pharma companies are focusing on honing their R&D capabilities that were somewhat ignored during the process patent era. This renewed focus on R&D re-iterates the need for robust and secure networks for large data transactions. Small and medium sized Indian pharmacos are still not convinced about the long-term benefits of adopting cutting-edge technology due to budget and infrastructure constraints. Although, the SME pharma market is very large and has tremendous potential, it is yet to be tapped to its full potential. Many Indian SME pharma companies are not into drug research and testing. Still, they need technology to improve efficiency in quality assurance and control, and for adherence to regulatory requirements for operation and testing, improving batch tracking and expiry date tracking, optimising credit and logistics control, consolidating sales promotions, discounts, and purchase-sales-inventory analysis and optimally tracking consignment sales.

Pharmacos and Internet economy

The Internet economy is also rapidly changing the face of the industry and delivering new web-enabled solutions to solve business and care issues such as billing and purchasing, increasing sales, marketing and R&D productivity, and reducing operating costs across the organisation. Higher R&D efficiency via web enabled clinical trial processes and increased information sharing will have a key impact by shortening pharmaceutical R&D cycles. Emerging sciences such as genomics and proteomics will increase the number of drug targets from many hundreds to tens of thousands, therefore Internet applications will help optimise huge volumes of complex data and will better identify drug candidates. Pharmacos have to make the Internet work for their business, by going from a traditional pharmaceutical organisation to an e-business with web-enabled applications. This calls for a rethinking of existing business models. It involves becoming more connected, and more flexible to react faster to change.

The question is no longer when the Internet or technology will impact the business of pharmaceuticals, but how the industry will adopt technology to get the most out of this new global business environment. Today's new pharma companies need scalable networking solutions that will grow with the company, provide productivity for mobile employees, and meet security regulations required in the business.

A recurrent theme across the pharma sector is the sheer volume of data that needs to be analysed, assessed, and used strategically, in real time, or as near as possible. The mapping of the human genome provides a powerful example of how analysing data faster can affect the competitive nature of a business. Two institutions—one private, one public—were competing to publish the exact sequence. The stakes in this exercise were very high; if the private company were able to complete the mapping first they could patent and copyright the genome sequence, and make royalties estimated to be worth between $600 and $700 million per year. For the public institution, the status accrued by publishing the sequence first, and making the genome mapping publicly available and royalty-free for future drug development, were primary motivations. In the end, the public institution was able to reconfigure its high-performance compute clusters and narrowly beat the competition in mapping the human genome.

(The writer is the VP-Enterprise of Cisco India & SAARC)

India hitches its star to embedded design model (http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202404775)
Bengaluru, India -- From the perspective of technology development and manufacturing, India can be a tough read--especially compared with its booming neighbor China, the world's factory.

India has a strong manufacturing presence in sectors like steel and automobiles, but it is lagging in electronics and chip manufacturing. What India lacks in manufacturing, however, it makes up for in software development. It is especially strong in embedded software--a foundation that could prove increasingly important in the future.

Indeed, as more telecommunications, consumer, computer, industrial and automotive products evolve toward the embedded, system-on-chip design and develop- ment model, India is poised to become a more critical link in the global electronics design chain.

India is a country where democracy and the rule of law are rock solid, making it a safe haven for intellectual property. A large and growing pool of globally trained, highly educated and motivated, English-speaking computer scientists and electrical engineers, with technology and professional network links to Silicon Valley, fuels India's intellectual infrastructure.

A clearer picture of India's emergence as an IP force and its growing role in the global technology design chain emerged in keynote sessions and interviews here during the Embedded Systems Conference India, an event organized by United Business Media India and CMP Technology, parent company and publisher of EE Times.

According to one estimate, more than 80 percent of working EEs in India are employed in embedded systems development--a significant shift from recent years, when VLSI design was the discipline keeping most Indian EEs gainfully employed. The electronics industry in India is undergoing a gradual but inexorable transition from a software-driven outsourcing model to one increasingly focused on growth and development of the domestic market. And as that shift occurs, the country's $4 billion embedded computing market is coming into sharp relief.

"Right across the globe, everyone is watching India becoming a rich source of innovation and technology," Gregg Lowe, senior vice president for analog products at Texas Instruments, remarked at ESC India. "It is, indeed, a unique place with its own culture and with a unique set of technological needs. And today, it is playing a key role in delivering next-generation IT solutions."

Texas Instruments should know. It entered India in 1984 and became one of the first electronics companies to tap the country's deep well of engineering talent. TI India was established in Bengaluru primarily as a design center, and it continues to be one of TI's largest design centers outside the United States.

The India Semiconductor Association (ISA) and market researcher Frost & Sullivan have projected that the Indian semiconductor and embedded design industry will grow from $3.25 billion in 2005 to $14.42 billion in 2010 and to $43.07 billion in 2015.


Indian design organizations are moving beyond simple labor-cost arbitrage to become true contributors to product innovation. Growing numbers of multinationals are opening design centers in India or are expanding existing ones, according to the ISA. Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, NXP Semiconductors, Renesas Technology, Freescale Semiconductor and STMicroelectronics are among the companies turning to India not just to cut engineering costs, but also to leverage the country's rich intellectual infrastructure.

Intel Corp. has launched two projects in India to leverage the company's embedded architecture portfolio. One track in- tends to aid Indian design houses in launching products for the domestic market; the other aims to help them build products for global markets. The India Design House Program is similar to a third-party alliance network and will cash in on the increasing role that design houses here play in platform definition and design for customers locally and overseas.

Targeting home digital multimedia applications, Freescale recently introduced a highly integrated two-chip set whose design cycle was completed in India. ST has completed a designed-in-India one-chip solution for digital set-top boxes. And both Freescale and Texas Instruments are developing single-chip mobile-phone solutions that are expected to be introduced in 2008.

http://i.cmpnet.com/eet/news/07/10/1498_PG_1_INDIA.gif

NXP Semiconductors' India Private Ltd. operation is emblematic of the western multinationals riding India's rising wave of chip and embedded system design. The operation's 800 embedded developers and system architects work on next-generation digital video systems and other embedded projects.

NXP's Bengaluru development center recently completed work on an integrated "system stack" consisting of 4 million lines of embedded software code for a multicore, four-processor 8051 MIPS + Trimedia DSP HDTV solution, according to senior system architect D. Jaipal.

"The engineers on my team come from a hard-core hardware background," Jaipal said, noting that the key to the embedded implementation of an HDTV system is "insight into hardware." Key employees and designers are EEs and graduate students from the Indian Institute of Science (IIS), India's top school for research and development. (IIS is not affiliated with IIT, the technology school renown for filling the ranks of software developers at U.S. companies such as Microsoft Corp.)

"Fifteen years back, software was not so important, but in the past eight years we have seen embedded systems--and embedded software--emerge as the future of electronics technology development here in India," Jaipal said.

He identified a key cultural and professional marker for Indian engineers, especially top graduates from IIS. "Technologically, people do not want to become identified with one specific field; they do not want to become too specialized for too long a time in any given area," Jaipal said. "The culture is to become a generalist, not to stay a specialist.

"Being a generalist in design is a growth path, which is why you will not see any engineer in India with more than eight years of experience doing code development," he said.

Jaipal and his team of embedded system designers and system architects are paving a new highway in India's intellectual infrastructure, and it represents a total-systems-design approach to IP development.

"The definition of an embedded system is changing. Systems are much more digital, and all technologies, from the PC to Internet-connected devices, are converging into a single, complex system," he said.

Being able to design "across multiple domains" not only requires a complex set of skills spanning technology boundaries, but also increasingly involves "collaboration across company borders," Jaipal said.

On display at NXP's booth here was a series of HDTV system designs slated to hit production lines in TV factories around the world in the coming months. The NXP solutions will fuel set-tops and TVs that consumer giants Sony, LG, Samsung and Philips will exhibit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

The equipment may be manufactured and assembled elsewhere in Asia. But the complete hardware and software platforms for all of these manufacturers' HDTVs are "made in India"--one line of code at a time.

Indian Company acquires Dutch Nursery for 50 million Euro to become worlds largest cultivator of Roses (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/india/article2733212.ece)
There is a school of thought that says that if you are going to get something done properly, then you have to do it yourself. It is a principle at the heart of many a great business and it is one that Ramakrishna Karuturi knows well, one that this week has made him the world’s largest cultivator of roses.

He has risen to the top of the rose tree, becoming the world’s largest cultivator of the flowers, after Karuturi Networks, his Bangalore-based company, agreed to buy Sher Agencies, the Kenyan nursery of a Dutch flower producer, in a €50 million (£35 million) deal.

The mechanical engineer, who returned to India from business school in Ohio in the United States a decade ago to run the family cables and transmissions towers business, began his unlikely move into the flower industry one long, frustrating Valentine’s Day. Hunting for a rose bouquet for his wife across India’s IT hub, he drew a blank. Bangalore was a rose-free zone.

So he decided to start to grow them himself. In 1996, the entrepreneur opened two greenhouses on 3.2 hectares of land in the southern Indian city, which is renowned for its temperate climate, and began to export the flowers. Mr Karuturi’s roses are now sold in Africa, America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. With the Sher acquisition, the fourth outside India and a deal financed through foreign currency convertible bonds, Karuturi’s annual production has jumped from 130 million stems to 650 million. Its target is one billion stems by 2010. To achieve that, the company will build more greenhouses in Ethiopia and will seek further acquisitions in the highly fragmented global flower business. It is in advanced takeover talks with a nursery in Ecuador.

Mr Karuturi, 42, believes that there is a large market in India, where Valentine’s Day is being celebrated increasingly. “There is huge potential in India. When I came back from the US, Valentine’s Day was unheard of as a festival, but now even on Mother’s Day, gifts are exchanged. I was surprised how quickly Western events have been assimilated into the culture,” Mr Karuturi said. About 20 per cent of Karuturi’s rose business is domestic, but he says that can be increased to 50 per cent. The company has 40 flower shops in India and aims to open a further 60 by Christmas.

Karuturi also supplies bottled gherkins to European, American and Russian supermarkets and provides niche software and IT services.

An estimated 40,000 hectares of land are under rose cultivation world-wide, yet the biggest farm is no more than 200 hectares. Kenya has the world’s largest share of the rose trade - 4 per cent – because it has ideal growing conditions, including 12 hours of light a day. Horticulture is Kenya’s third-biggest foreign exchange earner, bringing about $100 million (£49 million) into the economy every year, with most flowers exported to Europe.

BBC to set up first production studio in India (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Corporate_Dossier/BBC_to_set_up_first_production_studio_in_India/articleshow/2491743.cms)
For someone who grew up in the UK, it isn’t surprising that Mark Thompson’s first brush with Indian cuisine was through the various Bangladeshi eateries in the country.

It’s only recently that Thompson was introduced to the non-curry side of Indian food, and since then, he has been hooked to tandoori and Indian style veggies. The BBC Director General is also an avid cook, though he still hasn’t tried his hand at Indian cooking yet. “It’s a daunting task,” he laughs. “Given the flavours and the complexity, I don’t know if I can manage it.” Thompson’s interests though, go far beyond cooking, to mountain walking and flying a Cessna.

While he may be familiar with Indian cuisine, his familiarity with Indian movies ranks a little lower. “I’ve seen a few, but don’t remember which ones,” he says. Then he consults a sheet of paper he’s carrying and declares that Chak de! India is one movie that he’s planning to see soon. And though film making is not on the BBC’s agenda in India just yet, it just may be in the near future.

This is a time of many firsts for the British broadcaster — Thompson’s first visit to India, the first visit by a BBC Director General, and the setting up of BBC’s first production studio in the country, one of only three globally. Not surprisingly , Thompson’s schedule has been packed with meetings with various conglomerates and media houses as well as government representatives. “I don’t know why it has taken us so long to come here, we should done this a long time ago,” he says. “We may have the brand, skills and tradition, but it is good to come to India with a lot of humility. There is so much talent here, and a huge hunger for originality.”

Thompson plans to work with Indian producers on various shows and concepts. “Our experience is in making formats and we have seen better results when we do things on our own rather than licensing it out,” he says. Adaptation, he feels, is the key to succeeding in the Indian market. After a rather successful start with the Indianised version of Dancing With The Stars — Jhalak Dikhla Ja — BBC will now be looking at launching more adaptations of its successful international formats.

Going ahead, Thompson doesn’t rule out taking formats developed in India to other countries. “There is huge export potential in India both for Bollywood and the Indian media which needs to be tapped,” he says. As a step towards this, BBC is contemplating launching a Bollywood based web-fanzine (a magazine produced by and for fans devoted to a particular interest ) which would reach out to Bollywood buffs in other parts of the world.

The digital space is something that excites Thompson and he is keenly watching to what extent India will leapfrog technologically. While the beeb, as the BBC is fondly called in the UK, is better known as a news company in India, changing that perception is part of Thompson’s agenda. “Our basic philosophy is to produce outstanding content and use all platforms possible to get it to the consumers, and that is exactly what we will do in India,” he says.

“Consumers now want to be able to access news whenever they want it and through their media of choice. The trick to success lies in giving this to them.”

Going ahead, Thompson predicts that the market is poised for incredible growth, especially in television, but a shakeout is inevitable. “India is a complex, diverse market and will almost certainly have winners and losers” he says.

BBC is already present across print (magazines through a joint venture with the Times of India group), radio (through a joint venture with Mid-day ), television and now production, and it is in the process of scaling up and increasing its offerings across all the categories where it operates. In the past, some of the biggest production houses globally have set up operations in India and failed, but Thompson doesn’t seem bothered by it. “We know what it takes to be successful. We wouldn’t have set up our production house here if we didn’t think it would work,” he says confidently, without letting on too much about the specifics.

Another new avenue that BBC is in the process of tapping in India is the DVD market. “The expertise lies in the distribution , and once we understand the market and how to go about it, we will launch that business in India,” Thompson says. Clearly, partnerships are an important part of the BBC’s strategy in India and it is willing to invest what it takes in these businesses to succeed.

India presently is responsible for ‘very few percentage points’ of BBC’s revenue, but Thompson is optimistic that it could double or even treble in the next few years. “A lot of what we are doing is at an early stage. We have the money to invest and if we feel that we are doing well, we will invest more in India ,” he says. Meanwhile, he has plans to try his hand at Indian cooking, before he makes his next trip to India.

India's first independent private forensic lab set up (http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/403200710261140.htm)
Hyderabad (PTI): India's first private forensic laboratory with a wide range of services, including DNA testing, has been set up here to ease the burden on agencies solving crimes.

"Truth Labs is an independent initiative, set up with a pool, to help solve disputes and litigations of various nature without these being referred to the police or courts," retired IGP of Andhra Pradesh police K P C Gandhi said.

He told PTI that Truth Labs offers services like DNA testing, fingerprints comparison, computer crime analysis, document and handwriting examination, psychological evaluation and chemical examination of evidence.

"Such high-end services are currently available with a few government laboratories in the country," he said adding there was a need for private forensic labs as they help ease the huge burden on law enforcement agencies.

Gandhi pioneered the establishment of Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory (APFSL), the first in the country to be awarded ISO 9001 certification, and launched 'Crime Stoppers' initiative which collects information from the public for passing on to police and other government agencies.

Truth Labs, he said, could help tackle the growing economic frauds by making use of latest forensic techniques.

"There are lot of cases which need not always go to the police or courts. Typically, any cheating case takes a few years to be solved if it goes to the police or courts while we will give the report in 24 hours," he claimed.

Gandhi said private laboratories could substantially reduce the burden on public laboratories if they acquire advanced technical equipment.

"Many forensic labs are not able to clear the workload in the given time. Today, except a few like the Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory, many take years to give their reports," he said.

He said technologies were not upgraded although DNA testing was very important for identification of human beings, "it is not available in many labs even after 10 years of its introduction in India".

Gandhi said cyber crimes were increasing but "we don't have enough labs to deal with these" and the laboratory would help in easing the load since the "are admissible in courts".

Truth Labs has a number of retired senior government officials and eminent jurists as members of its experts, advisory and executive boards.

"All the experts who have joined this pool have already been certified, qualified, trained, accredited and have already given expert opinion in most parts of the country," he said.

It would soon have zonal offices in New Delhi, Chennai, Chandigarh and Manipur under the control of retired professionals, he added.

^^

ajay_ijn, you've grossly missed the point of this thread.

"India Rising - Collection of news articles from the International media on India's rising profile."

Most of the the articles that you've posted here don't belong in this thread. There are appropriate threads for such articles in the Infrastructure & Economy (http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=540) sub-forum.

India Paints an Attractive Model South Africa Could Emulate for Growth (http://allafrica.com/stories/200710230505.html)
Mathabo Le Roux
Business Day, Johannesburg
23 October 2007

SA IS fond of turning to China when it looks for economic inspiration, but valuable lessons are on offer from another Asian powerhouse, India.

Indian engineering companies will showcase their goods and expertise at the Indian Engineering Exhibitions show at Nasrec from today. At the launch of the event last week, Rantideb Maitra, executive director of India's Engineering Export Promotion Council, painted a picture that could well be a model SA may wish to emulate.

India's ability to maintain a growth rate of 8,5% over the past three years is widely hailed. Still, it is not quite as exuberant as the double-digit growth China has managed over the same period.

But Maitra points out an important distinguishing factor between the two economies vying for dominance in the world economy.

While the success of the Chinese economy is largely based on the unprecedented volume of goods that leaves that country's shores, India's growth is not export-driven; it is underpinned by robust domestic demand.

India's strong domestic demand vitally shields it from volatility in the global market.

The reliance on a robust domestic demand base means the Indian economy will not be as much affected by an anticipated downturn in the US economy as China would, Maitra says.

But India has other strengths which underpin the sustainability of its growth.

Like SA, India, is facing an acute skills shortage.

That country is, however, aggressively tackling the problem by investing in the education and expansion of its workforce.

The endeavour, Maitra believes, would ensure that India will remain strong in manufacturing.

Education data lend credence to Maitra's views. India annually produces 500 doctorates, 300000 nonengineering postgraduates and 410000 other graduates.

Of the latter, 200000 graduate as engineers.

Even with a population of 1,3-billion people, the figure is impressive, translating into two engineers for 13000 of the population, compared with the five engineers SA produces for every 400000 people annually.

These Indian graduates feed into a sector abuzz with activity.

India's engineering sector employs 7-million skilled and semi skilled employees, working for 40000 firms.

A billion reasons to invest in India (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/article2746675.ece)
Mark Atherton says despite new limits on foreign investment, a young population is driving economic growth

The Times, UK
October 27, 2007

IN all the hype surrounding China’s emergence as an economic superpower, India can sometimes appear relegated to the sidelines. Yet India, too, is a budding superpower in its own right. Its gross domestic product (GDP) has expanded from £16 billion in 1980 to £500 billion today, and its economy is now the fourth biggest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity.

India’s rapid annual growth rate of more than 7 per cent is reflected in the performance of funds investing in the country. Since its launch in 2004, Fidelity’s India Focus fund has produced a return of 246 per cent for investors. But even this impressive showing is eclipsed by JPMorgan’s Indian investment trust, which has returned an extraordinary 735 per cent over five years.

This month the Indian Government, concerned about the dangers of a market “bubble”, stepped in to limit the amount of money that foreign investors can feed into the market, triggering a sharp correction in share prices.

But India’s future still looks rosy, according to Arun Mehra, manager of the Fidelity India Focus fund. He says that one of the biggest drivers of growth is the country’s changing demographics. Wealth is beginning to filter down to rural and traditionally low-income sections of society, while India’s middle class – 200 million in a population of more than one billion – is expected to grow to 500 million by 2015.

Mr Mehra says that India has one of the youngest populations in the world, with about 50 per cent of people having been born after 1982. “As these young people move to the cities and their aspirations grow, life-styles are changing. More people are using credit cards, buying mobile phones, eating out and spending on healthcare, travel and luxuries.”

These “baby boomers” will not only drive consumer spending, he says, but also help India to avoid the long-term demographic problems faced by countries such as China, with its ageing population.

In the next three years, 71 million Indians will join the working-age population, while in China the “one-child only” policy means a comparable figure of just 44 million. India’s business sector is thriving too, with corporate profits expected to grow by 30 per cent in 2007 – a bigger increase than any of its main Asian rivals.

Pinakin Patel, of JPMorgan, says this rapid growth is driven by the success of a number of different businesses, such as the mobile phone industry. “This sector is signing up six million subscribers every month, more than any other country in the world, and yet with a market penetration rate of just 9 per cent there is plenty of scope for future growth.” JPMorgan has a stake in Bharti Airtel, India’s leading mobile phone provider.

JPMorgan also favours infrastructure, a sector that, Mr Patel says, was much neglected by the Indian Government until about 2000. “But it then received a terrific wake-up call when it saw how greatly China was outstripping it in this field, and decided to take action. Between 1950 and 2000 the country built 11,000km (6,800 miles) of roads each year. Since 2000 it has built 11,000km of road per day,” he says.

Furthermore, the country plans to spend $195 billion (£96 billion) on infrastructure over the next five years. Mr Patel says: “We have invested in Larsen Toubro, one of the key firms in this area, which is involved in building ports, roads, bridges and airports.”

Lack of universal education could spell trouble for investors

HOWEVER bright the future may be for India, taking a punt on the sub-continent still carries considerable risk, says Robin Geffen, managing director of Neptune Investment Management, which launched an India fund in January this year.

Mr Geffen says: “India has a lot going for it but, right now, valuations are not cheap and a lot of the good news is already priced into shares.

“One of the biggest problems that India currently faces is the barrier to social mobility caused by a lack of universal education opportunities.”

Nonetheless, if you do want to hold a stake in India, you have two principal choices: first, to put money into the handful of Indian single-country funds, such as those offered by Fidelity, JPMorgan, Aberdeen or Neptune or, secondly, you could spread the risk more widely and pick an emerging-markets fund with some exposure to India.

Rob Harley, of Bestinvest, the independent financial adviser, says: “We tend to favour the option of spreading the risk because single-country funds are fine when markets are going up, but painful to be in when they are going down.

“We like funds such as First State Global Emerging Markets Leaders, managed by the highly experienced Angus Tulloch, which has a stake of just under 5 per cent in India.”

Bangalore company blossoms as world’s biggest grower of roses (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/india/article2733212.ece)
Ashling O’Conner in Bombay
The Times, UK
October 25, 2007

There is a school of thought that says that if you are going to get something done properly, then you have to do it yourself. It is a principle at the heart of many a great business and it is one that Ramakrishna Karuturi knows well, one that this week has made him the world’s largest cultivator of roses.

He has risen to the top of the rose tree, becoming the world’s largest cultivator of the flowers, after Karuturi Networks, his Bangalore-based company, agreed to buy Sher Agencies, the Kenyan nursery of a Dutch flower producer, in a €50 million (£35 million) deal.

The mechanical engineer, who returned to India from business school in Ohio in the United States a decade ago to run the family cables and transmissions towers business, began his unlikely move into the flower industry one long, frustrating Valentine’s Day. Hunting for a rose bouquet for his wife across India’s IT hub, he drew a blank. Bangalore was a rose-free zone.

So he decided to start to grow them himself. In 1996, the entrepreneur opened two greenhouses on 3.2 hectares of land in the southern Indian city, which is renowned for its temperate climate, and began to export the flowers. Mr Karuturi’s roses are now sold in Africa, America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. With the Sher acquisition, the fourth outside India and a deal financed through foreign currency convertible bonds, Karuturi’s annual production has jumped from 130 million stems to 650 million. Its target is one billion stems by 2010. To achieve that, the company will build more greenhouses in Ethiopia and will seek further acquisitions in the highly fragmented global flower business. It is in advanced takeover talks with a nursery in Ecuador.

Mr Karuturi, 42, believes that there is a large market in India, where Valentine’s Day is being celebrated increasingly. “There is huge potential in India. When I came back from the US, Valentine’s Day was unheard of as a festival, but now even on Mother’s Day, gifts are exchanged. I was surprised how quickly Western events have been assimilated into the culture,” Mr Karuturi said. About 20 per cent of Karuturi’s rose business is domestic, but he says that can be increased to 50 per cent. The company has 40 flower shops in India and aims to open a further 60 by Christmas.

Karuturi also supplies bottled gherkins to European, American and Russian supermarkets and provides niche software and IT services.

An estimated 40,000 hectares of land are under rose cultivation world-wide, yet the biggest farm is no more than 200 hectares. Kenya has the world’s largest share of the rose trade - 4 per cent – because it has ideal growing conditions, including 12 hours of light a day. Horticulture is Kenya’s third-biggest foreign exchange earner, bringing about $100 million (£49 million) into the economy every year, with most flowers exported to Europe.

^^

ajay_ijn, you've grossly missed the point of this thread.

"India Rising - Collection of news articles from the International media on India's rising profile."

Most of the the articles that you've posted here don't belong in this thread. There are appropriate threads for such articles in the Infrastructure & Economy (http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=540) sub-forum.
So it should be from non-Indian media?

So it should be from non-Indian media?

Yes.

Mumbai confidential (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,21374592-26959,00.html)
Ryan Rodrigues threads his way through India's hippest and most happening city

The Australian, Australia
March 23, 2007

ON the descent into Mumbai, passengers can't help but notice Dharavi, Asia's largest slum. Arrival, usually at an awkward hour of the night, is singularly unimpressive. And should you touch down during the riotously popular Ganapati (elephant god) festival, immigration queues will stretch longer than usual, as staff will be away en masse enjoying the fun.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/imagedata/0,,5418008,00.jpg
Theatre in the open:Mumbai's busy walkways and crowded trains encapsulate the city's seething energy. Picture, above left: Vijay Verghese

Yet change is on its way to rejuvenate Mumbai, India's financial centre and thrumming metropolis, a city of gaudy Bollywood movies, packed-to-bursting trains, stunning colonial architecture interspersed with grime and green, and that smiling, head-nodding can-do attitude that ensures things are always buzzing.

Privatisation is about to rescue the airport and ground has been flattened for a new facility at Navi Mumbai or New Mumbai. Plans are under way as well for a new-look Dharavi where hip New Age hoodlums can hang out in sanitary concrete environs, perhaps switching their attention from gambling rackets to the latest soap on Star TV.

Welcome to Mumbai. Toss that doomsday talk, let your hair down and take the plunge. It's fun. As you clear the airport and emerge blinking into the humid, hot night, grab a pre-paid coupon taxi. It costs Rs350 (about $10) for a rattling small Fiat, or Rs450 for a non-rattling smaller airconditioned cab often referred to as a "cool cab". Beware of touts and head straight to your hotel. Never exchange currency with people on the street, no matter how tempting the offer.

GETTING AROUND

Given the extraordinary population pressure of 18 million inhabitants, the city runs a fairly efficient railway but it is not recommended for visitors. The heaving carriages carry six million passengers daily on a long, narrow north-south run. Peak hours, around 9am or 9pm, are sardine time. In the middle of this scrum, tailors, vegetable sellers, button-wallahs and fisherwomen hawk their wares. Need a screwdriver? No problem. This is a department store on wheels. Sweaty but effective.

If you insist on plunging in, opt for a first-class journey which, on the Western Railway, costs a maximum of Rs320 one way. Airconditioned coaches with automatic doors have been proposed but are not expected any time soon. Meanwhile, the city has an efficient and extensive system of double and single-decker buses, very civilised by Indian standards, but most visitors sensibly opt for cabs. Taxis have meters, largely for decoration, as drivers, especially those hanging around outside hotels, prefer to negotiate a fixed rate. If you opt for this, a cross-town ride from, say, the Taj Mahal Palace in the south to Bandra in the north, will set you back about Rs250 to Rs300.

SETTLING IN

For a good Mumbai hotel there are three areas to explore depending on your plans: the airport district, beside the beach in Juhu or in upmarket south Mumbai.

But the south is where most of the action still is. The best hotels in this area are the Taj Mahal, the Oberoi, the Hilton and the InterContinental. A ride from the international airport to this district costs about Rs450 by airconditioned cab. Most hotels along Marine Drive (also known as Queen's Necklace for the night-time view with the street lights sweeping around the bay) have breathtaking complete or partial seafront views. The area is a casual evening hangout, especially at sunset as the skies light up vintage art deco buildings.

The area around the Gateway of India, near Taj Mahal Palace, is bursting with British colonial buildings, as is the adjacent Kala Ghoda art district, which houses the city's museum, library and art galleries. The area is teeming with shops (at Colaba Causeway), nightlife and good food. Visitors also get to see the "tourist police" in their yellow Jeeps taking occasional rounds of this circuit.

The most prominent new hotel in Mumbai is the ITC Towers in Worli. It's being built from bricks imported from Malaysia, but what makes it so striking is the backdrop of derelict textile mills. This project signals change, and for the better, as a catalyst to development.

The Taj Mahal Palace is more than 100 years old; with its modern Towers extension, it offers about 546 rooms. The hotel recently spent millions preserving the heritage wing's century-old chandeliers. The high-ceilinged rooms are arranged around a grand staircase and tariffs depend on the view (sea-facing rooms are the costliest). The attractive refurbished top-line rooms feature a large plasma flat-screen TV (that doubles as a screen for a wireless internet-enabled keyboard), DVD player, a Compact Flash and SD card reader (a nifty device to get at your computer files in an instant, and on wide screen), a large bright bathroom with rain shower and quiet airconditioning with temperature controls that actually work. A classy and useful touch is the complimentary mineral water: two large bottles each day; ask for more if you need to. The fifth and sixth floors are for Taj Club members and offer a fabulous sea view.

The Oberoi, with 337 rooms, and the Hilton (also managed by Oberoi under franchise) with its 547 rooms, stand at the far end of Marine Drive. The rooms, divided into sea facing, city facing and harbour facing, cost between $US403 ($512, executive) and $511 (deluxe) to $652 (special). Internet charges are about $7 an hour. The Hilton's Frangipani restaurant is famous for Italian cuisine and India Jones serves oriental dishes. The Oberoi's most stylish place to dine is Vetro, with its Italian dishes and coloured-glass decor.

The more than 30-year-old Taj President, with 300 rooms, is in Cuffe Parade. The Lady Executive Suite costs $US153 with bath accessories from Biotique. Female guests are attended by female staff and can vet visitors at the door on a videophone. Pink bathrobes and slippers complete the array. The executive rooms are large and prices start from $US207.

The Ambassador has the only restaurant in Mumbai that revolves. Called the Pearl of the Orient, it takes 90 minutes for the restaurant to complete one rotation. Executive rooms are priced at $US120. Bathrobes are available on request and the minibar stocks no spirits. The health centre is small and limited.

SPA TIME

In the financial heartland of Mumbai, take time out at the sprawling art-festooned, yet brisk, Grand Hyatt Mumbai and its Club Oasis Fitness Centre and Spa complete with treatment rooms, jacuzzis, steam rooms and outdoor pool. The J.W. Marriott Mumbai, too, offers its state-of-the-art and utterly spoiling Quan Spa. Make an appointment for body scrubs, rubdowns, steam rooms and assorted fitness goodies. At the Leela Kempinski Mumbai enjoy gardens, a spa, meditation, yoga and naturopathy.

AFTER DARK

Night is when Mumbai really starts hopping. If you're in south Mumbai try Polyester for some nostalgic '80s song and dance. In South Mumbai's Colaba, visit the pricey, high-ceilinged, two-floor Indigo. The restaurant serves spicy Thai and oriental food.

Celebrities can be spotted at Athena, a cigar lounge cum restaurant with low yellow sofas and opaque glass counters. Try Gaylords at Colaba, too. An established bar since 1942, it has two levels with a mezzanine-floor and the menu here is reasonably priced. For a fun alfresco experience not far from the Taj Mahal Hotel, wander up a few floors to the trendy rooftop Koyla, a hookah bar and restaurant where white tents flap in the breeze amid leafy vegetation and lots of cosy, low sofas and cushioned corners. There's a good mix of music, mood, food and fruit-flavoured hookahs.

Insomnia at the Taj Mahal Hotel is frequented by the who's who of the city. Not Just Jazz by the Bay, on Marine Drive, is filled with jazz memorabilia and has live music on Wednesday and Saturday nights. This is a trendy hangout. Drop in late. There's a pizzeria just outside, too. Chopsticks (Chinese), across the road, seems to have lost some of its flavour, but in the general vicinity try Jahangir Cafe for food and art, Khyber (Indian) or the enduring streetside tandoori barbecue favourite, Bade Miya, just behind the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Roll up your sleeves if you're feeling adventurous. Visit Geoffrey's at Marine Plaza for an English pub experience. Mikano's, the disco at Lower Parel, has wide-open spaces, wooden floors and purple lights. The Olive Bar & Kitchen in the busy residential suburb of Bandra serves Italian cuisine and is popular with models and Bollywood stars.

Zenzi Bar, also in Bandra, has a glass-panelled, wood-floored lounge that serves French, Thai, Japanese and Indonesian cuisine. Rain, the restaurant-lounge bar, is popular in Juhu and serves New World cuisine.

Whatever you do, there's one cardinal rule: no ice in your drinks. And always, always, drink bottled water.


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TWENTY-FOUR HEAVEN
Lonely Planet author Joe Bindloss details his perfect day in Mumbai
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAYS in Mumbai start early, with coffee and a muffin at the nearest branch of Barista or with a plate of idli (steamed rice cakes) at one of Colaba's south Indian dining halls. Then stroll along Colaba Causeway to watch the vendors setting up market stalls laden with T-shirts, incense, soapstone elephants, discount electronics and faux antiques.

Take a ride in one of Mumbai's charming old taxis to the bizarre colonial fantasy that is Victoria Station, followed by a wander around the faded but still stately streets of the old British quarter. For the second half of the morning, I'd be torn between visiting the splendid Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum or a jaunt to Chowpatty Beach.

After lunch, I'd head back to Colaba for a boat ride to the famous Hindu cave temples on Elephanta Island (making sure anything that looked edible was hidden from the eyes of hungry monkeys). The tail end of the afternoon could be spent shopping for ethnic knick-knacks and Indian fashions on Dr D.N. Road in Fort or Linking Road in Bandra.

A shower and a change of clothes would be essential for dinner at Khyber, Mumbai's best eatery, styled after an Afghan palace and serving food fit for a Mughal emperor. Belly full, I'd drift back to Colaba for an ice-cold Kingfisher beer and a chat with interesting punters at the energetic Leopold Cafe.

Suitably refreshed, there might still be time for a late showing of a Bollywood blockbuster at the swish Inox cinema at Nariman Point.

This is an edited extract from The Perfect Day: Lonely Planet Insider Secrets to 100 Cities (Lonely Planet 2006, $9.95). Joe Bindloss is also the author of Best of Mumbai: The Ultimate Pocket Guide & Map (Lonely Planet, $19.95).

A little slice of India (http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/oct/23/travelfoodanddrink.london)
Celebrate national curry week with a tour of London's Southall, where you can pay for a pint in rupees, browse sari shops and, of course, taste traditional dishes. Jini Reddy hits the streets

Jini Reddy
Guardian Unlimited, UK (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)
Tuesday October 23 2007

http://image.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Travel/Pix/pictures/2007/10/23/Curry460.jpg
Dish of the day ... even the local Iceland sells ingredients for an authentic curry. Photograph: Envision/Corbis

I am staring at boxes packed tight with exotic Indian vegetables: patra leaves, parval (which looks a bit like a gherkin), green bananas, and the mysterious galka. And the wonder of it is that I'm in Iceland. And not the Iceland of puffins and Bjork either – nope, this is the frozen food supermarket, better known for, er, frozen foods. Only this Iceland is in Southhall, West London, and apart from the vegetables, the shelves are heaving with big chunks of jaggery, ready-made roti and naans, and about a dozen varieties of Bombay mix.

The shop is one of the stops on a clever tour hosted by Monisha Bharadwaj, a food writer who wastes no time in reeling off her accomplishments: "I've written 12 books, I'm a professional chef, a trained classical dancer with my own school, and I am a regular on UK FOOD TV," she announces. Our group, a mixture of North American, European and London day-trippers, is briefly silenced by this kameez-clad luminary in our midst.

Southall is home to a good slice of London's Punjabi community - if ever the word community can be applied to individuals who share the same skin colour, religion and ancestral patch but perhaps nothing more. "The Punjabi Sikhs from India, plus east African Asians from Uganda and Kenya, arrived here in the 1950s and 60s," says Bharadwaj, who isn't from Southall at all, but Mumbai, where she continues to live for part of the year.

I'm vaguely embarrassed to be the token Asian face on this tour – especially after one guy joining the group mistakes me for our hostess. I'm of Indian descent, I'm familiar with the spices, I know what a sari looks like – if not how to wear one – so why do I need to be herded around?

Mostly, I'm curious about our hostess, and Monisha is good value, especially her brazen attempts to flog one of her books, Indian in 6, which details Indian recipes using six ingredients or less. "See me later, if you want a copy," she reminds us, as we pause outside Glassy Junction, a pub where you can pay for your pint in rupees. Apparently, you can also order dishes prepared in a Tandoor oven, in traditional Punjabi style. We stare at the doors longingly, but here's no time to linger – the tour only lasts a couple of hours, and we have plenty of ground to cover.

There's the sari emporium on the bustling main drag – one of several – where the fabric is cheap and sold "by the suit". The colours, sequins and fabric are so heart-stoppingly gorgeous, they're practically edible. We peer through the window of a music shop selling sitars and tablas (no time to stop!), and then it's into the foyer of the Himalaya cinema, which is plastered with peeling Indian film posters. Here Monisha shows us a few of the hand movements the dancers in the Bollwood flicks use. "Come, come – you can all try," she clucks, as we obediently spread our fingers, though we can't compete with her slender, elegant digits. Her film recommendation? "If you're a fan of Shah Rukh Khan [a sort of jowlier, Asian Tom Cruise] you must see Veer Zaara," she says, as a woman in a cagoule starts taking notes.

Next stop is the sweet shop Ambala, which also does a nice line in assorted savouries. The lone Israeli in our midst buys a bagful of syrupy jelebis – think orange, translucent pretzels – and wolfs them down. An elderly local in a purple sari stares at the log-jam we've created. "Is there a special on today?" she asks, touching my shoulder with a hand heavy of gold rings.

There's barely time to admire the Hindu temple on Lady Margaret Road, before we're whisked off for lunch. At a tenner for three courses of unexciting but filling curries (second and third helpings too, if you ask nicely), the restaurant isn't bad value. And it's a chance to socialise – a nice extra if you've come alone. My table companions include a 24-year-old Montrealer named Ula Pohl, who's determined to visit her namesake, Ulla Pool, in Scotland, and two retired National Trust employees. Sadly the place lacks atmosphere and, apart from our group, is empty.

No matter, Monisha whips out her mobile phone, and a short while later, her two charming children appear and shyly let themselves be introduced. So what are their plans for the afternoon? "We're going to the Himalaya," says Monisha, clearly relishing an afternoon in the cinema. Her daughter, a mini-Monisha, nods eagerly. Not so her son, who, like boys the world over when faced with determined mums, emits a small sigh. "I'd much rather play," he says.

Baseball, Apple Pie...and Mahindra? (http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2007/gb20071025_959200.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_global+business)
How an Indian company plans to woo America's heartland with its fuel-efficient SUVs and pickups

by David Kiley (http://www.businessweek.com/bios/David_Kiley.htm)
Businessweek

http://images.businessweek.com/story/07/370/1025_mahindra.jpg

Engineers from India design advanced jet engines, write some of the world's most sophisticated software, and run massive global computer networks. But can they make a pickup truck that will sell in America's heartland?

Mahindra & Mahindra, a conglomerate based in Mumbai, intends to find out. In spring, 2009, the company plans to launch two- and four-door pickups and a sport-utility vehicle in the U.S. This trio of diesel-powered trucks will compete against a big pack of aggressively promoted offerings from General Motors(GM), Ford (F), Dodge, Nissan (NSANY), and Toyota (TM). All of these manufacturers have been warring over a domestic pickup market that is shrinking and a SUV market that's overcrowded.

Skepticism abounds. Trucks in the U.S. are sold with imagery of waving flags, macho companionship, and brawny workers showing off feats of towing strength to the sound of John Mellencamp anthems. Buyers tend to be loyal, practical traditionalists.

Considering that established players such as Toyota, Nissan, and Honda have already had their share of trouble attracting this crowd, some experts wonder whether a little-known company from a country that has no history of selling vehicles to American consumers has a prayer. They're also skeptical that buyers will flock to diesel—a technology that many U.S. consumers associate with belching big rigs. "It looks like an impossible marketing play," says auto industry consultant Dan Gorrell of AutoStrategem in Tustin, Calif.

But at a time of soaring gas prices, Mahindra's vehicles are going to have one big thing in their favor: superior fuel economy. Despite diesel's historic brown image, it is emerging as a green technology. New low-sulfur fuel, federally mandated in 2006, can produce mileage figures that nearly equal those of more fashionable hybrids. Mahindra estimates that its compact SUV, the Scorpio, and pickups, one of which will be called the Appalachian, will get about 30 miles per gallon in the city and as much as 37 on the highway. That compares with 30 city/34 highway for the $27,000 Ford Escape SUV hybrid and 21 city/27 highway for the gas-powered $23,000 Toyota RAV4.

Although Mahindra is unknown to most American consumers, the company has made cars in India for more than 50 years. The $4.5 billion company also has financial services, information technology, telecommunications, and agricultural equipment businesses. Over the past decade, it has sold more than 50,000 tractors in the U.S.

Well aware of the image problems confronting an Indian pickup, Mahindra has conducted extensive consumer research in America. At a recent meeting at the Alpharetta (Ga.) offices of Global Vehicles, the company that will distribute the brand in the U.S., interviews with potential buyers were projected on a big screen. "I don't see them [Mahindra] entering the market and immediately competing with more established brands," said one thirtysomething male. "Can it really be made well if it comes from India?" asked another.

Given these attitudes, the company has made a key strategic decision: It is not going to waste energy trying to persuade the unpersuadables. Instead, Mahindra is going to target the three groups it believes will be the most receptive to its vehicles—consumers who identify themselves as "green," people who have bought Mahindra tractors, and the close to 3 million Indian expatriate households in the U.S. The plan is to generate buzz with these buyers, then hope the word spreads to the mainstream.

Rather than unrolling a big image-building marketing campaign, which would be drowned out by the thunder of other truck promotions, Mahindra plans to start small. It will spend only about $20 million on marketing in 2009, less than 10% of what Toyota spent to launch the Tundra pickup. Almost none of this money is expected to be devoted to television or glossy print ads. Instead, it will purchase carefully selected search terms and banner ads on Web sites popular with its target consumers. These links will steer potential buyers to detailed information about Mahindra's trucks. The green consumers whom the company is courting relentlessly research the products they buy, then frequently promote them to friends.

Mahindra has set modest sales targets for its American operation. In the second six months of 2009, it plans to sell just 18,000 vehicles, followed by 45,000 in 2010. Mahindra will ship its SUV whole from India, but the pickup trucks will be transported in pieces. They will be assembled at one of three plant sites Global is scouting in the Southeast. Worried that any quality problems could quickly stigmatize the Mahindra brand, Global Vehicles CEO John A. Perez is working hard with Mahindra to keep the number of defects to a minimum. "We don't want to be Kia or Hyundai and have to apologize after we launch," says Perez.

So far, Perez has attracted 263 dealers to distribute Mahindra trucks. One of them is Steven Taylor, a Cadillac dealer who's invested more than $1 million in a Mahindra franchise in Toledo despite all of the obvious risks. "Trucks and an SUV that get over 30 mpg is a market niche that will get noticed," Taylor says.

David Kiley (http://www.businessweek.com/bios/David_Kiley.htm) is a senior correspondent in BusinessWeek's Detroit bureau

Indian It Giants Turning East For New Markets (http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v3/news_business.php?id=292030)
From P. Vijian
BERNAMA, Malaysia
October 25, 2007

NEW DELHI, Oct 25 (Bernama) -- After a long association with the American market, Indian information technology (IT) giants are now veering towards Asia to double their computer hardware and software exports.

India's Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council chairman, Sanjiv Narayan, said India wants to reduce its over-dependence on America, which accounts for over 60 percent of the total Indian exports.

"Basically, we are looking at diversifying the market portfolios which largely had been focused on the US. We want to expand to newer markets in Asia, the Far East and the Middle East.

"There are lots of opportunities (in Asia). We are looking at expanding the Asian market share from the current 10 percent to about 15 percent in the next three years," Narayan told Bernama.

India's red-hot economy had largely been propelled by the robust IT sector where about 4,500 established IT companies export products worth US$37 billion (US$1=RM3.36) overseas markets, and plans to double the figure by 2010.

Asian economic powerhouses like Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, which has a healthy demand for IT products are certainly on India's list and the council forecast India's IT industry itself to grow by 30 percent annually.

"Japan is having US$30 billion market but we are only doing US$2 billion and we will focus more on Japan and Hong Kong. Hong Kong is becoming an outsourcing hub and many companies are going there and also to China," said Narayan.

Amid growing competition in the sector and perceived odds against the outsourcing industry, a main driver of the Indian IT sector, and the strengthening of the rupee against the dollar, Indian companies are now looking at Asia for the future.

India offers hope for those too sick to wait (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/28/nhealth528.xml)
By Amrit Dhillon in Delhi
Telegraph, UK
28/10/2007

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Success: The Wockhardt has treated 100 Britons in six months

Emerging into the teeming chaos of people, cows and honking vehicles outside Bangalore airport, retired teacher John Stauffer wondered if he had been mad to come to India for brain surgery.

On arriving at Wockhardt Hospital, the American's unease soon faded. The calm atmosphere, the gleaming high-tech equipment and the soothing manner of the consultant neurosurgeon instantly reassured the 66-year-old.

Mr Stauffer had flown from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to have a brain tumour removed for a fraction of the price it would cost him in the US, and he is one of a growing number of health tourists to India.

Some 175,000 foreigners have made the same journey this year, according to the Confederation of Indian Industry, up 25,000 from last year. Next year, 200,000 are expected.

The figures underline the remarkable success of India's medical tourism industry, despite warnings that the country's poverty and reputation for poor hygiene would put people off.

Not only are there more such tourists, but they are coming for increasingly complex treatments. The healthy patients who have flown to India for cosmetic surgery or dental work for a decade are now being joined by sick people, some in terrible pain.

They are seeking knee replacements, bariatric surgery for obesity, heart bypass operations, spinal surgery and, in some cases, transplants. Mr Stauffer came because he had no medical insurance and the tumour was life-threatening.

"Otherwise I would have had to mortgage my home to get the treatment," he said.

He was treated by Dr Deshpande Rajkumar, a pioneering surgeon who removed another patient's tumour through the nose earlier this year.

Foreigners who have surgery in India come because of long waiting lists in Britain, high prices or lack of insurance in America, and a dearth of expertise in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Dr Vijay Bose, an orthopaedic surgeon at Apollo Hospital in Madras, operates on around 16 foreigners every month – mainly Americans, Canadians and Britons – who want hip-resurfacing, which enables a more active life than traditional hip replacement. The procedure is new and has not yet been licensed in the US, so Americans fly to be treated by Dr Bose.

All India's major private hospital groups report a growing number of foreign patients, of whom around 20 per cent are from Europe.

In the past six months, Wockhardt Hospital alone has treated 100 Britons for joint replacement, spinal decompression (for chronic back pain) and heart disease.

Would-be patients often have long talks with the doctors before flying in.

"The 'tourist' element of medical tourism has gone," said Anas Wajid, head of marketing at the opulent Artemis Health Institute at Gurgaon, near New Delhi.

"Patients might have a break after their treatment to see India, but they come because they are sick and want to be relieved of pain."

Record numbers go abroad for health (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/28/nhealth128.xml)
By Laura Donnelly and Patrick Sawer
Telegraph, UK
28/10/2007

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More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year, a figure that is forecast to rise

Record numbers of Britons are flying abroad for medical treatment to escape NHS waiting lists and the rising threat of hospital superbugs.

Thousands of "health tourists" are going as far as India, Malaysia and South Africa for major operations – such is their despair over the quality of health services.

The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration with NHS waiting lists are fuelling the increasing trend.

More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year – a figure that is forecast to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade. Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away.

India is the most popular destination for surgery, followed by Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia, Poland and Spain. But dozens more countries are attracting custom. Research by the Treatment Abroad website shows that Britons have travelled to 112 foreign hospitals, based in 48 countries, to find safe, affordable treatment.

Almost all of those who had received treatment abroad said they would do the same again, with patients pointing out that some hospitals in India had screening policies for the superbug MRSA that have yet to be introduced in this country.

Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said the figures were a "terrible indictment" of government policies that were undermining the efforts of NHS staff to provide quality services.

The findings come amid further revelations about the Government's mishandling of NHS policies, and ahead of official statistics that will embarrass ministers:

On Wednesday, figures are expected to show rising numbers of hospital infections. Cases of the superbug Clostridium difficile, which have risen five-fold in the past decade, are expected to increase beyond the 55,000 cases reported last year.
On the same day, statistics will show that vast sums have been spent on pay, with GPs' earnings rising by more than 50 per cent in three years to an average of more than £110,000.
New research shows that growing NHS bureaucracy has left nurses with little time to see patients – most spending long periods dealing with paperwork.
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients' Association, said the health tourism figures reflected shrinking public faith in the Government's handling of the NHS.

"The confidence that the public has in NHS hospitals has been shattered by the growth of hospital infections and this Government's failure to make a real commitment to tackling it," she said. "People are simply frightened of going to NHS hospitals, so I am not surprised the numbers going abroad are increasing so rapidly. My fear is that most people can't afford to have private treatment – whether in this country or abroad."

Some foreign hospitals touting for business on the internet offer consultations in hotels in Britain. But other patients are happy to rely on email to discuss their treatment with doctors thousands of miles away. Low prices in India, where flights, hotels and a heart bypass cost less than half the price charged by British private hospitals, explain its top ranking in the survey by Treatment Abroad, a British website providing information on hospitals overseas.

Hungary's popularity rests on a boom in dentistry, thanks to a shortage of NHS dentists in Britain.

Mr Lansley said: "Healthcare is an area where Britain could be a world beater because we have some of the best research and best clinicians. If people don't trust the health service, then that is a terrible indictment of this Government, which has turned the NHS into a nationalised bureaucracy, instead of something able to focus on what patients want."

The British Medical Association advised people to be careful when considering treatment abroad, highlighting the dangers of flying soon after surgery, which can cause complications.

A spokesman said: "Travelling can place a great deal of stress on the body. Patients travelling abroad for surgery should consider their fitness to fly and get an understanding of an appropriate convalescence period before attempting to return home."

A Department of Health official said the number of patients seeking treatment abroad was a tiny fraction of the 13 million treated on the NHS each year. Waiting times had fallen. Almost half of patients were treated within 18 weeks of seeing a GP. Most people who had hospital care did not contract infections.

Fears and frustrations driving patients abroad (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/28/nhealth228.xml)
By Patrick Sawer and Laura Donnelly
Telegraph, UK
28/10/2007

The threat of contracting a fatal superbug, and despair over hospital waiting times are fuelling a boom in health tourism, with Britons turning to overseas hospitals in growing numbers.

A survey – as new figures are about to be published on MRSA and Clostridium difficile – reveals that a third do so because of rising hospital infections.

Figures this week are expected to show a continued rise in outbreaks of the superbugs. And experts warn that the latest statistics would represent "the tip of the iceberg" with hundreds of thousands of cases going undetected.

advertisementThe figures from the Health Protection Agency are expected to show that cases of C. diff, which have risen five-fold in the past decade, have increased beyond the 55,000 cases reported last year.

The number of MRSA infections is predicted to fall slightly, but experts warn that the statistics would only include cases where MRSA was detected in a patient's blood, not in the area surrounding wounds, where it is commonly found.

Dr Mark Enright, a microbiologist, said: "Most experts think bloodstream MRSA represents about 15 per cent of the actual cases of the infection found in the hospital, so these figures will represent the tip of the iceberg."

He also warned that many hospitals failed to spot the symptoms of C. diff, meaning that many patients who suffered might never be included in NHS statistics.

One "health tour operator", Taj Medical Group, which specialises in India, points to superbug infections as a key reason why Britons are seeking treatment abroad.

Last year, it arranged treatment and travel for 400 Britons. Dr Jagdish Jethwa, its director, said: "They go because they are fed up with long NHS queues, or they have had appointments cancelled three or four times. Some go because they are scared of rising MRSA rates and know a friend or relative who has been infected in a British hospital."

A number of hospitals in India screen patients for MRSA, which they would treat before any surgery. Earlier this month, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said that Britain will adopt a similar policy within the year. Screening of emergency admissions could be in place within three years.

Cost was another reason given for seeking surgery overseas, according to the survey, carried out by the information service Treatment Abroad. Those unable to bypass queues through private health care found cheaper alternatives in other countries.

Indian hospitals charge 20-50 per cent less than private British clinics. In Madras, a single knee replacement can cost £4,200, compared with £9,500 in Britain.

Heart bypass operations typically cost £5,300 in India, including the cost of transport and accommodation, compared with £14,000 in Britain.

Almost all those surveyed said they had no regrets and would travel abroad again if necessary; 39 per cent wanted to combine treatment with a holiday.

But India is not the only destination that is proving a popular destination with British health tourists. Nearly a third opt for hospitals, often elsewhere in Europe, to avoid long NHS waiting times.

Phil Smith, a logistical expert at Northampton-based People Logistics, said: "People want to go to France because they are often in too much pain to wait six months it takes to see a consultant and have surgery in Britain. With us, they have to wait only two to three weeks for the operation to be carried out."

French surgeons specialise in minimally invasive knee surgery not routinely available in NHS hospitals.

About 2,500 Britons have travelled to France for knee and hip surgery with People Logistics alone. The company, founded in 2000, has seen the number of patients it handles grow from about 25 a month to 40 a month since the start of this year.

"Patients are also coming to us because of growing fears over MRSA and C.diff," said Mr Smith. "We've never had a case of MRSA from the clinic we deal with in Abbeville and it has a less than one per cent infection rate.

"Cost is another factor. To go privately in the UK costs as much as £12,500. It's £7,000 in France."

People Logistics is among several companies with links to hospitals around the world that have sprung up in the past few years. They act as brokers, arranging "sun and surgery" packages which include the cost of the operation, travel and accommodation.

Many patients bypass the operators to make their own arrangements with hospitals, using the internet to compare success rates and find the specialist they need.

The Treatment Abroad survey of 290 patients, just over half of whom were aged between 40 and 60, also found that marginally more women than men sought treatment abroad, possibly because many foreign clinics offer cosmetic surgery at attractive prices.

Spain is becoming popular for fertility treatment. Anonymity for sperm and egg donors is still guaranteed, unlike in Britain, and success rates are high.

The Netherlands is seen as an attractive destination for cancer treatment, with hospitals there much quicker to use cancer drugs. Belgium's record for heart surgery is attracting health tourists, with infection rates of 0.5 per cent, compared with 1.5 in Britain. It was ranked top out of 24 EU states for cardiac treatment by the European Heart Journal.

The numbers of British patients travelling overseas is expected to continue to rise, according to the Treatment Abroad survey.

In India alone, health tourism is expected to be worth £1.1 billion by the beginning of the next decade. Last year, an estimated 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical procedures, and the number is increasing at the rate of about 15 per cent a year.

But patients are being warned to research countries and hospitals thoroughly before seeking treatment.

The advice of David Hancock, author of The Complete Medical Tourist, is: "Ask for testimonials of patients who have undergone procedures at the medical facility. Contact the people personally to make sure there were no later complications."

He also recommends taking a friend or companion along to help cope with difficulties before or after surgery. "The prices are seductive," he said, "but there are pitfalls. People should not regard it as a holiday with an operation thrown in. They should choose the location for medical reasons."

The reputable agencies also warn British patients to be on their guard against rogue operators.

Dipa Jethwa, the Taj Medical Group's customer support manager, said: "Unfortunately, there are a lot of people wanting to make quick money and we see a lot of companies jumping on the health tourism bandwagon. It just takes one bad case to tarnish us all."

Your surgeon is just a flight away (http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/travel/story.html?id=87d2cdd8-67c7-40bb-aa17-ab935ff5d09a)
Seven Golden residents are glad they spent thousands of dollars going to India for hip replacements rather than sit in pain on waiting lists here

Doug Ward,
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, October 27, 2007

Jeff Dolinsky, a dentist in Golden, travelled to India in the spring -- and he didn't go to sightsee, meditate or contort his body in front of a yoga master. Dolinsky's goal was more prosaic -- hip surgery.

When Dolinsky went under the knife in a hospital in Chennai (formerly Madras), he felt reasonably confident he had made the right decision.

After all, six other residents from the Rocky Mountain town of Golden had also undergone successful hip surgery in the same hospital with the same physician during the previous three years.

Dentist Jeff Dolinksy (right) went to India for hip surgery, as did six other Golden residents over the past few years. With him is Dr. Vijay Bose, who operated on him at the Apollo Hospital in Chennai, India.

The patients from Golden are among the small but slowly growing number of Canadians flying to foreign countries for treatment -- a for-profit phenomenon known as medical tourism.

The medical tourism industry earned revenue of $20 billion in 2005 and that figure is expected to double to $40 billion by 2010, according to a recent report by Frost and Sullivan, an U.S. business research firm.

The same study found that Asian countries such as India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia view medical tourism as important sources of revenue.

Canadians who "outsource" their treatment overseas are doing so because of frustration over the list of 875,000 people waiting for surgeries and other procedures.

Dolinsky, 48, had spent many months in severe pain from osteoarthritis. He sought treatment and was told that hip resurfacing -- a less invasive alternative to hip replacement surgery -- was his best option. He was also told that he might have to wait a year if he wanted it done in B.C.

A long pain-ridden wait would have forced Dolinsky to scale back his dental practice and temporarily give up downhill skiing and mountaineering, the sports that drew him originally to the Golden area.

But instead of waiting, Dolinsky flew to India. The hospital picked him up and ushered him into what it called its "platinum ward," which was more like a posh hotel, with its marble floors, big-screen satellite TV and lap-top computer with WiFi.

"And from the time I woke up from surgery until now, I haven't had to take more than a couple of painkillers," recalled Dolinsky recently.

North Vancouver's Gloria Creighton is similarly pleased with her decision to forgo treatment in Canada and fly to Chennai. Doctors here told her she needed a hip replacement. She feared this would end her career as a dance specialist with the Burnaby school district.

Her husband learned about the less invasive hip resurfacing from the Internet. He also learned that the procedure could be purchased at the clinic in Chennai. They decided to fly to the subcontinent and many months later, they have no regrets about the $15,000 cost.

"When I came home I started walking around the park down the street and going swimming," said Creighton.

"It's a miracle. Before that, I'd thought that I was gone, done-in. Now I can keep teaching and not have to go on disability and be a burden to the government."

There are about 15 medical tourism companies based in Canada. Their clients are seeking elective surgeries for such things as joint replacement (knee/hip), cardiac surgery, dental surgery, cosmetic surgery, cancer and transplant surgery.

These firms arrange treatment in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Critics have said it's morally wrong for these developing countries to foster a private health care sector for wealthy westerners when the majority of their own citizens have poor access to health care.

But these attacks haven't stopped the governments of many Third World countries from trying to attract wealthy western patients.

The website of the Royal Thai Consulate in Vancouver provides an overview and pricing for its medical tourism sector, which attracted 600,000 foreign patients in 2004.

Many of the Canadian medical tourism companies are based in B.C., including Surgical Tourism Canada, which brokers surgeries for Canadians in affiliated high-tech private health facilities in India, Mexico, the United States and Abu Dhabi.

Yasmeen Sayeed, chief executive officer of Surgical Tourism Canada, said her client list has steadily increased since she opened shop in July 2005.

But Sayeed acknowledged that medical tourism is far less of a big deal in Canada than it is in the U.S., where 500,000 Americans went overseas for treatment in 2005.

The reason for the difference is cost. Americans are used to paying for medical care, said Sayeed. Canadians aren't because of their country's universal publicly funded health care. Medical care overseas for Canadians means money out of their pocket, she added.

But for millions of Americans who are either uninsured or underinsured, purchasing medical care overseas can be cheaper than buying it at home.

Another obstacle in Canada for medical tourism, added Sayeed, is the refusal so far of provincial governments to reimburse people who get treated abroad.

While medical tourism in Canada is on the increase, the number of people going abroad for care appears to be insignificant.

Sayeed's Surgical Tourism Canada is one of the largest medical tourism firms in the country, but it has only sent about 100 people abroad since its inception.

Leigh Turner, a McGill University biomedical ethics professor, recently wrote that little is known about how many Canadians do go abroad but that the number is probably relatively modest.

Also modest is the number of Canadians heading to the United States to avoid long waiting lists. There was a flurry of media reports a few years ago about Canadians heading south for private care, but a 2002 study by health care researchers at the University of B.C. found surprisingly few Canadians travelled to the U.S.

The report, Phantoms in the Snow, said Canadian travel tourism to the U.S. was "more myth than reality" and that the numbers involved "appear to be handfuls rather than hordes."

Dr. Michael Rachlis, who has written extensively about the Canadian health care system, said the number of Canadians going overseas "is of trivial significance."

Rachlis recalled attending a conference in Toronto on medical tourism where most of the companies involved were only sending about six people a month abroad.

There seemed to be a jump in recent years in the number of Canadians, mostly ethnic Chinese or South Asians, going to Asia for organ transplants.

Ken Donahue, a spokesman for the B.C. Transplant Society, said 136 British Columbians have received transplants overseas since 1990.

But Dr. David Landsberg, medical director of transplantation at St. Paul's Hospital, said the number of Canadians seeking organs overseas is on the wane because many countries have recently placed restrictions on the practice.

"I haven't had any patients who have gone away and come back in the last six months."

Dr. Brian Day, head of the Canadian Medical Association, is a big fan of a reverse form of medical tourism -- he wants the tourists coming here.

Day believes Canada could eventually make billions of dollars off mostly American medical tourists.

The CMA head believes B.C. could attract many medical tourists from Asia. Day said he visited an orthopedic hospital in Cuba that generates $20 million in revenue annually treating medical tourists.

But Day's opponents in the debate over the future of Canadian medicine are less enamoured of the prospect of medical tourism in Canada.

Rachlis, a sharp critic of private medicine in Canada, said: "Do we really want the administrators in our system spending their time luring Americans? Or do we want them to fix the problems faced by Canadians?"

Rachlis said the money available from medical tourism would only amount to tens of millions of dollars -- miniscule compared to the $150 billion spent on health care annually in Canada.

"It's just a complete diversion."

Day dismissed Rachlis's criticism, saying that Canada should only promote medical tourism once waiting lists are eliminated in Canadian hospitals.

"We are losing all of that potential trade and the only reason we are losing it is because we have wait lists."

He also said that Rachlis seriously underestimates the revenue available to Canada from medical tourism - money that could be injected back into the system here.

Day believes Canada could make "tens of billions or more" from medical tourism based on the sector's projected growth worldwide.

Kashmir sets the scene to lure Bollywood stars back to the hills (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/bollywood/article2748858.ece)
Ashling O’Connor in Bombay
From The Times, UK
October 27, 2007

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As a backdrop for blossoming love on the big screen in India, Kashmir has been missing for nearly 20 years since insurgency in the disputed border region sent Bollywood directors running for safer hills in Switzerland. Now tourism officials from Jammu and Kashmir have renewed their pitch about the merits of the picturesque state to the Hindi film industry, which is still largely sceptical that things have changed for the better.

Bollywood producers and directors at a Bombay trade show yesterday for potential film locations in India heard that Kashmir was “as safe as anywhere in the country”. Sarmad Hafeez, the state’s joint director of tourism, said: “There has been a lot of negative publicity about Kashmir that is very unfair. Things are always blown out of proportion. They can happen anywhere in the world.”

It is 17 years since tensions between India and Pakistan brought the neighbours to the brink of war, and Kashmir is promoting its unique selling points: a diverse topography including lakes and snow-capped peaks, cheap accommodation and labour, no location fees and its proximity to India’s entertainment capital.

In the 1970s and 1980s, directors and stars flocked to the Kashmir Valley for its stunning scenery. Its sylvan surroundings soon became synonymous with song and dance sequences from classics. The close association caused a generation of Hindi film fans to describe Kashmir as their “paradise on earth”.

The outbreak of militant violence, which has claimed thousands of lives, cooled the relationship and film-makers led by Yash Chopra, Bollywood’s undisputed kingpin, searched for alternative locations. Switzerland soon reemerged as the favourite, having first been used in the 1960s by directors including Raj Kapoor and Shakti Samanta. More than 20 Bollywood productions a year are made in Switzerland and about 80,000 Indians visit annually to see the “sets”.

“It’s one of the most potent forms of advertising,” Navjot Singh Sidhu, the Indian batsman-turned-politician, said. “I have never been to Switzerland but I have seen it on the silver screen and had an urge to go.”

Its films are watched by an estimated 14 million people a day, making Bollywood a vital catalyst for tourism. With a lull in the violence and the tone of peace talks between Pakistan and India apparently positive, tourists are beginning to return to Kashmir. Officials hope that new attractions such as Asia’s largest tulip garden, which opened this year, and a proposed £3.5 million adventure sports facility will boost numbers. Greater exposure in Bollywood, beyond films about the insurgency, would provide the real filip.

Emerging rival destinations such as Malaysia and New Zealand are offering incentives including fast-track visas and discounted scouting packages. Kashmir’s biggest inducement is less enticing: free security.

Film-makers remain unconvinced. Rakesh Kumar, who filmed five movies in Kashmir before the violence erupted, including Mr Natwarlal, starring the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, said: “We are all eager that a solution should come but it’s not just a case of going there to sell goods. It’s a creative job, so why go to a risky place?”

Switzerland

Highest point: Dufourspitze 4,634m
Total area: 41,290 sq km
Population density: 183 per km sq

Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which ran for a record 500 weeks, was made almost entirely in Switzerland. The Schilthorn is also the location of Blofeld’s lair in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Kashmir

Highest point: K2 8,611m
Total Area: 222,236 sq km*
Population density: 34 per km sq

Ninety-three Bollywood films, including blockbusters, were shot in Jammu and Kashmir before the outbreak of violence in 1990. Only three have been made since then
*claimed by India

Sources: Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare; CIA World Factbook; Official Website of J&C

Goa goes broadband in hi-tech drive for foreign investment (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article2759447.ece)
Ashling O’Connor, Goa
The Times, UK
October 29, 2007

In Goa’s capital city of Panjim, Deepak Surlakar has just spent a minute completing a task that used to take him more than a week.

Emerging from the Mahiti Ghar (citizen service centre), a bright yellow tin shack, the 50-year-old property developer is clutching a digitally produced copy of a land ownership record. He paid 15 rupees a sheet and did not have to bribe anyone to get it.

He seems happy with his initial brush with the Goan government’s push to become India’s first fully wired state. “It was done in no time,” he said, smiling broadly. “Before, I had to apply for the form and it took eight days.”

Downloading public documents has been possible for five years in Goa, India’s most progressive state, but the fibre-optic cable threaded through tree branches overhead to the kiosk from the land registry office across the street is evidence of an initiative to take its technological edge further.

Goa is going broadband. And, in a project that would be ambitious even in a developed economy, it aims to have it all done by March.

United Telecom Limited (UTL), the Bangalore-based company awarded the contract nearly a year ago, has laid nearly 250km (155 miles) of cable and says that it has completed the first phase of the project – linking the government’s headquarters to district offices via a ten gigabits-per-second network.

By December, district and village administrations will have one gigabits-per-second connectivity and within five months 320,000 households will have access to speeds of up to ten megabits per second. Initially, the aim is to sign up 80,000 homes to bundled access to voice, data, high-speed internet and television services for about 500 rupees a month – a significant discount to buying cable TV, telephone and internet separately.

Users will be able to pause and fast-forward live television, hold video-conferences with friends and colleagues and file tax returns straight to the government server.

It all seems a little fantastic in a country where nearly half the 1.1 billion population does not even have an electric light in the home. Goa, though, is probably the only place in India where this futuristic scenario stands a chance of becoming reality. It is the smallest state, so is relatively easy to manage, as well as being the richest per capita – Goans earn about three times as much as the average Indian. It is already well developed in terms of infrastructure because of the tourism industry, which accounts for half of the state’s GDP. The roads are good, everyone has electricity and nearly 85 per cent of the population is literate, compared with the national average of 35 per cent.

JP Singh, the chief secretary, admits that Goa is “more like a developed economy”. While India is growing at 9 per cent a year, Goa is enjoying a rate of more than 12 per cent. He sees the opportunity for Goa to rival Bombay and Bangalore as a business process outsourcing (BPO) centre. There are already 300 BPOs up and running and two IT parks on the way.

Goa is hoping to attract serious foreign investment. Tourists who flock to the state for its beaches and laid-back vibe may be tempted to stay longer.

“With our bandwidth, someone from the US or Asia would be able to carry on with their business,” Rajendra Pal, the IT secretary, said. “There is already talk of Goa being a first-world state. An American would feel at home here.”

The Goan government has good reason to feel pleased with itself: it is getting a world-class infrastructure for free. UTL is investing 4,000 million rupees (£49.4 million) and will pay 12 per cent of net revenues to the state after the fifth year.

“It’s difficult to say how long it will take India to be a wired nation, but initiatives like this will put pressure on the government to put more services on the internet,” Anirudh Prabhakaran, chief operating officer of 3i Info-tech, a company investing $6 million (£2.9 million) in the e-governance branch of the Goa project, said. “It will act as a catalyst to other states.”

Switched-on state

1961 - Goa liberated from the Portuguese

1.4m population

58,677 GDP per capita in rupees

12.1% GDP growth

83.5% literacy rate

60% personal computer penetration

1,140 engineering graduates a year

2.4m broadband subscribers in India

7m new mobile subscribers in India every month

Goa takes a gamble to attract richer tourists (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1464304.ece)
Jeremy Page in Delhi
The Times, UK
March 3, 2007

Ever since Western hippies first arrived in Goa in the 1960s it has been redolent of psychedelic drugs, full-Moon parties and free love.

Now Indian local authorities, fed up with backpackers and ravers, are trying to revamp the former Portuguese enclave by developing a gambling industry that they hope could one day rival Macau’s.

The latest move is to host India’s first professional poker tournament, the Asian Poker Classic, at a five-star hotel, with a jackpot of $1 million.

The event, which ends tomorrow, is a big step in a country where gambling is illegal apart from on horse-racing (which is deemed to involve skill), as opposed to cricket, considered a game of chance, in tourism-dependent Goa. Its gambling industry currently consists of the privately-run Casino Goa, which operates on a boat cruising along the Mandovi River, and a handful of slot machines in hotels. But five more offshore casinos have been given licences and five are under discussion, according to Goa tourism officials.

“This is a good way to promote tourism,” said Ernest Dias, the vice-president of Goa’s Travel and Tourism Association. “The whole hippy image is changing: the quality of people coming to Goa is improving.” Last year local authorities banned music on outdoor loudspeakers after 10pm, which put a stop to allnight beach parties.

Local officials say that the changes are intended to attract older, higher-spending tourists to Goa, which accounts for a growing slice of India’s $6 billion tourism industry.

Of the four million tourists who visited India between 2005 and 2006, 400,000 visited Goa. The number is expected to rise by 20 per cent this year due in part to an influx of Chinese and Russian tourists, who are often keen gamblers.

Gambling industry insiders hope that this may persuade the Government to ease restrictions on betting in Goa, and eventually elsewhere in India. They argue that many Indians already gamble illegally, especially on cricket, or travel to casinos in Nepal and Sri Lanka.

The poker tournament’s sponsor is Maharajahclub.com, a gambling site that offers baccarat, blackjack, craps and roulette among other games. It also runs a site designed for Indians called Maharajahclub. net, which teaches people to play poker and other games, using virtual money.

The Asian Poker Classic’s organisers insisted that the tournament did not technically involve betting, and denied that their aim was to encourage Indians to gamble. “It’s an investment in the long-term development of the game,” said Imran Hassan, director of operations for the Asian Poker Classic. “Plus it’s great exposure for Goa.”

The tournament has provoked controversy nonetheless. “We don’t want Goa to be developed towards gambling,” said Manohar Parriker, the former Chief Minister of Goa. “With gambling come other vices like drinking, prostitution, money laundering and drug money,” he said. “Foreign tourists come to Goa for the peace and beauty of the place, not for casinos and cards.”

Investment in India hits new high (http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/investing/article.html?in_article_id=425756&in_page_id=166)
Philip Scott,
This is Money, UK
29 October 2007

Indian stocks soared to an all-new new high as the nation's main index, the Sensex, rocketed to more than 20,000 points this week as foreign investors ploughed cash in.

The Sensex, which is comprised of India's 30 largest companies, gained 3.8% to close at 19,977.97, after reaching a record high of 20,024.87 points earlier on Monday.

Already this year foreign investors have injected some $18bn into Indian equities, driving the index up almost 40% and experts are forecasting more growth.

Earlier in the month, the Indian Government announced it was taking measures from 25 October to monitor anonymous foreign investing which, although it caused some initial market concern, has been welcomed by experts as an extra layer of regulation which should ultimately protect investors. The chief worry is that foreign investors could withdraw large amounts of cash from the Indian market, which could subsequently lead to a sharp slump in equity prices.

Arun Mehra, manager of the Fidelity India Focus fund said: 'India is changing and new themes are emerging all the time. For example, huge gas and oil fields have been found recently on the East coast which will have an impact on the rupee and imports. Lifestyles are changing, more people are using the internet and thinking about healthcare. Property development is also increasing.'

One of the biggest drivers of growth is the changing demographics. Wealth is increasingly filtering down to rural and traditionally low-income sections of society, and India's middle class now totals 200m and this is expected to swell to 500m over the next eight years. The gross domestic product (GDP) of India has enjoyed phenomenal growth from some £16bn in 1980 to a whopping £500bn today.

In addition it also has one of the youngest populations in the world, with around half aged below 26. Experts point out that lifestyles are changing too with a growing number of people using credit cards, buying mobile phones, eating out, shopping in big department stores and spending their money on healthcare, travel and luxuries. Over the coming three years some 71m will join the working age demographic.

'What we have taken for granted for years in the UK is now unfolding in India. Purchasing power is starting to come through and households are moving up the income chain,' adds Mehra.

'Another big issue in India is infrastructure. While India is ahead of China - the other big powerhouse in Asia - in terms of its service industry, it is at least 10 years behind with infrastructure development. However, this is starting to change and $320bn of infrastructure investment has been targeted between now and 2012 with projects in place for improving roads, ports, telecommunications, airports, railways and power.'

Justin Urquhart Stewart of Seven Investment Management is however urging caution as he believes many investors in India suffer from a 'highly inflated expectation on returns'.

He says: 'The global economy is slowing down and emerging markets,
especially those that have been doing so well, will inevitably be hit. There is a huge amount of speculation, but this is a very volatile region. Right now India looks like a terrible fashion fad. There needs to be a reduction in valuations to more realistic levels.'

Volatility no doubt dogs the Indian market. In 2006, when markets around the globe tumbled in May and June, the Indian Sensex index plummeted by nearly 30% in just five weeks. Following the Government's recent legislation on foreign investors, shares fell by 10%, although they managed to recover to just 1.7% down by the end of trading on the same day.

There is a limited selection of pure India funds but some of the growth has been exceptional. Mark Dampier of Hargreaves Lansdown, an independent financial adviser, likes the HSBC GIF Indian Equity fund. Launched in 1996 it has achieved a phenomenal return of 1,514% since then, according to fund analyst Morningstar.

Darius McDermott of Chelsea Financial Services, another adviser, likes Fidelity India Focus - up 250% since it launched in August 2004 - and First State's India portfolio, which has posted a return of 45% since its inception a year ago.

Neptune is one of the latest fund managers to get in on the India game. The group launched its India fund at the end of December last year and since then it has delivered growth of 31%. JPMorgan's Indian investment trust has delivered 735% over the past five years.

McDermott says: 'While India has a very good long-term story, this is for high risk investors only, but there have been some excellent returns from India funds, particularly over recent years.'

Another way in is to buy a generalist emerging markets fund which invests in a spread of regions. Experts like the the look of First State Global Emerging Markets Leaders fund for investors who prefer this route.

India should be economic ally (http://www.ifallsdailyjournal.com/node/5431)
International Falls Daily Journal, Minnesota
Submitted by Journal Staff
October 29, 2007 - 5:00pm.

India offers Minnesota economic opportunity.

That’s according to Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty who returned Saturday from a week-long trade mission in India. The governor said he hopes the mission will boost economic opportunities for Minnesota business. A 73-member delegation, including representatives of IBM, Best Buy, CH Robinson and 3M, joined him on the trip.

The country’s growing middle class and more than 700 people less than age 25 presents a huge market for Minnesota companies. And, Pawlenty noted that India’s agriculture, medical manufacturing, environment and energy-related sectors also offers Minnesota businesses opportunities.

For example, Pawlenty noted that India is one of the world’s largest producers of goods and vegetables, however 40 percent of the products rot because of inadequate food processing and distribution systems. It’s in these areas that Minnesota business could fill a niche.

Several Indian companies are already doing business in Minnesota. One of those companies, Essar Global Ltd., is moving ahead with plans to construct a $1.6 billion ore-to-steel plant in Nashwauk — a major investment in a town that needs it to revive its suffering economy.

But Pawlenty recently learned that the company may have ties to Iran and said he got no solid answers about Essar’s involvement in a proposed refinery project while there in India. Pawlenty pledged that the state, at least under his watch, would not support companies engaged in activities in Iran, which he called a terrorist state.

We, too, agree that promoting economic gain must be tempered with reason. And the idea of doing business with a company too closely tied to Iran would be wrong. Pawlenty says he will oppose any state subsidy — and the entire project — if Essar is involved. Instead, he — and much of northern Minnesota which stands to gain from the project — hope the matter is cleared up to allow the project to move foreword.

But the Essar deal shouldn’t cloud that India could become a bright economic spot on the horizon, for Minnesota.

India's Construction Boom: Boon or Bust?



P.M.S. Prasad is not a man you would expect to be worried. The CEO and president of Reliance Industries' oil and gas business is in the enviable position of having a long list of buyers lined up to purchase natural gas from its record-breaking discovery in the Krishna Godavari
basin, off India's east coast. But at a recent press conference, Prasad's worry showed through as he
was forced to admit that the prospecting program of India's largest private-sector holder of oil and gas blocks was delayed because of the unavailability of rigs. "The commercial production of gas from the discovered fields in the Krishna Godavari basin will not be affected, as we will divert some of the rigs from exploration into production, to make good the shortfall in rig availability in the global markets," Prasad assured reporters. For a company known for quick execution, it was a rare public setback.

Reliance is not alone: Almost every Indian company -- big or small -- that has some expertise in
construction finds itself flooded with orders that are nearly three to four times its annual sales. The size and pace of orders could threaten the development of the country's already creaking and short-supplied infrastructure. "Execution is the biggest issue in India today, especially on time and within budget," says Pratyush Kumar, president and chief executive officer of GE Infrastructure, India.
Although construction companies are prepared to spend money to raise their production capacities,
experts say that a shortage of skilled talent and the limited ability of capital equipment suppliers to meet demand mean that skillful project management and innovative solutions will be necessary to prevent bottlenecks.

India's planned infrastructure outlay over the next five years has been revised upward by various
government authorities, from $150 billion to almost $475 billion. The country currently spends around
$21 billion a year on infrastructure, compared to China's $150 billion. Corporate capital spending tracked by research firms like the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) is at a multi-year high in India. The effect of all of this demand can be seen in the order books of infrastructure builders, which have also reached a multi-year high. Consider just a few examples: Punj Lloyd, one of the country's largest engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies, earned 72% more income for the quarter ended June 2007, at Rs
1,4179.5 million ($359.43 million). Yet, its order backlog rose to Rs 152,250 million ($3,859.32
million). Larsen & Toubro, one of Asia's largest vertically integrated engineering and construction
companies, announced that gross sales rose 47% in the quarter ended September 2007 to Rs 55.74 billion ($1.41 billion), and yet its order backlog rose to a record Rs 400 billion ($10.14 billion). At Wartsila India, which had an order book of one times sales in 2003, the backlogs have risen to almost three times that amount. And Patel Engineering, which expects to close the current year with sales of Rs 16,000 million ($405.58 million) has an order book of Rs 54,000 million ($1.37 billion).
Rupen Patel, managing director of Patel Engineering, says that alone, the planned roll-out of highways
by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) over the course of the next 10 years exceeds the
total turnover of all construction companies in India today. "Construction companies have never seen

such a boom in India. Even if [they all] did only road projects and left all work on building airports and
power plants aside, NHAI still has more work to offer than firms can take," he says.
"The turnover of all construction companies in India last year was around $15 billion. This year it may
rise to $20 billion. But a total of $50 billion is [slated] to be spent on construction every year in India,
which requires a capability of 2.5 times the sector's size," says a senior executive at IVRCL
Infrastructures who did not wish to be named. India will need several billion-dollar, pure-play
construction companies to be able to execute such projects, but it has only a couple of such companies, calling into question the ability of the private sector to build out infrastructure in a public-private partnership mode.


Foreign firms might view the huge gap between the sector's existing capabilities and those required as an
opportunity to make their mark in India. Indeed, the infrastructure spending boom in India has benefited
a bevy of overseas companies, such as Dongfang Electric Corporation in China and Doosan Heavy
Industries and Construction Company in Korea, who are filling orders for turbines used to generate
power. A number of leading global construction companies, such as Australia's Leighton Holdings and
Italian-Thai Development Public Company, have also entered India.
Skilled-labor Shortage It's difficult to fathom the words "talent shortage" in a country of a billion people that's getting younger over time. But speak to any infrastructure builder, and you hear anecdotes about shortages of trained fitters, welders, masons and plumbers. "Whether we will get the people necessary to support the growth
is the real challenge. Both engineering and blue-collared skilled workers are in short supply. Fitters and
welders are not available in the numbers you want. The industry also needs mechanical engineers who
have worked in capital goods industries and would like to pursue a career [in that sector] rather than
switch into software," says Allen Antao, vice president, process equipment, at Godrej & Boyce
Manufacturing Company. "Once, India had such a supply of labor that we never thought we'd run out, but today things are certainly moving towards that," says Satish Magar, chairman and managing director of Magarpatta Township Development & Construction Company, which has developed a 250-acre plot near the city of Pune in western India. According to Magar, semi-skilled labor was once brought in from the neighboring south Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, but now projects in the west Indian state of Maharashtra are pulling in laborers from far flung Eastern states of Orissa and West Bengal where surplus laborers are still available. Importing lower-skilled workers from overseas would be too problematic, "given the significant wage differentials and the effect such inflated costs would have on a project's viability," says Patel.


The construction industry remains one of India's largest employers. Realizing the need for skilled
vocational staff, the industry has begun collaborating with academic institutions to either train staff for plumbing and masonry type work, or to set up in-house training programs. "We are tying up with
industrial training institutes for education and vocational development as well as organizing local training at our school," says Godrej's Antao. Training is important, because by mechanizing their operations, companies have needed to substitute low-end, semi-skilled artisans with comparatively high-end machine operators who are in short supply. As a result, wages for crane operators and others with higher levels of expertise have risen faster than the average for other industrial workers. For instance, Sanjay Verma, head of ship power for Wartsila India, estimates that welders have seen their wages rise by 30% to 40%, while those for traditionally well-compensated naval architects and marine engineers have risen by 50% over a 3-4 year period. Antao says that the appreciation of the rupee and the rise in wages are happening so quickly that their effect on costs cannot be countered with a rise in productivity. "If margins drop as a result, companies may not be able to commit large sums for capital investments with the same freedom as we would otherwise." One area of shortage which hurts all infrastructure builders is the availability of skilled project managers.


In the case of many developers, "there may not be that level of experience available to execute the size of the projects [that are] planned," says Aniruddha Joshi, executive vice president of the Hiranandani family-controlled Hirco Group, which has large realty projects underway in India. India hasn't seen many large projects until very recently, and the country has traditionally not produced enough skilled project managers to coordinate multiple vendors and optimal allocation of resources.
For prospective engineering students, civil engineering had lost its charm and was seen as a low-growth area, where progress would be limited and the hours long and hard. In comparison, many males who completed computer engineering programs found jobs as code writers in India's burgeoning software services industry. These jobs, which came with a possibility of overseas placements, also made the men good prospects in the traditional Indian marriage market. But with the construction boom, "salaries for civil engineers from reputed colleges, which averaged around Rs 7,000 ($190) a month three years ago,
have risen to around Rs 25,000 ($600) a month now, which makes them comparable to what software
engineers get. As a result, we are seeing engineering colleges report a higher percentage of students
opting for civil engineering courses after several years of relative drought," says Patel.
Many companies have turned to acquisitions to cover their short-term labor needs. Punj Lloyd has
acquired Singapore's Sembawang E&C to help provide expertise in EPC projects, while Patel
Engineering has bought U.S.-based Westcon Microtunneling to build on its construction expertise. Many firms are also hiring expatriate project managers to take charge of projects and train juniors to assume such positions over time.

Verma feels that the high wages for such positions in India may help in attracting talent from other areas like Eastern Europe and Japan. Patel says skilled project managers and planning engineers could be hired from outside India as well. Reliance Industries, for instance, has an expatriate as its chief of drilling
services, who helps train its drillers and rig operators to meet target dates for commercial production of
gas.
Joshi sees a silver lining in the shortage of human resources as well. He cites the example of Japan,
where construction companies adopted a "top-down" method that helped attract talent to the industry -- one that Japanese society considered a "tough, dangerous and dirty" profession. "It's good to have constraints; it forces you to come up with new solutions," says Joshi. Wanted: Equipment (and Capital) At the lower end of the skills chain, companies are responding to labor shortages by automating parts of the production process, which makes them less susceptible to shortages of vocational staff. As a result of this, and partly in response to customer demand for faster build-outs, construction companies that once relied on an army of cheap labor now employ a variety of equipment, from low-end concrete mixers to goods elevators and tipper trucks for transporting materials, tower cranes, tunnel-boring machines, robotic drills and hydraulic excavators. Patel, for instance, has spent Rs 600 million to Rs 800 million ($ 20.28 million) so far to build an equipment bank, while IVRCL estimates it has invested between Rs 2,500 million to Rs 2,750 million
($69.71 million) in equipment so far. "We even think about having a second set of fall-back equipment
ready for certain contracts. We now need national equipment yards, as high-end equipment required for finishing jobs in time is not available for hire," says one official from IVRCL.
"A lot of this equipment could be rented at some point, but these days many companies, including ours, have been purchasing used equipment. Often, the required machinery is not available at the right price and within the desired time frames," says Patel. The boom in building activity in Asia and the Middle East has not only increased demand for such building equipment but also resulted in a rise in lease rentals and forced many companies to own equipment. This has made the operations of such companies far more capital intensive.

As companies take on larger size projects, the capital intensity of their operations increases, forcing
many companies to rely on private equity or the public markets. So far, the Indian capital markets have been supportive of this, with DLF Ltd. -- one of India's largest real estate developers -- raising capital in a record-breaking IPO earlier this year. Many realty companies also managed to raise funds on London's Alternative Investment Market for investing in projects in India.


Lately, as real estate stocks have come under increasing pressure, many companies have begun to
reassess the premiums they can hope to receive when they go public. Infrastructure builders, however, have discovered that the stock market is still receptive, with Mundra Port & Special Economic Zone becoming the first SEZ developer to go public in October this year. While funds can be raised, companies have also been rethinking their work methods and the building materials they use. Many companies now employ ready-mix concrete rather than prepare a cement and sand mixture on site. This helps speed up production since ready-made cement can be poured faster and in a uniform consistency to lay out foundations and pillars. Companies have also started employing prefabricated materials -- like brick wall sections or Siporex blocks for ceilings -- to help speed things up
while using less manual labor. "India may soon move to [another] stage of mechanization, where
developers use completely knock-down assembly components to build projects," says Magar.
One of the reasons for using alternative materials is the reduced availability of materials like clay bricks
and sand which traditionally came from the outskirts of a city. With cities expanding, the typical 50
kilometres distance of such brick kilns from a city centre work site no longer holds true. "Thanks to
India's huge foreign exchange reserves, import of goods has been liberalised so supply side constraints in the domestic market can be compensated with global sourcing," says Joshi. This has not come a moment too soon: Companies want their projects built in much shorter times than what it historically took in India.

Challenges on the Supply Side
At this point in time, many of India's capital equipment and shipbuilding firms face a Hobson's choice:
There is great demand for their products and services and a global shortage of available capacity, but
forecasting future demand is difficult. "Putting up a manufacturing facility for turbines, for instance,
requires a couple of years, and by the time the project starts commercial production, we expect China to have surplus production capacity seeking global markets," says GE's Kumar.
Dhananjay Nalwade, president and CEO of GE Equipment & Services, India, also raises the issue of
how fast firms can digest new technology required to set up advanced manufacturing facilities that can meet market demand. "You need a local supply chain which supports this technology transfer into India. This process takes time and a huge investment on the part of the suppliers to implement modern
manufacturing techniques, such as Six Sigma." "In the case of our investment in Titagarh Wagons, for instance, we will hire people well before the factory is built, train them in our U.S. factories to build the products that will be manufactured in India and then bring them back to India to train other staff in turn," says Kumar. However, GE says some of its partners are reluctant to transfer designs to Indian companies as there is no patent protection available here. Despite these limitations, firms have been expanding capacity. But several capital equipment and shipbuilding firms find that their component suppliers who have gone from one shift to three and de-bottlenecked their facilities can no longer expand capacity without fresh investments. "With demand showing continued growth, delivery lead times have lengthened. For instance, a ship engine which could be delivered in as little as four to six months from the date of the order could now take as long as 24 to 30 months to arrive," says Verma. According to Antao, "Steel suppliers can't match demand for the exotic grades of steel firms such as ours use. As a result, project timelines have almost doubled. But expanding capacity at the supplier's end requires high capital expenditure, and these firms are afraid that
[the demand] bubble may burst and they may not recover their investments." In the meanwhile, equipment manufacturers are coping with lengthened delivery times by becoming far more choosy about what orders they take. "One prioritizes customers whom one has a long history of
working with, and new markets where one may seek to establish oneself," says Wartsila's Verma. "We
are going slow on taking fresh orders until our new capacity is ready. Our order book has already
doubled in the last year," says Prakash Chandra Kapur, managing director of Bharati Shipyard.
"Contractors these days want to work with companies who will be a source of repeat business and will be regular in paying dues. In the past, it was difficult for these firms to be choosy about their clientele, but today, when they have people knocking on their door, they would prefer to work with people who will be around in the long term too," says Joshi.


http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4237

India ready to get the world's money (http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071102/FOREIGN/111020052/1003)
By John Zarocostas
Washington Times, DC
November 2, 2007

GENEVA -- For many years, the world's largest democracy, India, watched frustrated from the sidelines as well-heeled foreign investors injected tens of billions of dollars of capital each year into communist China's economic miracle under way next-door — but not anymore.

Although China — with its powerhouse economy and double-digit growth rates — remains the top investment destination in Asia and in the developing world, its southern neighbor, India, is now seen with a more favorable eye in many boardrooms around the globe.

Last year, India attracted a nearly threefold increase in foreign direct investment to $16.8 billion, compared with $6.6 billion in 2005 and $5.7 billion in 2004, according to a new report by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

"Rapid economic growth has led to improved investor confidence in the country," says UNCTAD's world investment report for 2007.

A series of long overdue structural reforms are rapidly transforming India into a formidable player in many spheres of the world economy from traditional manufacturing to high-tech services.

The economy, which has in recent years posted growth rates of between 6 percent to 8 percent, is estimated by the Indian government to grow by 9.2 percent for fiscal 2006-07.

New Delhi is aiming for a growth rate of 10 percent by 2011, which Western economic think tanks, including the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, say is achievable if the recent pace of reforms continues.

As in China, the big draw is India's massive and lucrative domestic market potential and its rapidly growing middle class, analysts say.

Moreover, India is also projected to overtake China to become the world's most populous nation by 2050.

According to the United Nations' 2007 world population report, India's population is forecast to reach 1.6 billion, up from today's 1.1 billion, and China's to increase to 1.4 billion, up from the 2007 level of 1.3 billion.

The UNCTAD report points out that U.S. multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart have entered the Indian market and that others such as General Motors and IBM "are rapidly expanding their presence."

Other global corporations are also lining up deals for a slice of the action.

Last year, POSCO, a South Korean steel producer, announced that it would invest $12 billion in a steel plant, and Japan's Suzuki Motor Corp. announced an expansion plan of $1.65 billion that will bring its annual automobile production capacity in India to 1 million, according to the UNCTAD report.

But investment specialists also emphasize that India still has a way to go before it can match China, which embarked on market-oriented reforms that included an overhaul of its command economy in the late 1970s.

Looking ahead, UNCTAD analysts expect the strong trend in foreign investment in India to continue the upward trend in the short term and surge in the long run.

Supachai Panitchpakdi, UNCTAD secretary-general, told The Washington Times that many Indian industries — from steel to automobiles and auto parts — are now "more geared to the global economy."

Mr. Supachai, a former deputy prime minister of Thailand, said that South Asia's largest emerging market was increasingly more integrated with the global economy and that Indian reforms under way are likely to increase the integration.

In 2006, India's merchandise exports grew 21 percent to $120 billion and its imports grew 25 percent to $174 billion, according to World Trade Organization data.

Seasoned investment bankers active in both of the world's biggest emerging economies say one attraction is India's large pool of English-speaking, skilled, price-competitive labor force.

On the downside, India still has a large rural poor population of subsistence farmers, many urban poor and millions who are severely hindered from breaking out of the cycle of mass poverty by deeply entrenched discriminatory social norms.

The country also has massive infrastructure needs and even greater social challenges, including high malnourishment — especially among children; low levels of adult literacy among women; and poor access to drugs and affordable health services.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that from 2001 to 2003, about 212 million people — or about 20 percent of the Indian population at the time — were undernourished.

Still the UNCTAD report anticipates continued global foreign investment, which in 2006 was partly driven by increases in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, higher stock prices and re-invested earnings.

"Inflows in 2007 are forecast to reach $1.4 to $1.5 trillion, which would imply a new record level," it predicts.

UNCTAD's chief for investment analysis, Anne Miroux, said the agency projects an overall increase in foreign investment flows destined for developing countries, especially in Asia.

UNCTAD predicts that rapid growth in Asia is likely to continue, "underpinned by the strong performance of China and India." Ms. Miroux added that markets seeking investment to the region "should keep pace with rapid economic growth in the next few years."

In 2006, foreign investment to Asia increased by 19 percent to a new high of $200 billion and accounted for more than half of $379 billion in investment to developing countries and transition economies.

China was the biggest recipient, ahead of Hong Kong, Singapore, and India.

But inward investment to China fell for the first time in seven years by 4 percent to a still very respectable $69 billion. The decrease was mainly due to a drop in financial-services investments. Hong Kong reached $42.8 billion, up from $33.6 billion the year before, and Singapore attracted $24 billion, up from $15 billion.

In 2006, foreign investment inflows to rich industrialized countries rose by 45 percent to $857 billion, with the United States the world's top destination with $175 billion, up from $101 billion the previous year, followed by the United Kingdom, with $139.5 billion, and France, with $81 billion.

Petroleum Exports Likely To Be Us$ 497 Bln By Fy 2012 , Says ASSOCHAM

The quantity of petro exports will rise 3 by times by 2012. So the figure comes to 100 billion USD approx but we are not considering factors like oil price rise & dollar position. leaving reliance jamnagar plant, Most State run oil giants will mainly cater to demand in India. Refinery production in India will rise of 240 million tone per year by 2012 and consumption to 130 million, rest will be exported.
By 2012, India will be refining 5 out of every 100 barrels in the world.

Here comes the £1,200 car (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article2799410.ece)
Manufacturers are focusing on cheaper vehicles for developing countries

Ray Hutton
The Sunday Times, UK
November 4, 2007

NEXT YEAR, Tata, the Indian industrial giant, will launch the world’s cheapest new car.

The company, which is one of the frontrunners to take over Jaguar and Land Rover, is bidding to capture a large share of the expanding Indian market with a four-wheeler for the price of a motorcycle.

This revolutionary Tata is known as the “one-lakh” car. A lakh is 100,000 rupees, about £1,225. It has been the dream of company chairman Ratan Tata for more than a decade. He promises a small, four-door car, with a simple specification, cheap to run, and attainable by Indian buyers who want to step up from two wheels to four.

As the Tata project comes close to fruition, vehicle makers around the world are planning ultra-low-cost cars, primarily for developing markets such as India but also with the expectation that they might appeal to motorists in western Europe.

Tata’s one-lakh car is specifically for India, where it has already spurred rivals into action. Market-leader Maruti Suzuki, whose 800 is currently the lowest-priced car at 205,000 rupees (£2,500), is developing a model it calls New Basic World Standard to be sold overseas but it won’t equal the Tata’s price.

But motorcycle maker Bajaj, which also produces India’s famous “tuk tuk” three-wheeled rickshaws, is taking on Tata on its own terms. It has set up a joint venture with Renault of France to develop its first four-wheeler. Renault is designing a two-cylin-der engine to run on natural gas and expects the Bajaj car to be on sale in India for about £1,500 in 2010.

The Logan, designed in France for Renault’s Dacia subsidiary in Romania and touted as the “€5,000” car, is now made in India as well as Iran, Russia and South America. The Logan has turned out to be a surprising success in western Europe where bringing it up to the latest safety and exhaust-emissions regulations has increased the basic price to €7,500 (£5,200). It will come to Britain next year.

The Logan is a simple family saloon – recently supplemented by a spacious estate car and soon to be joined by a hatchback – but the deal with Bajaj shows that Renault recognises one size does not fit all when it comes to budget motoring.

Renault chief executive Carlos Ghosn said: “In India, the small-car market is well established, but China does not want small cars. There, customers like bigger saloons with a separate boot.

But anyone can make a cheap, throwaway car – the challenge is to make a simple, reliable car at low cost and make a profit.”

Making money at this end of the market is the concern for the world’s biggest car companies, General Motors and Toyota, both of which are working on low-cost cars. These will be made in areas where labour costs are low, but that alone won’t make them viable; there needs to be a rethink of small-car design and engineering.

Toyota is being typically thorough in its approach. At the recent Tokyo motor show, president Katsuaki Watanabe said: “Our project team is studying every aspect of the car’s construction, the materials used and all its component parts.

“This ‘new-element technology’ will reduce costs considerably. It is becoming clear what is realistic and feasible.

“We will have prototypes running this spring, but it will take two or three years before we have a vehicle ready for production and decide when and where it will be made.”

The latest GM low-cost-car study is centred on its company in South Korea. This is also likely to be a rival to the Logan rather than the Tata.

Rick Wagoner, GM chief executive, is sceptical about whether a £1,500 car can provide what today’s motorists want. “We have a car in that price range in China (from its associate company Wuling) and it has all the amenities you would expect from a $3,000 car,” he said.

Although the focus for these companies is on the fast-expand-ing Bric markets (Brazil, Russia, India and China), Toyota and GM also intend to offer their low-est-cost cars in the West. There, they would be more expensive, requiring compliance with more stringent safety rules and emission controls, but still priced below most of the existing budget models.

It remains to be seen whether the same design can satisfy the simple transport needs of India and also be fashionable among upwardly-mobile young customers in Frankfurt or London. Volkswagen thinks it can. At recent motor shows it has exhibited two variants of a future “people’s car”, a small hatchback labelled Up but expected to be called Lupo when it goes on sale at the end of the decade.

The baby Volkswagen has been presented as the company’s answer to BMW’s Mini or the Fiat 500, with premium features that would set it apart from most of the small cars currently available. But the plan is to fit a simpler, two-cylinder engine and less equipment for developing markets, and to make this car in different versions all over the world, including India and China. Prices in Europe will start at about £7,000, but elsewhere they could be as low as £4,000.

The collective rush into low-cost cars is driven by necessity. All the growth prospects are in developing countries. The largest mature markets – western Europe, North America, Japan – are either static or declining.

But as Toyota president Watanabe points out, although there are 900m cars on the world’s roads, two-thirds of the global population does not have one. Those people are its target for the future.

The indian Bull (http://www.investordaily.com/cps/rde/xchg/id/style/3315.htm?rdeCOQ=SID-3F579BCE-7C7B207C)
Investor Weekly cover story

By Christine St Anne
Investor Daily, Australia
Mon, 05 Nov 2007

When 19th century literary figure Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman sought adventure in India, he carried the fantasies of thousands of men across Britain's vast empire.

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When 19th century literary figure Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman sought adventure in India, he carried the fantasies of thousands of men across Britain's vast empire.

Immortalised in books written by Thomas Hughes and George Macdonald Fraser, Englishmen today can still enjoy his adventures and perhaps even fantasise about returning to past colonial days. It is a past that still resonates in India today.

"There were only a few advantages to being colonised by the British, but they were powerful," MLC investment strategist Brian Parker says.

"They are the English language, the British rule of law and a love of cricket."

It is these attributes that analysts say will make India a long-term story compared with its neighbouring superpower China. "By and large China has been run by communist-educated engineers. There are no leaders in China that could inspire genuine change. India is a melting pot of religions and cultures. It has had its fair share of ethnic and religious violence and leadership assassinations. Yet today India is still a secular democracy and that is a massive achievement for an emerging country," Parker says.

India is a country of extremes. In a population of over 1 billion, 29 per cent live in poverty, while 300 million reside in the middle classes.

With 1652 dialects, it remains the largest English-speaking nation in the world. Statistics show 36 per cent of NASA scientists are Indian, and yet 40 per cent of Indians do not meet the literacy standards of the World Bank.

Global car manufacturers Suzuki and Hyundai have established manufacturing plants there, while the country is tipped to produce the cheapest Aston Martin. Yet roads are filled with human-led rickshaws, many dodging the sacred cows that still freely roam the streets.

Despite such contradictions, India's middle class continues to grow. The population is not only large but also young, with those between 20 and 55 years of age expected to make up 55 per cent of the population by 2016.

And according to World Bank statistics, it is growing wealthier with more than 50 per cent of households expected to earn $1000 to $5000 a year by 2010. These factors all present a lucrative opportunity for global financial services companies, including those from Australia.

Aussies in India

Government agency InvestAustralia notes on its website that "Australia and India have substantial converging commercial interests, due in part to the changing international environment".

In 2006, India became Australia's sixth largest export market with exports reaching $10.3 billion, eclipsing the United Kingdom for the first time.

Australian businessman Denis Carroll says there is a very strong but unrecognised link between Australia and India. "Indians want to do business with Australians. They believe we have a long-term view to investing. They respect our approach and our money."

In 2000, the Indian Government opened up the insurance market, effectively dismantling the Life Insurance Company of India's (LIC) monopoly.

It was an opportunity seized by insurance company Axa Asia Pacific. The group established a joint venture with India insurance group Bharti Enterprises.

The joint life insurance business began in August 2006. New business premiums for the group accelerated by a staggering 100 per cent in 2006/07, with the company gaining US$32 billion in premiums sales.

The rebranded Bharti Axa Life Insurance Company now has 14 million customers with a sales force of over 2200 and 870 salaried planners. The group expects to make an additional $65-85 million in capital commitments in the next three years.

"India represents a significant growth opportunity for our firm," an Axa spokesperson said.

As one would expect, it is a country Macquarie Bank has already tapped into. The bank has an established a banking service that includes corporate finance, equity funds and research.

The group was established by Macquarie's Mumbai office chief, Stuart Smythe. Smythe arrived in Mumbai two-and-a-half years ago from Macquarie's Manhattan office. Did he find the cultural extremes daunting?

"Mumbai is like any global city, lots of people with lots of things to do," Smythe says.

The bank now has 100 people working in its Mumbai office, four of who are expats.

Given India's massive population, Smythe said India still had a tight labour market.

"Right across India the battle for quality staff is a challenge. A well-educated workforce in the country has also been targeted by offshore companies looking to recruit for their own countries," he says.

With no established distribution, Macquarie still managed to grow its client base.

"We managed to build our presence in India by servicing our international clients who had invested in the country," Smythe says.

Its Indian banking operations are only the tip of the iceberg, according to Smythe, who says there is still a lot more to do. In October,

Macquarie announced a joint venture with Indian fund manager Religare Wealth Management. It took a 50 per cent stake in the firm, giving the bank access to 1215 of Religare's branches in 392 cities and towns.

"Macquarie has been looking to establish a wealth management business in India for some time but needed to find the right partner," Macquarie Financial Services group head Peter Maher says.

"Like Macquarie, Religare is entrepreneurial, its management and staff are innovative and visionary."

The great game

The culture of cricket is another important aspect shared between the two countries and Carroll points out that the cricketing link should not be underestimated.

"Cricket is something that will bind the two countries forever," he says.

Cricketers like Steve Waugh, Brett Lee and the hapless but loveable Shane Warne are virtually worshipped among India's one billion cricket tragics. While Lee has gone on to feature in Bollywood films, Waugh now represents the interests of Macquarie Bank in the country.

Savvy enough to appoint one of India's most admired cricketers, the bank has entered into a joint venture with Waugh through development company Milestone Communities. Milestone Communities is a real estate group that develops tailored residential communities around sports, health and education facilities.

"India provides an environment receptive to innovative ideas and with the energy to make those ideas happen," Waugh says.

Economy charges ahead

Capitalising on India's growing population is not restricted to the wealth management sector. Over the past two years the economy has grown 9 per cent and forecasts are optimistic at 8.5 per cent-plus growth in coming years.

This growth is fuelling the demand for infrastructure, telecommunications and property. Investment in these assets is required to sustain the growth, according to Baer Capital executive director M. Padmanabhan.

As a private equity manager, Padmanabhan says the industry is evolving with about US$13.5 billion flowing into the country. These inflows are expected to touch US$20 billion by 2010 and US$490 billion in the following decade.

So far the Dubai-based Baer Capital has invested US$200 million in private equity and is expected to close one of its funds in October to the tune of US$50 million.

The private equity manager has invested in a diverse range of burgeoning Indian companies, including contemporary art group ArtCo and maintenance and engineering services firm A2Z.

With galleries in Mumbai, New York and an office in London, ArtCo delivered a net profit of over US$5 million in 2006. A2Z on the other hand has taken advantage of India's central government finance initiatives in telecommunications.

Securing contracts to revamp the distribution of India's power companies. Padmanabhan warns, however, that private equity can be very risky in India. To ensure the security of its investments, Baer Capital has taken board positions on each of its invested companies.

Infrastructure is also desperately needed to support and sustain the growth of the economy. Macquarie Bank is set to launch its Macquarie India Infrastructure Opportunities Fund by the end of the year.

The World Bank is expected to be the fund's cornerstone investor following approval from the bank's International Finance Corporation. The fund will invest in infrastructure and infrastructure-related assets in India, including roads, airports, ports, power, generation, power transmission, water and waste treatment.

Paying less for more

India is not just a country for the big players and multinationals. Carroll, who is the former chief of industry superannuation fund AV Super, has established a property business, Ausindi.

With an on-the-ground team in India, the company will source opportunistic property deals. Its first property investment is a five-star hotel in Chennai.

"I first went to India in January 2006 and saw it offered a compelling investment case compared with China. I wanted to get first mover advantage," Carroll says.

As a lone businessman, he says it is imperative the right investment partners are found if you are to grow and sustain your business.

"It's a dynamic but complex market. It is important in any business relationship but especially important in India to have these solid relationships. Political risk cannot be dismissed," he says.

Ausindi will focus its investments in southern India because of the region's economic and political stability. "There are definitely parts of India you would not invest in," Carroll says.

Local small cap fund manager Atom Funds Management decided to run its research and analysis from India and in 2006 established a nine-person team in Bangalore.

With Australian analysts commanding large base salaries plus bonus, Wilson looked to India's huge educated population as a potential source to hire its analysts.

"We wanted to be a boutique but with the resources of a large fund manager," Atom managing director Drew Wilson says.

"Indians have a culture of maths. They are naturally inquisitive and entrepreneurial."

The firm's recruitment process included an advertisement on India's job seeking website naukri.com. By the end of the first day the company had received 400 responses.

The process was followed by a telephone interview to ensure candidates' English was sound. A formal interview and pre-testing to check on numeracy skills followed. The company then organised an analyst open day.

"You could never imagine organising an analyst day in Australia. Analysts here would simply not turn up," Wilson says.

While competition for the best and brightest was tough, he says many of the multinationals in India employ well-educated people as "data monkeys".

"These graduates go into these companies thinking they can apply their skill honed while completing PhDs. They turn up and are then asked to enter data. What attracted people to our company was the fact that they could use their skills to analyse Australia's small cap stocks," he says.

Wilson flies six to seven times a year to meet his analysts. With technology and an easy time difference, the agreement is working well. Like Carroll, Wilson says it is imperative to get the right adviser for any business looking to set up shop in India.

"As a business you must ensure that you are always complying with the law, your adviser will ensure you do this. They play an important part in watching your back," he says.

There are plans to expand the Bangalore office, but for now Wilson is concentring on his existing team of analysts and the growth of the business.

"They say that you can't change India; India changes you. I would definitely agree. This has been such an adventure for me. It has been the highlight to my career," he says.

Mumbai Masala (http://magazine.continental.com/102007/content/explore/been-there.jsp)
Robert McHarvey
Continental Magazine

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India’s biggest city climbs onto the world stage

You have to wonder what Rudyard Kipling was smoking when he wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” He was wrong when he penned that verse, and he would be even more wrong if he were to write it today.

If ever there were a city — a massive, mind-bending metropolis — that encapsulates East meeting West, it is Kipling’s own birthplace, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the Indian masala of a 21st-century city on the Arabian Sea. There are 18 million Mumbaikers, as they are called (though many old-timers prefer Bombayite) and they are packed into a tiny island where India’s old money clans, bankers, and Bollywood (the country’s film industry, which each year produces more product than Hollywood) duke it out for rupees against high-tech entrepreneurs. Fueling the financial fight is the IT outsourcing boom, which has lit a bonfire under India’s economy, turning the onetime “caged tiger” into a nation that roars loudly across the globe (and is usually ranked second only to China in velocity of growth).

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Employees at Zenta, a call center, gather for a prework snack


Walk down a Mumbai street and what dazzles is the diversity of the architecture, ranging from classical Eastern-style buildings to gleaming, modern skyscrapers. What may dazzle the visitor even more is that seemingly every inch of the city is filled with something. This is a place with roots in history, but the new buildings declare that cutting-edge rules in Mumbai. As ever more U.S.-based companies arrive to set up outposts, the competition for space has intensified. Microsoft is now in Mumbai, as are IBM, HP, and Google — pretty much a who’s who of American high-tech companies. Mumbai has also become a setting for glittering high-tech shows — from the SAP Summit to Telecomm India 2007 — and the shows are here because the companies and the people are. A city once defined by its port and its banks (Mumbai has always been India’s financial hub) is now coming into its own as a new high-tech center, and the resulting explosion in employment has pushed the city into overdrive. Today’s Mumbai has become a place where snake charmers coexist with some of the planet’s most sophisticated computer programmers. And by all accounts, they are coexisting in a genuine, if uniquely Indian, harmony.

The word masala in Hindi literally means a mix of spices. But the slang meaning we are after is hodgepodge, a mix of this and that and another thing that produces, well, Mumbai. The city is a perfect masala. Walk down a Mumbai street and take in the clothing. You’ll see everything from traditional 13th-century outfits (saris for women, dhotis — loincloths — for men) to kurtas (knee-length shirt-dresses often worn by Indian men), in addition to men wearing splendid Savile Row bespoke suits and women wearing Dolce & Gabbana. And there are more pairs of Tommy Hilfiger jeans then you could count.

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The Mumbai stock exchange


You’ll also see traffic. Cars fight with buses and bicycles, but there are also pedestrian hordes, possibly camels, and almost certainly a cow, all jousting for an inch of road to call their own. Masala indeed.

This crowding is not merely a result of Western encroachment. Mumbai — renamed in 1995 in a return to India’s roots — has been this way for centuries. The name Bombay originally came from Bom Bahia, a Portuguese phrase meaning “good bay” and a name tagged on this port as far back as the 16th century when Portuguese sailors landed. In the 17th century, the British renamed it Bombay — but you get the drift. For 500 years, Mumbai has been an international outpost that, yes, brings together East and West.

“They call Mumbai the city of opportunity,” says Surya Kant, president of Tata Consultancy Services, North America, the U.S. subsidiary of one of India’s outsourcing giants. “People have always gone there to make their success. It’s a melting pot, always has been. New York,” he adds, “is kind of a glorified Mumbai.”

A Bigger Apple

That is how immense Mumbai is. One reality: it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the city’s sheer size. “The scale here is completely different,” says Bharat Desai, co-founder and CEO of Syntel Inc., a Troy, Mich.–based outsourcing company that has operated in Mumbai for 15 years.

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Looking down at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus

To try to imagine Mumbai, start by envisioning New York — the financial center of the United States — then squeeze Hollywood into Manhattan. “That’s what Mumbai is to India,” says Anuj Puri, a Mumbaiker himself and chairman and country head of Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj, a leading global real estate services firm. Puri offers an orienting observation, however: “It may look disorganized on the surface, but it is very organized beneath the surface.”

“They call it organized chaos,” laughs Patrick Brennan, a vice president with Long Island–based technology publisher CMP Technology, which is launching a group of India ventures in the hope of riding the country’s cresting economy. He adds, “The atmosphere is electric. There is so much happening.”

Todd Furniss, COO of the outsourcing advisory firm the Everest Group, first visited India in 1982. “There’s been a seismic shift in [Mumbai],” he says, adding that the biggest change isn’t increased prosperity, or more Western consumer goods, or the newly buoyant job market — although all those mark significant changes from a quarter century ago. It’s that the people in Mumbai today are consciously crafting what can only be called Brand India — and that is compelling because the aim is to create a place that produces such high-quality work that it becomes a magnet for opportunities.

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In a hurry at Churchgate, another train station


That bubbling optimism is a crucial Mumbaiker trait, but navigating the Mumbai business world requires more than a positive outlook. “If you know India, you will succeed. But it isn’t easy to know,” says Renuka Kathpal, director of India development services for the accounting firm Grant Thornton LLT and leader of the firm’s new India Tax and Business Services Gateway. Old India hands point to enduring realities that need understanding.

Namaste, for instance. It’s an Indian greeting that literally means “I bow to you.” Figuratively it has come to mean “I honor the divine within you,” and it’s not mere blather. People mean it, and this is a huge differentiator for a business community. “I have been to Mumbai perhaps 20 times in the past five years,” says Chris Repholz, senior vice president at Zenta, a Philadelphia firm that operates call centers in Mumbai. “I get treated with so much respect and deference when I am in Mumbai. It’s part of the culture.” A word of advice: reciprocate that namaste attitude. Bow to Mumbaikers who cross your path, and closed doors will suddenly open; darkened rooms will go bright.

Then there’s The Argumentative Indian. That’s the title of a recent book by Amartya Sen, a Harvard economist. His thesis is simply that Indians, well, like to argue. CMP’s Brennan elaborates: “Indians like to debate anything, anytime. It’s one of the joys of doing business there.” Put out an idea and do not expect applause. Expect instead to hear analysis, haggling, disputation. There is no avoiding this; it’s ingrained in the culture. “Everyone in India has a point of view, and discussions include everybody,” says Lulu Raghavan, client director for the Mumbai office of international branding powerhouse Landor Associates. Hear some yelling, some animated disputation? It might be about politics, possibly sports (cricket engenders heated conversation), maybe even business. Don’t be put off. “We inject emotion into our work,” says Raghavan.

Old Money

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An office building in Peninsula corporate park

Mumbai has always been the hub of India’s commercial universe, and a proof is that this is where the country’s old-money families have their bases. Case in point: the Tata Group, which operates seven business sectors — from steel to cell phones — in more than 85 countries and has annual revenues amounting to around $22 billion, equal to almost 3 percent of India’s entire gross domestic product. Another example: Reliance Industries Ltd., owned by the Ambani family. Its annual revenues, deriving from a medley of businesses, from oil to clothes, are pegged by Fortune magazine at around $25 billion. Industrialists like Ratan Tata, 71 year-old chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group, are celebrities in Mumbai, and they captivate the public imagination in this city where people are there to make it. People talk about where they were last seen, with whom, and what they were eating.

That’s why you should start your day in Mumbai with a read of the Times of India’s Page 3, a daily injection of purported news items about fracturing relationships, infidelities, and worse. It’s just like the New York Post’s Page Six, with a distinctly Indian difference: Executives read Page 3, they talk about it, and some of them scheme to get a mention, says Hemant Puthli, a senior director at the outsourcing advisory firm neoIT and a lifelong Mumbai resident. There’s a reason for this fascination: Page 3 taps into what has emerged as a primal Mumbai focus. “Money flows in Mumbai, and Page 3 is about money,” says Puthli.

Relationships matter a lot in Mumbai. Family relationships matter the most, but it would be a mistake to view personal relations as separate from business. Robert Friel, president and COO of PerkinElmer, a health sciences and photonics firm based in Waltham, Mass., says he has been to Mumbai about 10 times in the past four years. His first Mumbai memory is of being invited to an employee’s home. Frequently, Friel says, when on his way to a business meeting, an Indian PerkinElmer employee will say, “My family lives a few blocks away. Would you honor me by stopping in for a visit?” That is nearly unthinkable in the United States, of course, and Friel admits that the first time he was asked, he was pleasantly surprised. After a visit of perhaps 30 minutes where he met the wife, the parents, and some children, he walked away touched. When this invitation is extended, Friel says, it needs to be savored. Until you know families, you will never know Mumbai.

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South Mumbai

Add it all up, say many insiders, and Mumbai just may be the place to do business in India today. “Infrastructure, talent availability, cosmopolitan attitudes — Mumbai has it all,” pronounces Atul Nishar, chairman and founder of Hexaware, a fast-growing outsourcing firm based in Mumbai. Every day, more people — from across India and, increasingly, from around the world — flood into Mumbai. They are coming to make it, to work hard, and to cash in. “There is so much optimism, so much happiness among the people,” says Nishar. “It’s a great city.” He adds, in an aside, that he also owns a house in leafy Princeton, N.J., near where his company has a development center, but he leaves no doubt: “I fell in love with Princeton, but I would rather live in Mumbai.”

Persuaded that Mumbai is a mind-boggler of a super-sized city? Now tune into unexpected intimacy. Earl Harcrow, a partner with the Texas-based law firm Haynes and Boone, tells how just a few weeks ago he was in Mumbai, pursuing an outsourcing arrangement his firm has in the city, when an e-mail rolled in from an old friend, an American banker. “You will never guess where I am now,” the e-mail read. “Mumbai!” Harcrow says he almost fell out of his chair. “Of course we got together for dinner that night!” And you can just imagine exactly how shocked two old American pals were that they had run into each other half a world away. But that is Mumbai today, a place where East and West are, indeed, coming together.

Accounts Receivable Financing- The India Connection (http://www.bestsyndication.com/?q=110607_business_outsourcing.htm)
by gelberg12
Gregg Financial Services
November 6, 2007

Accounts Receivable Financing - The India Connection explores the vast growing marketplace in India and how you can benefit from this trend by importing goods or exporting goods to this ginormous economy with accounts receivable financing.

India is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Their history goes back over 10,000 years. India is the largest democracy in the world. As of July, 2007, the Central Intelligence Agency for the United States Government estimated that the population of India is over one billion, one hundred twenty nine million people. In contrast, the population of the United States is estimated to be a little over three hundred two million people. That’s 129,000,000 versus 302,000,000 people; India has over four times the population of the U.S. in a geographic area lightly more than one-third the size of the U.S.

India has the third largest economy and the second fastest growing economy in Asia. It has a vast pool of professional talent and an enormous reservoir of intellectual capital with a growing middle class.

India’s dense population creates economic opportunities and pressing internal social problems such as overcrowding, environmental degradation, poverty and social unrest. The economy and society are in a state of rapid transition. There are pressing environmental issues because of overpopulation such as air pollution from industrial effluents and vehicle emissions, water pollution from poor sanitary conditions and soil erosion.

According to the World Bank, about 380 million people in India live in poverty on less than $1 a day; this is about one-third of the population. Nevertheless, middle and upper class Indians have created immense wealth in an economy bursting with opportunities. India’s business climate is changing rapidly.

This social paradox is in some ways similar to the controversy in the U.S. over big box stores and their effect on smaller retailers. The same issue is debated in India regarding Western style supermarkets versus mom and pop stores. India has a child labor problem; the U.S. has a problem with illegal immigrants who tend to take the lowest paid jobs in the U.S., performing jobs that most legal Americans do not want to do. We live in a world of conflict, change and opportunities.

There are 14 official languages in India. Hindi is the national language. English is a secondary language used for national, political and commercial communication. India is the largest English speaking nation in the world. India’s legal system is based on English common law.

India’s economy is growing over 10% per year with a labor force of more than 500 million people. The Indian retail sector is growing at a rate of 47% per year. Manufacturing is expanding. There are large numbers of well educated people skilled in the English language. Today India is a major exporter of software services and software workers. Other major industries include textiles, chemicals, food processing, steel, transportation equipment, cement, mining and machinery.

In 2006 India exported over $123 billion dollars of textile goods, gems and jewelry, engineering goods, chemicals, leather items; only 17% were exported to U.S. partners. Imports the same year were $184 billion dollars; less than 6% of this import business originated with U.S. partners.

What does this all have to do with accounts receivable financing? The expertise of a commercial finance company can be invaluable with regard to helping you succeed in India’s enormous marketplace. If you want to export goods to India, a commercial finance company will check the credit of the business in India that you are selling to; this can facilitate capital for exponential growth to creditworthy customers. If you want to import goods from India, purchase order financing combined with accounts receivable financing can help you to achieve the same goal of increasing cash flow to grow your business.

Albert Einstein said: “We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made”. Mark Twain said: “India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only”.

The bottom line: India is a land of great problems and great opportunities. Accounts receivable financing combined with purchase order financing can help you succeed in this vast democratic, English speaking marketplace.

India's powerful supercomputer signals HPC(high performance computing) ambitions
(http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=12&articleId=9046518&intsrc=hm_topic)
Tatas Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) built Supercomputer ranks fourth most powerful in Top500 Supercomputer list Clocking 117 Tera Flops

November 12, 2007 (Computerworld) -- The U.S. remains by far the global supercomputing leader. But an India-based company that's part of a major IT offshore services firm has just built the world's fourth most powerful supercomputer, according to the just released Top500 supercomputer list.

Rankings on that list, which is maintained by academic researchers and updated every six months, can be notoriously short-lived thanks to the relentless worldwide push to build faster systems. But India's position near the top of this list is a clear signal of its ambitions in information technology.

"We would like to be in the forefront of HPC (high performance computing) research, services," said Ashwin Nanda, who heads Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in Pune, India, which owns the system. The goal is to "basically bring the analytical brainpower of India to solve the supercomputing, HPC-related problems, that we have in the world," he said.

"This is a completely new market for us," said Nanda, who was attending the Supercomputing 07 conference in Reno, Nevada, where the Top500 list was announced.

CRL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd., which is in turn part of a conglomerate that's one of India's largest IT offshore services providers.

Nanda said its supercomputer, built with Hewlett-Packard Co. servers using Intel chips with a total of14,240 processor cores, will be used for government scientific research and product development for Tata (which makes automobiles, among other products), as well as to provide services to U.S. customers. The system went operational last month and achieved performance of 117.9 teraflops.

India, China and other countries are increasingly being tapped by U.S. and European firms for research and development. But of the supercomputers powerful enough to make the Top500 supercomputers list, only 9, or just under 2%, are in India. The U.S. is home to 283 of the systems, or nearly 57%. Next runner up is the United Kingdom, with 48 or nearly 10% of the systems powerful enough to make the list.

While India's system ranked high, it's still a distance from the top position. That fastest system, with some 213,000 processing core, is IBM's BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. It achieved a benchmark of 478.2 teraflops.

Horst Simon, associate laboratory director, computing sciences, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and one of the Top500 list authors, said it was exciting to see India's entrance into the Top 10 and said the country has "huge potential" as a supercomputing nation.

"India is very well known for having great software engineers and great mathematicians, and having a (HPC) center there is a catalyst for doing more in the high performance computing field," said Simon, who said it brings "a whole new set of players into the supercomputing world."

Incredible India bursts into TheMoveChannel’s ‘Top of the Props’ chart! (http://www.prlog.org/10037504-incredible-india-bursts-into-themovechannel-top-of-the-props-chart.html)

Interest in India from visitors to TheMoveChannel.com has rocketed over the last month, with the world’s largest democracy bursting into the top ten 10 in our ‘Top of the Props’ chart…

Source: On the Move Ltd, Romania
PRLog.Org
Nov 12, 2007

Interest in India from visitors to TheMoveChannel.com has rocketed over the last month, with the world’s largest democracy bursting into the top ten 10 in our ‘Top of the Props’ chart…

India has been one of the rising stars in the world economy in recent years, booming in industry, IT, filmmaking and numerous other ways, one of the two big beasts, along with China, of the developing world.

The property market has been booming alongside this overall development in various ways, be it real estate as new building takes place, or the buy-to-let that is made possible by the growth of the middle class and the popularity of many areas with tourists.

Spurred on by its young working demographic and economically active population, India’s extensive IT and outsourcing industries are just part of the increasing demand for real estate.

Progressive attitude

India is Asia’s fourth largest economy and its property industry is offering great prospects for smart gains with its high growth curve, corporate governance and the robustness of the stock markets.

The government’s progressive attitude and the great demand for housing developments and commercial establishments are contributing to the real estate boom. And it is not only the affluent that are playing the game. The newly rich middle class is also participating in great numbers. Foreign investors who seek high returns are also coveting India’s potential real estate market.

Nick Booker, Managing Director of Assetz India comments: “Property investment and property prices in India are booming. Before the Industrial Revolution, India had the largest economy in the world. Economic reforms, the IT revolution and access to investment capital has resulted in new opportunities for employment and rising standards of living.

“The transformation that has taken place in India over the last few years has been phenomenal. The economy is currently growing at 9 – 10% per annum – the equivalent of doubling every seven years. As a result, an increasing number of property investors are looking to capitalise on India’s emerging prosperity, with fast growing IT and retail sectors set to drive up the demand for more housing in a number of India’s key cities.”

A ‘golden age of tourism’

Thanks to successful government-backed efforts to promote the country to holidaymakers, tourism in India is booming like never before. The resounding success of the Ministry of Tourism’s 'Incredible India' campaign has seen a massive increase in Indian vacations, exemplified by the stunning increase in visitors to India's Andaman islands, where tourist numbers jumped from 32,000 in 2005 to over 100,000 in just one year.

Indian tourism and culture minister Ambika Soni recently revealed to India’s parliament that £8 million had been spent in the last fiscal year to promote the country abroad, with 80 per cent of the money spent on advertising in foreign markets.

Ms Soni stated: "The government is putting greater emphasis on development of infrastructure at important tourist destinations and to promote and publicise various tourism products of India within the country and abroad."

Ms Soni also revealed that foreign tourist numbers have increased by a huge 45 per cent in the past two years. This drastic increase has forced island authorities to refurbish long abandoned wells - unused since World War II - to obtain enough water to service the increased demand.

In a recent intervie