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Confederation of Indian Industry - Economic Issues
CII Pre-Budget Memorandum 2007- 2008
Economic Issues
I. Introduction
The performance of the economy in the last three years provides a strong base for optimism for the next five years. It is possible to raise the growth rate of incomes from the current level of 8% to 10% during the 11th Plan with emphasis on creation of income opportunities.
Incremental policies are no longer relevant. A complete restructuring of present systems is imperative in most sectors for breakthrough results in development, sustainability and innovation.
CII's Pre-Budget Memorandum for 2007-08 is predicated on its perspectives for the 11th Plan, and aims to build a base for taking advantage of the unprecedented window of opportunity open for India at this period in time, based on expected population dynamics and global economic conditions.
CII expects that with growth rates averaging at least 8.5% during the 11th Plan, the share of agriculture in the aggregate GDP will decline to below 15% by 2011-12. However, 60% of the workforce continues to be dependant on the sector for income. Therefore, urgent measures must be undertaken to move people off the land and into productive employment and self-employment in other sectors. This is critical for increasing prosperity as also for avoiding negative social implications. End-to-end solutions for employment and self-employment involve human capacity-building, vibrant markets, and promotion of manufacturing and exports.
Education and skill development are thus the centerpiece of CII's proposals for Budget 2007-08.
Employment generation and entrepreneurship development in off-farm sectors is also promoted by reducing anomalies in factor and product markets to release latent investment and growth potential. It is thus crucial to adhere to the announcement in Budget 2006-07 of a single Goods and Services Tax by 2010 as well as to prioritise FRBM targets. It is imperative that the Government announce the key roadmap towards the establishment of the system of the single Goods and Services Tax in the forthcoming budget statement.
II. Perspectives on 11th Plan
Only faster growth can generate sufficient revenues for social sector spending. This will require all sectors of the economy - the public sector, the private sector, and the household sector - to work together in tandem and partnership. The role to be played by each sector needs to be clearly articulated and targeted in order to achieve maximum efficiency.
This is best done through two instruments -
One, the objective interplay of market forces will promote competitiveness and direct resources for optimal benefit. In other words, the role of the government must recede from commercial activities and limit itself to social protection and provision.
Two, the primary driver of the current growth trend is the private sector. It is therefore essential to amend the business environment in a manner that ignites entrepreneurship, encourages competition, rewards creativity, and stimulates growth and development through interplay of market forces. Business must be a partner, and not a passive bystander, in the development process for the country.
The two most critical sectors that need enhanced outlay and policy reforms to meet stated objectives relate to education and infrastructure, both requiring measures now for results to fructify by the end of the 11th Plan.
- CII has projected that an average of 10% growth of GDP is within the realm of being possible. Savings and investment are expected to increase as age dependency ratios fall.
- For achieving a 10% average growth rate for the 11th Plan, CII has estimated a conservative growth rate of 3% in agriculture as this sector is dependant on weather conditions, and has low and tardy elasticity to policy measures. Industry has the potential to expand by 12% while services can grow at a rate of 11% average during the 11th Plan.
- As share of agriculture in GDP dwindles, off-farm employment and income opportunities must be promoted. The manufacturing sector must be strengthened to create these opportunities as well as to avail of global demand potential.
- Thus, the urgent issue for the 11th Plan, according to CII's perspective, is generation of employment and self-employment in the non-farm sectors. An end-to-end solution would involve enhancing human capacity, facilitating vibrant markets, and promoting manufacturing and export sectors. Technology will be a critical driver of this solution.
- Within this larger goal, CII postulates the following objectives for the next five years of the 11th Plan:
- Make India a knowledge economy with particular thrust on education and skill development and adequate focus on technology;
- India must double Real Per Capita income in 8 years through a process of sustained growth;
- Poverty Head Count Ratio must be reduced from 28% to 20% through creation of adequate income opportunities, for an estimated 71 million additions to working-age population in the next five years;
- The developmental divide must be bridged through initiatives such as Bharat Nirman;
- A strong movement towards universal elementary and secondary education funded by the government is critical;
- Rise in literacy rate from 65% to 85% will aid employability. However, literacy measurement criteria need to be also expanded to include functional literacy, as measured through standardized milestone-attainment testing at different grade levels.
- Restructuring of higher education, vocational training and skill development systems giving primacy to private sector initiatives must be carried out
- Power generation capacity expansion of 60,000 MW should commence
- India must be positioned as a global source for goods, services and knowledge by the end of the 11th Plan. This implies a renewed thrust on export and value-addition with particular leverage of the natural advantage enjoyed by service exports
Economic conditions in India are suitable for BOLD decisions.
Factors for achieving the above objectives include enablers as well as roadblocks. The enablers are:
- The economy has witnessed excellent GDP growth track for 4 years continuously, reflecting robust macro conditions;
- With large numbers joining the middle classes each year, no obvious concerns on demand slowdown are apparent;
- Government finances and FRBM targets are on track;
- Strong performance of Corporate India and the capital market has made India a favoured destination for foreign funds. Close to $40 billion has come into India so far in the form of net FII inflows. At the same time, Indian companies are also expanding into overseas markets with mergers and acquisitions;
- Investment in capacity expansion on a large scale is evident;
- Demographics, if handled well, are a huge advantage.
Some of the potential roadblocks to double-digit inclusive growth are:
- Huge resources are required for public investments in basic infrastructure, particularly power;
- Human capacity building, or education and skill development, is a major hurdle;
- Workforce dependency on agriculture and agricultural stagnation are major concerns;
- Agriculture subsidies have been going up at the expense of public investment in the sector;
- Indirect tax liability on industry is very high, impacting competitiveness;
- Labour laws are restricting employment growth in the organized sector.
The two most critical sectors that need enhanced outlay and policy reforms to meet stated objectives relate to education and infrastructure, both requiring measures now for results to fructify by the end of the 11th Plan.
III. Economic fundamentals
As per the growth figures released by the CSO for Q1 '07, the GDP has posted a growth of 8.9%, which prompts us to think that the 8% plus growth rate that has been clocked in the last three fiscals will continue.
India's demand-led growth impetus is driven by an expanding consumer base, increased integration with the global economy, competitive business entities and rising domestic and foreign investments. Rainfall has been near normal for the last four years, allowing non-agricultural sectors to flourish unimpeded on the base of agricultural stability and adequate demand.
The Manufacturing sector has proved itself a growth driver with growth rates climbing up from 8.1% in 2004-05 to 9.0% in 2005-06 and standing at 11.8% for April to August this year. Investment announcements in recent quarters indicate that manufacturing is high on the priority list of corporates. Within the Industry sector, the growth rates of capital goods and consumer durables and non-durables have been particularly impressive, emphasizing the drive to augment capacity and ride the consumer boom. At the same time, stagnation in mining and power generation is of concern.
The services sector has maintained near double-digit growth rates in the last two fiscals, and the first quarter of the current year witnessed continued growth of 10.6%. This has been led by rapid expansion in the Trade, Hotels, Transport and Communications category, and by the fast-growing telecom sector in particular. Financing, insurance, real estate, and business services are also increasing at rising rates.
2: Sectoral Growth
The Agriculture sector continues to be heavily monsoon dependent and suffers from low investments, poor credit, and outdated technology, leading to low productivity of land and labour. Its declining share in GDP is unlikely to be reversed and there is urgency to provide adequate off-farm employment opportunities for the large proportion of the workforce dependant on the sector. Uneven rainfall in the current year is expected to result in decline in kharif output, and consequently, agricultural production is likely to be stagnant.
4: Increasing Savings and Investments
To maintain the growth momentum through the 11th Plan, and to further speed it, Budget 2007-08 needs to strengthen the foundations of consumption-led growth and to set in motion processes to encourage investments that would enable long-term sustainable growth.
At the same time, it is essential to tap the robust global demand conditions and build increased linkages with the international economy, both for flow of goods and services, and for investments. Current FDI inflow is rather low, and prudent level has been estimated at 2.5% of GDP.
5: Growing Externalisation
IV. Budget strategies for the first year of the 11th Plan
Convergence of skill levels and technology enables economies to shift growth trends upwards. CII believes that double-digit growth is attainable in the near term, provided key issues in agricultural, industrial and services growths are addressed. These issues relate to human capital, physical capital, financial capital and technological capital. All these factors need to function in an environment of maximum efficiency through more liberal market forces.
The critical factor for public sector investments in key sectors is revenue generation.
1. Increasing Revenue:
CII proposes that of incremental central tax revenue share in 2007-08, 75% be earmarked for development expenditure and 25% on non-developmental expenditure.
Of the additional expenditure (75%), a proportion of 35:35:20:10 should be spent on education, infrastructure, health and other development expenses.
There is need for a high initial loading dose of investments for a BIG PUSH to the economy.
The government must not compromise on adhering to FRBM targets during Budget 2007-08 and the 11th Plan. Apart from credibility being at stake, there is fear of distortions of markets.
With these pre-conditions met, the following measures need to be urgently put in place:
i. Widen tax base
– Bring more services in the tax net; make tax collection easier and simpler to allow more individuals to comply
ii. Incentivise savings for infrastructure projects
– issue Infrastructure Bonds. Investments in Infrastructure Bonds should be tax exempt.
iii. PSU disinvestment and privatization
– sell all PSUs sick over a certain time; privatise all PSUs making losses for a certain number of years; bring down shareholdings in profitable PSUs; sell high value unproductive assets of PSUs. A target of Rs. 10,000 crores from such offloading may be set. PSE privatization needs to be part of the government agenda once again for greater common good. It has been successful in different states, and is essential for the central government to raise resources for social and physical infrastructure.
iv. Increase expenditure efficiency and productivity
– ensure minimal expenditure leakages, reduce corruption through stringent action; adhere to timelines; prevent cost overruns through on-the-ground surveys; outsource service delivery to private sector
v. Reduce subsidies
– fertilizer subsidies; electricity; petrol and gas; agricultural subsidies have been increasing as percentage of GDP while public investments have correspondingly declined. Redirect subsidies to productive capital formation in agriculture. A target of reducing subsidies by Rs 15,000 crores can be set for the first year.
Often, subsidy targeting is inefficient, leading to higher costs being paid by the poor and subsidies reaching the middle or higher income groups. Some subsidies, such as on fertilizers and electricity, cause distortions in usage patterns and accentuate problems (groundwater depletion, runoffs, soil pollution). Other subsidies hinder resource generation for maintenance, modernization, and safety measures. Availability of inputs is often more critical than cost to the poor.
vi. Raise external debt to GDP ratio
through long-term borrowings, for use in infrastructure.
Given India's comfortable external debt position, borrowings from overseas for infrastructure projects has scope for expansion.
India's External Debt
End – March (Ratio as per Cent)
| Items | 2004R | 2005R
| 2005 QE |
| External Debt to GDP | 17.8
| 17.3 | - |
| Short term debt to total External Debt | 4.0
| 6.1 | 6.7 |
| Short term to Foreign Currency Assets | 4.0 | 5.6 | 6.1 |
| Debt Service to current receipts | 16.3 | 6.2 | - |
| Concessional debt to total debt | 36.1 | 33.3 | 31.6 |
Source: Economic Survey 2005-06 p 130
In addition to raising revenue for its developmental expenditure, the government must also make it easier for private sector investments to be more productive and efficient through vibrant markets that smoothen demand and supply matching. For this it is essential to move towards a single market and a common Goods and Services Tax.
2. Invest in Human Capital
Social equity, individual potential and national economic needs are met through investments in education and health. While the government bears the responsibility of primary and secondary education, private investments must be attracted into higher education and skill development. A roadmap for the next five years should be announced to achieve universal primary and secondary education.
CII suggests a working model for such universalisation of education. It is estimated that additional revenues of Rs 25 thousand crores can be mobilized for educational infrastructure provision from additional tax revenues expected in 2007-08. These funds may be used to commence a common school system for primary and secondary education.
- The funds can be utilized for building new primary schools in the poorest and most illiterate districts in 2007-08 to begin with.
- The schools would be set up entirely through central government funding, with recognizable identity, perhaps of a certain design and painted in a distinctive bright color.
- The management of these schools would be through a panchayat-appointed committee from the feeder villages for ensuring accountability and transparency.
- Local qualified staff could be recruited as teachers.
- Revenue expenditure of the schools could be met from state revenues and a combination of user charges, charges from renting out school premises for other educational needs such as skill development, or other innovative mechanisms devised by the panchayat committee.
- Voucher system must be established for securing education in areas where government and private education is available.
At the end of the 11th Plan, there would be such centrally-funded school buildings across the country, progressively established in higher income districts, and creating a common school system with free compulsory education for all up to Class 8.
The same infrastructure can be utilized for imparting skill education in the afternoons or evenings.
- Skill courses should be available to all children who have completed Class 8 and Class 12 at different skill levels to provide incentives for completing these classes.
- Village management committees can run the programs. Local people can be resource persons for these centres, imparting a variety of skills as per local needs and industry requirements.
- The skill centres must be user-fee based, providing rental income for running of the school.
- Accreditation offices can be run by a state-level public-private body with branches in all districts to give universal acceptability and promote labour mobility.
- There should be linkages with local employment exchanges and adequate information available on job opportunities.
In higher education, steps must be announced for encouraging private sector investments, reducing start-up formalities, establishment of independent credible accreditation bodies, setting in place regulatory and appellate authorities, quality upgradation and curriculum revision. A national policy on higher education must be examined and passed in the first year of the 11th Plan to outline central and state efforts in the field. The central government must provide funds for upgrading 10 more institutions as announced for the three universities in Budget 2006-07.
In health, the government should consider beneficiary-based funding in private healthcare centres as opposed to government-run health centres. A payment system can be introduced where the state pays for health services to targeted segments of society provided by private sources. This would incentivise private health providers to set up health outlets in rural areas.
3. Invest in Physical Infrastructure
Infrastructure, or physical capital, requires funding, policy reforms, establishment of regulatory authorities, and speedy clearances. Fast decisions on these would lower the costs of doing business in India and promote investments from the private sector. The government may also consider more loans from international institutions, possible in the current foreign currency debt and assets position. Gross Capital Formation in Infrastructure must be progressively raised from 4.5% of GDP to 11%.
The Budget must start the process for several large 'Innovative India' projects with high visibility and new global benchmarks of scale and excellence. These are urgent to ignite latent nationalist passions, mark India's arrival on the global economic stage, and inspire investor confidence. Short deadlines, stretch targets, and rapid deployment are essential for Innovative India projects.
At the recent Infrastructure Summit, a requirement of Rs. 14,50,000 crores or $320 billion for the next five years was laid out. Although it might be difficult to outline the exact break-up of this figure, an indication of the extent of resources to be raised from different sources must be presented.
To enhance regional equity, greater dialogue, cooperation and consensus between states and between the center and the states through an institutionalized regular mechanism on a neutral non-partisan platform is required to be put in place. Individual platforms for dialogue in crucial areas such as education, agriculture, and electricity must be set up with regular meetings to evolve time-bound fast solutions for moving forward.
Sectors with the most enabling policy environment, such as telecom, aviation and ports, have witnessed high participation from the private sector to great success. Thus, non-viable and uneconomical services must be separated from profitable services, with the latter left entirely to the private sector and the former providing adequate gap-funding to incentivise the private sector. Certain sectors such as energy and mining require urgent policy changes to facilitate private investments. The Model Concession Agreements need to be made more practical and suitable in a manner that the interest of private sector is retained in PPP models, including viability gap funding frameworks.
Efficiency of resource utilization and time-compression also need attention. Private sector can be a partner for techno-managerial expertise. The government must consider setting up an Infrastructure Development Board at the central and state levels as a one-stop fast-track mechanism for identifying projects, conducting feasibility studies, acquiring land and licenses, and inviting and selecting bids. Further, a system of infrastructure statistics at the central level would help monitor progress and conduct comparisons. Such a system would release data on progress of infrastructure projects on a quarterly basis.
Establishment of effective regulatory authorities is also critical to private sector participation in infrastructure provision and servicing. Priority in the Budget must be given to regulation in power, roads and highways, ports and airports. In power, projects for 60,000 MW additional capacity must be initiated for the 11th Plan. State governments must be given adequate incentives to reform distribution of electricity.
4. Deepen financial capital
There is a critical gap in the translation of aggregate savings into productive investments. Much of household savings does not reach the financial markets, while at the same time, government crowds out private sector in bank lending due to requirements for holding government securities. The huge rise in investments by the corporate sector in the previous quarters has been financed through retained earnings, equity, external borrowings, and bank borrowings. However, further growth may be restrained by the lack of access of the corporate sector to household savings. McKinsey Global Institute states that $48 billion of funds annually could be unlocked through financial market reforms.
Corporate bond markets, pension reforms, more privatization of banks, and changes in withholding tax will help channelise household savings to productive sectors. Introduction of STRIPS (Separate Trading of Registered Interest and Principal of Securities), short selling of government paper, and transparency in trading through simpler listing procedures need to move faster. A credible trading platform needs to be set up for the secondary bond market. FII trading norms in bonds also need to be relaxed.
Capitalisation of banks must be addressed so that borrowings are not hampered due to lack of capital adequacy. For this, the government needs to reduce its share in public sector banks to 33%. Bank credit grew at 30% in 2005-06, and maintained this rate for the first half of 2006-07, but already accounts for 72% of deposits.
Deposits must be increased by widening the depositor base rather than raising the interest rates. Hikes in interest rates impact consumer retail lending and would reduce the pace of growth in consumer durables sector, which has been a growth driver of the IIP.
To attract depositors, innovative banking for the rural and poorer sections of society is needed. Microfinance institutions must be scaled up. Stronger linkages between the formal and informal sectors are needed so that more income generating opportunities are created. Micro and small entrepreneurship in rural areas have to be aggressively promoted to bring more people into the banking net.
Pension and insurance fund reform must be set in motion to widen and deepen capital markets, expand investor base and add to resources for infrastructure creation. Pension funds must have access to the equity market and should be delinked from revenue inflow. Insurance product basket also needs diversification.
At the same time, the high rates of public sector borrowings and the consequent impact on revenue expenditure for interest payments are a cause for concern. The government must give highest priority to reducing its revenue and fiscal deficits in line with the FRBM Act. This expands fund availability to the private sector, offers comfort to investors, supplies an image of a responsible and mature government, and improves macroeconomic fundamentals.
There is need to also utilize funds in a more cost-efficient manner for optimal spending on social sector programs. Expertise of the corporate sector must be leveraged even in social programs of the government as the current efforts of companies have proved efficient and viable even in education, health, awareness generation and other areas.
5. Strengthen technological capital
India has a particular advantage arising from its human resource in becoming a knowledge and innovation hub for the world. However, India's current R&D spend is grossly below that of many countries.
The proportion of R&D expenditure to GDP in India should be increased to 1% in the first year of the 11th Plan to conform to the aspirations for making India a knowledge economy. This proportion must be progressively increased to 3% by the end of the Plan period, so that India evolves into a world class hub for R&D.
Innovation regimes need to be strengthened, corporate-academia cooperation enhanced, and intellectual property rights made credible. A clear-cut demarcation of the roles and responsibility between different organizations promoting R&D is essential. Administrative procedures and time required in clearing proposals must be reduced.
For technology commercialization, suitable mechanisms to monitor, support and hand-hold should be put in place. Patent protection regime needs to be strengthened to promote new technologies and innovation. Suitable policies are required to be drafted on patent rights by the scientists working in R&D institutes.
R&D support in terms of fiscal incentives like tax credits and other benefits should be extended to all sectors of the economy, including agriculture. Further, SMEs should be provided additional benefits to promote innovation. A central autonomous fund for R&D by SMEs needs to be instituted, started by a corpus contribution from the government. Industry contributions should further deepen this fund. Industry contributions would have to be voluntary and the contributing companies should get 200% tax deduction on their contributions. This scheme would run parallel to the existing scheme to extending 150% weighted tax deduction on R&D expenditure by companies.
The government should give grants on the basis of proposals for significant R&D, particularly to SMEs.
Industry-institute interactions must be made more intense through information sharing mechanisms and venture capital incentives. There needs to be an institutionalised mechanism for transfer of ideas to the marketplace between entrepreneurs and scientists.
6. Vibrant markets
A significant part of India's economy lies outside formal markets. There is need to widely expand markets so that more and more people are subsumed into the formal marketplace, as well as to deepen and strengthen existing markets. Connectivity and information are necessary for smooth clearing of demand and supply so that resources are allocated optimally.
Barriers in the marketplace add to transaction costs and lower competitiveness. Product markets as well as factor markets need to be liberalized to promote movement of goods and services. Labor and capital mobility must also be addressed.
It is estimated that the burden of indirect tax structure adds 14-16% to costs of manufactured products over those in China. Administrative hassles, slow movement of goods, and poor logistics support raise costs further. Thus the costs of doing business in India are high, as is indicated by its ranking on the World Bank 'Doing Business" report. Although the ranking overall has improved from 138 in 2005 to 134 in 2006, this is still very low in a list of 175 countries. Therefore, Budget 2007-08 must focus on increasing competitiveness and facilitating greater market functioning.
Other sections of the Pre-Budget Memorandum focus on direct and indirect taxes. In the macroeconomic perspective, the emphasis is on creation of a single market. The deadline for a common goods and services tax was announced in the last Budget as 2010. Budget 2007-08 must announce clarity on the overall roadmap and timeline proposed for movement towards GST. Dismantling of Central Sales Tax must be urgently carried forward, along with compensation issues for states. Other duties hampering movement of goods also need to be addressed.
Services tax structure must align with taxes on goods and more services should be included in the tax net.
Market conditions in several sectors need to be urgently improved. In particular, mining, energy, and the agricultural goods sectors need enabling policies to unlock potential growth. Both the mining and electricity sectors are dragging down overall industrial growth. At the same time, the manufacturing sector needs to grow at 12-14% in order to absorb larger workforce and gain more share in overall GDP.
Mining sector needs deregulation for more competition and private sector operators with clear criteria for lease allocation, increased royalty payment to states, and establishment of independent regulators. Reconnaissance, prospecting and mining movement must be flexible, and approvals must be fast. Environmental guidelines must be clear and speedy.
7. Agriculture
In agriculture, the farmer must have the opportunity of choice for selling his produce. Vibrant produce markets need to be incentivised and contract farming must be encouraged. Greater linkages with the food processing sector are required to be promoted. Credit facilities and risk management mechanisms need to be strengthened. Standards and harmonization with international norms should be advanced in order to enhance exports.
Rapid growth in the agricultural sector can come only from the following:
a) Creation of the rural businesses / agri-enterprises
b) Diversification into high-value crops and value addition to both traditional and diversified agriculture produces.
c) Large-scale exports of high value basic and processed agri produce.
Thus agriculture needs to be linked to the markets by creating vibrant agricultural markets through implementing the APMC Act in the states and private sector participation in market development.
Agribusinesses and rural enterprises near farms need to be promoted. Private sector participation in agriculture research, extension and farmers' training is required to link production to demand.
The government needs to invest in irrigation infrastructure and promote private sector participation in watershed development and micro-irrigation. Participatory user committees would further help manage water infrastructure.
Food processing sector:
strengthen engines of agriculture growth such as the food processing industry, biodiesel, etc; shift the focus from a 'classes' product to a 'masses' product industry; improve industry viability through enabling industry to obtain 'return on taste and time invested' (ROTTI) as opposed to Return on Investment (RoI); position India as a preferred outsourcing hub for processed food products; support institution development for capacity-building in Food Safety and Quality. This sector needs a uniform-low rate of tax incidence.
V. Employment Intensive Sectors
The large numbers being added to the active working age population every year would prove to be a huge demographic and social liability, unless job creation is given special attention.
There are sectors of industry that are employment intensive. The government needs to come out with ways to promote these sectors in a manner that growth in these sectors create the necessary job opportunities.
VI. Retardance measures
Certain risks that threaten the growth environment need to be assessed and measures taken for mitigation. Some of the key issues that would need to be considered are:
Delivery mechanisms
: Prospects of uncertainties in policies and dilatory administrative procedures impact current domestic and overseas investment decisions. Government needs to be more credible, transparent, accountable and outcome-oriented.
Slowing down of reform process:
Political consensus must be built around the key areas of reform so that further liberalization is not impeded.
Government salary expenditure:
While it is imperative to improve salaries of government officials in line with economic progress, there must be accompanying measures to reduce intake and trim staff for greater productivity.
Disaster prevention and management:
A weather forecasting system must be established to mitigate disasters arising from weather conditions. Global warming and climate change factors need to be taken into account.
Diseases
: Pandemics and HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria and other diseases must not be allowed to impact productivity and investment.
Depleting water resources
: India has 18% of the World's population, but only 4% of the water resources. Overstressed freshwater services may make already-scarce water more difficult to access, exacerbating the country's health and humanitarian problems.
VII. Conclusion
The government needs to maintain fiscal responsibility and restrain unproductive expenditure. It needs to focus on creation of long-term enabling measures to boost inclusive growth. Such measures would primarily concentrate on education and skill development, infrastructure and policy environment for better operation of market forces. Rapid and inclusive growth can be driven by the private sector rather than the public sector.
The business environment must encourage entrepreneurship, promote competition, reward creativity, and stimulate growth and development through interplay of market forces. Business must be considered a partner in the development process for the country.
Sarkaritel.com News and Features
President Presents Samman Awards to 13 Overseas Indians
New Delhi, January 11, 2007
A World Knowledge Platform can be a launchpad for innovation with the combined power of nations, said Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, President of India. He was addressing the valedictory session of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2007 organised in New Delhi by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, and the Confederation of Indian Industry.
Ending the three-day event on a rousing note, the President also presented the Samman Awards to 13 overseas Indians who have contributed significantly in different walks of life across the world, and raised the profile of India. Two of the awardees, Mr. Gopal Raju of USA and Mr. Moti Tika Ram of Fiji, shared some of their experiences and perspectives.
Elaborating on the World Knowledge Platform, the President gave the example of the design and development of the Brahmos missile, which is a world-class product at low cost developed within a record time period. Combining core competencies of nations would help develop knowledge products in a short lead time. The Pan-African network between India and the African continent would also assist education, telemedicine, and e-governance in 53 countries in Africa through an e-network and e-connectivity. Sixteen countries are expected to be connected in the first quarter of this year, and the remaining by next year. The World Knowledge Platform would have missions in the categories of energy, water, healthcare, food, knowledge products, automobiles, and capacity building.
President Kalam also outlined the Global Human Resource Cadre, two cadres comprising youth with world class skills and youth with higher education and research qualifications. India's current levels of higher education must be raised to 50% by 2040 and each Indian student must have the choice of the education he wants to pursue. PIOs can help in this effort through ideas and funding, stated the President.
Giving his vision of India in 2020, he said that the country has the potential to be a developed country by 2030. There are great opportunities in the great transformation of India, he concluded. The President also read out a poem composed by him for PIOs.
Earlier, Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs, Mr. Vayalar Ravi, said that the last three days of the event have raised several ideas, and partnership opportunities for overseas Indian have been explored. The partnership agenda would be taken forward and developed into actionable points.
The Minister assured that the Prime Minister's announcement of establishing an Overseas Indian Facilitation Centre to serve as a single window for investment advisory services would take force by the next Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in January 2008. He also stated that the framework of a PIO university in a Special Economic Zone under the UGC Act would be worked out shortly. The third initiative announced by the Prime Minister - of a central council for overseas employment for overseas Indian workers - will also be launched in the next few months.
Mr. Nirmal Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, while welcoming the dignitaries, said that 1100 persons from 47 countries had attended the PBD 2007. Social development in education, health, women's issues and youth as well as partnership with the states had been addressed. An action-oriented plan would be formulated from the ideas generated, he said.
Presenting the vote of thanks, Mr. R Seshasayee, President, Confederation of Indian Industry said that overseas Indians exemplified 'unity in diversity' by assimilating diverse cultures, while at the same time, displaying unity of purpose for building India. The concept of inclusive growth should include overseas Indians as well, he stated. CII has roots all over India and abroad, and proposes to create a platform with the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs for overseas Indians, said Mr. Seshasayee.
Students of the Sarvodaya Vidyalaya, Jor Bagh, presented a song entitled 'Ignited Minds' during the valedictory session.
http://www.sarkaritel.com/news_and_features/jan2007/presipresammanaward.htm
| Year : Mar '07 | |
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the 96th Annual General Meeting of your Company. It is a matter of satisfaction for me to report yet another year of robust growth and strong performance encompassing all the business segments of your Company. The foundations that we have laid over time by investing in R & D, technology and innovation for international competitiveness, supported by a robust governance structure, continue to drive growth in your Company's multiple businesses, providing a strong momentum for a secure future. FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE Gross Turnover for the year grew by 20.2% to Rs. 19505 crores. Net Turnover at Rs.12369 crores increased by 26.3% driven by the non-cigarette FMCG businesses, higher agri-business revenues and the continuing strong performance by the Hotels business. The non-cigarette portfolio grew by 37.6% during the year and now accounts for 52.3% of the Company's Net Turnover. Pre-tax profit increased by 20.1% to Rs. 3927 crores, while Post-tax profit at Rs. 2700 crores registered a growth of 20.8%. Earnings Per Share for the year stands at Rs. 7.19. Cash flows from Operations stood at Rs. 3402 crores during the year. The ITC Group's contribution to foreign exchange earnings over the last ten years amounted to nearly USD 2.8 billion, of which agri exports constituted nearly 65%. Earnings from agri exports is an indicator of your Company's contribution to the rural economy by effectively linking small farmers with international markets. You, the shareholders, can draw even greater satisfaction from the fact that these financial results rest on a strong foundation of trust earned by your Company's diverse brands, products and services and the enduring relationships formed with millions of farmers in rural India over several years. It is on this bedrock of trust, competencies, innovation and rural partnerships that we have built our aspiration to be a leader in every business segment we are engaged in. SUSTAINABLE AND INCLUSIVE GROWTH Last year, I had spoken to you on the fundamental pillars of Vision, Values and Vitality that have powered the transformation of your Company over the past decade. I reiterated that envisioning a larger societal purpose has always been the hallmark of your Company. Indeed, this 'commitment beyond the market' is a compelling Vision that motivates us to enlarge our contribution to the Indian Society, even as we attain new milestones of excellence in sustainable wealth creation. We have, over the years, pursued relentless innovation to forge unique business models that synergise long-term shareholder value enhancement with the superordinate purpose of creating greater societal capital. We take pride that your Company is defined by its deeply 'Indian' character that aligns corporate strategy to national priorities. It is for this reason that we measure our accomplishments not only in terms of financial performance but also by the transformation we have consciously engendered to augment the natural and social capital of the nation. This approach towards achieving Triple Bottom Line benchmarks is key to our resolve to contribute to the national goal of sustainable and inclusive growth. It is my firm belief that business enterprises can and must make a difference towards achieving greater social equity. It is through a fundamental and unwavering commitment to Triple Bottom Line objectives that long-term sustainability of business enterprises can be ensured, unleashing in the process strong drivers that can make national progress more inclusive and equitable. ITC has received global recognition as an exemplar of Triple Bottom Line performance. For five years in a row, we have achieved and sustained our status as a 'water positive' organisation. We have also been 'carbon positive' for the last two years. We continue to strive towards achieving a 'zero solid waste' discharge status, having recycled over 90% of solid waste produced during the year. This makes us, to the best of my knowledge, the only business enterprise in the world, of our size and complexity, to accomplish these three dimensions of environmental excellence - an extremely challenging task given the fact that we are continuously growing our manufacturing operations. In addition, through a concerted effort to develop innovative value-chains across our diverse business segments, your Company today is instrumental in creating and sustaining livelihoods for nearly 5 million people, many of whom represent the weakest sections in rural India. Our deep commitment in ensuring sustainability and competitiveness have given us the confidence to voluntarily publish an annual Sustainability Report with independent reputed third party verification. The 2006 Sustainability Report of your Company, the third in the series, is the first in India and among the top 10 in the world to be presented in accordance with the latest G3 guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative. Indeed, these achievements reinforce our commitment in making a meaningful contribution towards sustainable and inclusive growth of the Indian Society. A SOCIAL CHARTER FOR BUSINESS A few weeks ago, the Hon'ble Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh presented a ten-point 'Social Charter' sharing his vision on the responsibility of corporates for sustainable and inclusive growth. He said, and I quote, Indian industry must rise to the challenge of making our growth processes both efficient and inclusive. This is our endeavor in Government. It will have to be yours too and I seek your partnership in making a success of this giant national enterprise. 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. I invite corporate India to be a partner in making ours a more humane and just society. Unquote. To my mind, the Hon'ble Prime Minister's clarion call is not only a responsibility that we, in Indian Business and Industry, must commit ourselves to but a crying need that we cannot afford to neglect any longer. While we can justifiably be proud of India's stellar performance in GDP growth, the growing inequity in sharing the fruits of success is indeed a millstone that impedes the nation's true potential. Business Corporations draw heavily on societal resources. Therefore, it is in the enlightened self-interest of business to engage constructively in enlarging its contribution to the broader social and environmental agenda. Competitiveness of firms can be severely threatened by unsustainable environments and a lopsided social structure that creates islands of affluence amidst a sea of poverty. A constructive public-private partnership for socially responsible growth is imperative and must occupy a larger space in the future business strategies of India's corporate sector. You are indeed aware of the enormous importance of our rural engagement in the future growth of your Company. We have constantly strived to meaningfully blend our social responsibilities with business competitiveness, so that we can continue to create shareholder value even as we enhance the benefits that accrue to rural communities. We recognise that this is the path we must pursue to ensure sustainable and inclusive growth - a philosophy that is central to the vision articulated by Prime Minister's Social Charter for Business. I take immense pride that the vision enunciated by the Hon'ble Prime Minister echoes the core values that your Company has enshrined in its management philosophy and governance structure. We have indeed been ' practitioners' of this vision for many years now. It gives me immense satisfaction that your Company has executed, on a substantial scale, innovative business strategies which result in 'mainstreaming' the disadvantaged sections of rural India. Your Company's pioneering e-Choupal initiative today comprises 6,400 choupals transforming the lives of over 3.5 million farmers in 38,500 villages in 9 States of India. We hope to reach out to 10 million farmers in 100,000 villages in the not too distant future. The Social and Farm Forestry Programme of ITC covers 65,000 hectares providing over 28 million person days of employment among the disadvantaged. In the process, we have also helped sequester over 2,000 kilotons of Carbon Dioxide as a firm commitment to combating climate change. Your Company's Integrated Watershed Development programmes in rural areas cover nearly 27,000 hectares providing critical irrigation to water stressed areas. This year, we have also forged a milestone partnership with the Government of Rajasthan for an integrated watershed development project covering 5,000 hectares. Your Company's initiatives to provide opportunities for non-farm incomes through economic empowerment of women, supplementary education and integrated animal husbandry services continue to make significant strides in rural empowerment. As a nation, we face today a multi-dimensional challenge to chart a growth path that will transform the lives of almost a third of our billion population who live at the margin. Surely, it is not a task that any single segment of society - be it Government or Responsible Business - can hope to accomplish in isolation. It is true that sustained high rates of GDP growth is one of the surest ways of creating livelihoods for the disadvantaged. However, if such growth impulses do not envision or contain conscious efforts to enhance social value, it is not necessary that high growth rates alone will ensure social equity. In fact, there is a danger that competitive pressures may not actually lead to development and growth in areas that need it the most. There is also a significantly large cost involved in implementing value-chains that are socially inclusive. While commensurate returns may flow over the longer term, there are indeed cost barriers, over the short to medium term, that inhibit investments in such socially inclusive initiatives. In the absence of strong fiscal or financial incentives, business enterprises would hesitate to raise such investments and commit physical and human resources over a longer term. Therefore, it is important to examine how market drivers can creatively facilitate such long-term investments which have larger societal benefits. Corporates will be able to support a much larger social involvement in their business strategies, if market forces facilitate such investments and returns. How do we then create a market that will support such corporate action for social development ? If we are to transform the Hon'ble Prime Minister's vision into reality to its fullest potential, we need to find answers to this critical question. MOBILISING CSR FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH WITH EQUITY Over the years, progressive organisations have demonstrated several laudable examples of responsible corporate action for social development. Unfortunately, many of these efforts have not been able to reach a level of scale and dimension that can make an impactful difference on a nation as large and diverse as ours. Why is it, that despite possessing rich and diverse managerial capability, a tradition of entrepreneurship, economic resources and the right consciousness, corporates are still unable to participate more meaningfully in building natural and social capital? The reasons are many and complex. These relate to the lack of a conducive external environment as also to organisations' vision, values, leadership and competitive capability. However, if there is one common thread, it is the unassailable fact that markets have failed to reward CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). They do not adequately provide the drivers required to sustain a level of intensity of long-term engagement necessary to produce results in the vast social fabric. As Prof. David Vogel says, in his recent work titled 'Market for Virtue', and I quote, CSR is sustainable only if virtue pays off. The supply of corporate virtue is both made possible and constrained by the market …..while there is a place in the business system for responsible firms, the 'market for virtue' is not sufficiently important to make it in the interest of all firms to behave more responsibly. It is sometimes argued that the 'reputational asset' that CSR attains is an adequate reward in itself, and therefore, does not need any further market incentives. However, at the present stage in India, such a reputational asset has so far not led to any significant consumer support, persuaded sizeable investor interest, or resulted in meaningful preference in Government policies. Therefore, given the ambivalent market response, CSR initiatives, by and large, tend to attempt the minimum, often defined by compliance to regulations, and do not ignite creativity and innovation to accelerate social benefit. There are also apprehensions amongst many that investing in CSR would put them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their competitors who do not choose to carry such social overheads. Nevertheless, there are worthy exceptions, where organisations have displayed sustained commitment and are certainly the harbingers of social change and an inspiration to others. However, it is only when market forces make CSR a crucial component of shareholder value creation that new competitive forces will emerge in favour of responsible corporate action. It is then that CSR will assume a new dimension - one that is defined by market forces, and not inspired by corporate conscience alone. I am of the firm belief that private enterprises are well placed to play a much larger role in augmenting natural and social capital. Corporates have created assets and facilities that span the length and breadth of the country, and therefore, constitute the front line of engagement with civil society. The physical presence in communities around their catchments gives them an opportunity to directly engage in synergistic business activities that can create livelihoods and add to preservation of natural capital. More than financial resources, private enterprises possess the more crucial managerial capability to ensure efficient delivery of social projects. In that sense, CSR can lead to optimum utilisation of national resources, given that far higher social benefits will accrue to every unit of incremental cost incurred by the organisation. Thus, given the right market incentives, Indian corporates can significantly add to Government efforts in pursuing growth with equity in constructive public-private partnerships. The key to corporates sustaining a meaningful strategy for constructive social action therefore lies in the ability to create strong market drivers that incentivise CSR. Civil Regulation, including pressure groups, act as strong drivers to ensure socially responsible action. Government regulation and public policy are also influential drivers. However, these again tend to deliver the bare minimum interventions. Besides, over reliance on regulation can stifle corporate creativity and innovation. A perceptible augmentation of societal capital will take place when market drivers spur innovation and a sense of competition to deliver CSR in ways that positively impact financial results. CSR initiatives then become a part of the balance sheet deliverables, are quantified by the market and provide a direct incentive to the company to enhance socially responsible behaviour. MAKING MARKETS WORK FOR CSR Can we, therefore, make markets work for CSR ? Are there compelling market drivers which would give a positive reinforcement to corporates to focus on Triple Bottom Line performance ? Can these powerful drivers energise innovation by companies, so that CSR becomes an integral part of the marketing mix and a competitive differentiator? Fortunately, there is an answer. The most potent force that can trigger a complete rethink of corporate strategy and bring about transformational change lies in the power of consumer franchise. I use the term 'consumer' here in a broader sense to also encompass other market participants including Government - both as a buyer and regulator, Investors, Employees, Job-Seekers and other segments of Civil Society. An enlightened consumer, by exercising a choice in favour of ' socially responsible' enterprises, can unleash a powerful force of incentives. A 'positive vote' for socially responsible companies, exercised through preference for a company's products and services, would change the context and dimension of meaningful CSR, create strong economic multipliers and enhance shareholder value. The implications of such consumer franchise for business will be wide ranging. Consumer preference will spur a massive movement in corporate innovation to integrate business goals with the building of societal capital. CSR can also emerge as a distinctive market differentiator and help position progressive companies more strongly in the marketplace. Companies will vie for consumer spend by positioning CSR as a compelling value proposition. Gains would accrue to the company and its shareholders with increasing revenues and goodwill. Where consumers go, Investors will follow. Investors will increasingly find such socially responsible companies attractive, given the larger market gains. Potential employees would also seek opportunities in such successful companies and the enterprises themselves would be better positioned in the war for talent. Competition amongst CSR exemplars would lead to a perceptible augmentation of natural and social capital and this would create a more sustainable future. Thus, powerful market drivers will emerge to encourage CSR as an integral part of business strategy. In the course of time, stakeholders will build a more enduring relationship with such companies, continuously creating value for the organisation, for its shareholders and the nation. ENLISTING CONSUMER SUPPORT The key, therefore, lies in mobilising market participants - the most potent being the consumer - and enhancing awareness amongst them, so as to empower their decisions. We will need to ramp up consumer education substantially, so that they are made aware of the power they possess to transform society and bring in enduring social change. Government, Industry and Civil Society will need to join hands in this endeavour to give it more body, scope and reach. Your Company made a beginning in this direction by creating a high visibility 'cause marketing' campaign involving our popular brands - Sunfeast' and 'Aashirvaad' - and highlighted the link with some of our CSR initiatives. It was our endeavour to educate the consumer that with every spend on those brands, they would, in effect, be contributing to the Social Forestry and Watershed initiatives of your Company. You are aware that your Company's 'Classmate' brand contributes significantly towards the education of the underprivileged by earmarking a portion of its proceeds for this cause. I am given to understand that school children actually prefer Classmate products not only for their superior quality, but also for their association with a noble cause. We are committed to enhancing these awareness campaigns, and it will be our endeavour to continuously make the consumer aware of the choice that she possesses to support such social programmes by making informed buying decisions. It is heartening to note that worldwide, consumers are already demonstrating their preference for socially responsible products and services. In 2006, an estimated €1.6 billion worth of Fairtrade products were sold across the world, growing annually by almost 50%. This independent consumer certification mark guarantees that disadvantaged producers are getting a better deal. Today, more than 7 million people - farmers, workers and their families - across 59 developing countries benefit from the international Fairtrade system. In some cases, consumers have also demonstrated that they are willing to pay more for a product or service if it contributes to social good. These are certainly welcome developments although they occupy, as of now, a small proportion of global trade. If these individual efforts of consumers get escalated into collective action, they will certainly have a distinct impact on corporate thinking and action. Unfortunately, the 'market for virtue' in India is practically non-existent. However, a small beginning has been made. With concerted action from policy makers and civil society, a significant force can be created by enlightened consumer franchise to spur industry into innovative thinking for social action. India's young demographic profile will also support this trend. In late 2006, a Cone Millennial Cause Study in the US found that, amongst the youth, nearly nine out of ten surveyed stated that they were likely or very likely to switch from one brand to another (price and quality being equal) if the second brand was associated with a good cause. This goes to indicate that with greater awareness through education and exposure, the future generation will tend to exercise a 'vote' for companies with higher social accountability. This is now getting to be a worldwide trend, and with increasing connectivity through the Internet, widespread media and new tools for communication, I can see the emergence of a young global community, who share common views, common concerns, and common hopes and aspirations. This is a force that is lying dormant amongst India's confident new young generation, and once unleashed will be a formidable catalyst for change. ALIGNING FORCES OF FRANCHISE Given the power of consumer franchise, how do we align forces amongst all the market participants to support a new movement for innovative CSR? To make 'consumer choice' a compelling market driver we would need to create a supportive institutional framework to facilitate the process of making an informed choice by market participants. Let me briefly elaborate on some of these enablers : First, the Policy and Institutional Framework. Market participants would need an effective tool to make an informed choice in favour of a Responsible Corporation. I would suggest that Government support the development of a 'CSR Sustainability Trustmark', or a series of Trustmarks defined by Industry segments, which could be displayed on products and services to convey to the consumer that the enterprise follows a strong commitment to building natural and social capital. Voluntary in nature, these Trustmarks, crafted on sound scientific and market principles, will stand for the positive impact a company has made on the environment and the society. The Trustmarks could also be supplemented with Ratings, based on the extent of the individual company's involvement in creating societal capital. The Trustmarks need to be administered by a reputed and independent body or bodies, much like the financial rating agencies. An institutional framework and appropriate guidelines can be created by a Government-Industry partnership to provide organisational support and credibility. A major impetus can emerge out of Government's consideration to extend fiscal and financial concessions, priority clearance and other incentives to organisations that attain sustained high ratings. Government and its agencies could also give purchase preferences to suppliers with highly rated Trustmarks. Second, the role of Industry : In championing a sincere commitment to a Vision that embraces contribution to Society as a key component of business strategy. In moving towards voluntary disclosure of Triple Bottom Line performance in the Company's Annual Reports, verified by independent reputed third party organisations. In making a strong effort to attain the CSR Sustainability Trustmarks, and displaying the same on their products and services. In enlarging the Company's contribution by giving preference to vendors with a strong CSR and Sustainability orientation. In developing a model code of responsible conduct by Industry bodies and associations for its members. In encouraging Modern Retail outlets to develop special sections that display and sell products with Trustmarks. In providing support to the creation of Awards that recognise outstanding Sustainability Performance. This would provide a tremendous reputational asset and incentivise CSR significantly. In strengthening reporting on Sustainability based on guidelines such as the Global Reporting Initiative. I am sure that the Indian operations of multinationals, not listed on Indian bourses, would also want to make such public disclosures and demonstrate their contribution to the Indian Society. I envisage a future where Sustainability Reporting will form an integral part of a firm's public disclosures, and will be valued by stakeholders in equal measure to the established practices of financial reporting. Third, the role of Investors. Investors play a critical role in encouraging social accountability in corporate behaviour. Globally, there are today hundreds of funds that invest in socially responsible enterprises. These funds rely on Sustainability Indices such as Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, FTSE4Good, Domini 400 Social Index and others to guide investment decisions. These funds have already channeled large amount of investors' savings into companies that have high social brand capital. India has witnessed some welcome developments in this direction in recent years. The ABN Amro Bank launched a Sustainable Development Fund as India's first Socially Responsible Investing Fund. Recently CRISIL, S&P and KLD have announced that they would develop an Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) Index of Indian companies. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India is also reported to be working on developing a similar evaluation. Individual investors, while seeking to maximise returns from their portfolio holdings, could exercise a powerful choice for companies with high Triple Bottom Line performance. Banks and Financial Institutions could ask for voluntary disclosures and factor the rating in their lending evaluations. Fourth, the role of Civil Society organisations. Consumer awareness will benefit immensely if civil society organisations and consumer bodies actively advocate the usage of Trustmarks. They could also promote awareness amongst constituents to support products and services of companies with higher Sustainability ratings. Schools and educational institutions could also promote awareness on responsible corporate behaviour and its association with the Trustmark ratings on products and services, and design elements in their curriculum to groom citizens of tomorrow as enlightened consumers. And finally, the Media, as one of the most powerful forces of shaping public opinion, can make a multi-dimensional contribution in this direction. It is my strong belief that by aligning such powerful forces, we will see the emergence of a new consciousness where CSR will transcend from corporate philanthropy to a competitive value proposition. Your Company has been instrumental in setting up the CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development, which is a unique institution that seeks to address the void in developing requisite capability on Sustainability issues among Indian industry. The Centre endeavours to bring about transformational change in Indian businesses by providing thought leadership, promoting awareness and building capacity. One of the major initiatives of the CII-ITC Centre is to recognise excellence in Sustainability practices by presenting Awards to industry, based on a rigorous process of selection. This attempt to recognise outstanding Sustainability initiatives is designed not only to celebrate individual corporate action, but also to inspire others to follow. I am convinced that in today's enlightened India, more and more companies will respond to the appeal made by the Hon'ble Prime Minister to forge partnerships for social action, and achieve growth with efficiency and inclusivity. Making markets work for CSR will indeed provide the compelling foundation for such initiatives. MAKING A DIFFERENCE The essence of what I have presented to you today is a considered response to enhancing corporate participation in societal development. Your Company has been at the forefront in providing both thought leadership and action in creating a more secure, sustainable and inclusive future. It is true that no single organ of society will be able to make a significant difference based on their individual action. However, the efforts made by your Company demonstrate that with innovation, commitment and by forging enduring partnerships, we can all make a difference. Indeed, the challenges seem daunting when we witness the scale of inequity and poverty. The good news is that never before in world history have we possessed so much knowledge, technology and resources to deal with this apparently hopeless situation. It is indeed heartening to witness a growing corporate consciousness to ensure that the future generations are more secure. I hope this groundswell of effort will continue to grow and become a committed movement for a better tomorrow. I firmly believe that Corporates in India have the capability, the vision and the entrepreneurial skill to forge a more prosperous future for the nation, even as they sharpen their competitiveness and grow their businesses globally. Mahatma Gandhi said, and I quote : The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems. We need to heed this message to realise our fullest potential. To be able to stand tall amidst adversity, to live your convictions and know that your actions and beliefs have transformed the lives of millions is at once a humbling and enriching experience. Your company is indeed privileged to be able to make a difference, and be recognised for the contribution it makes. Our abiding Vision the strength of our outstanding human capital, and our commitment to creating enduring value will continue to inspire us as we strive to achieve even greater success in the future. On this occasion of your Company's 96th AGM, I would like to once again thank all of you - our valued shareholders - for your unstinted support in our shared journey to create one of India's most valuable corporations. In this journey, I look to you, as always, or your continued support and encouragement. | |
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| Source : Religare Technova | |
| http://www.moneycontrol.com/stocks/company_info/chairmans_speech.php?sc_did=ITC | |
Overview
The Department of Science and Technology, Government of India has assumed an important role in building a strong base for Research, Development and Demonstration in the country. During the year 2006- 07, serious concerns have been expressed about the declining competitiveness of India in basic research as evident from the global share of India in publications in journals included in Science Citation Index. The global concern regarding the challenges of attracting talent to study and careers with science have been shared also by thoughtful leaders of Indian science.
Support to a Strong Base for Research and Development in India
Mobilizing Support for Research and Development: A Eleventh Plan Priority: The Department of Science and Technology, as the national agency for strengthening the base of Science and Technology in the country has made sincere attempt to address the national concerns of declining competitiveness of India in basic research. The department has developed some carefully planned interventions to be implemented during the next five years. The planned interventions are a) attraction of talents to study and careers with science, b) attraction of larger outlay for science c) programmes for rejuvenation of research in Indian universities and expansion of base for research and development , d) increasing the efficiencies of delivery of research funds, e) development of measurement and parameters for accountability. One of the major outputs of DST during the year 2006-07 has been the development of a vision-led plan for the period 2007-12. DST has developed its plan and programmes of eleventh plan with a focus on long term impacts and on strengthening of the foundation of Science and Technology base of India.
The steering committee constituted by the planning commission for the development of eleventh plan for the S&T sector has recommended an outlay of Rs 30,400 crores for DST which amounts to 690% increase in outlay in comparison to the actual sanction of Rs 4399 crores for the tenth plan period.
Extra Mural Funding Support to Scientific Research: The Department of Science and Technology has emerged as the major funding agency for Extra Mural Research (EMR) in the country with a share of about 44% of public funded research in the country. The combined share of universities and colleges in EMR funding through DST is about 41%. DST has made some special efforts to strengthen research infrastructure for science and technology in universities by changing the parameters of funding levels during the year 2006-07.
The limits for Fund for Infrastructure strengthening of Science and Technology (FIST) have been raised significantly. The waiting period between applications has been reduced from five to three years. Further empowerment of Programme Advisory Committees for speedy delivery of EMR funding has been made. Special drive undertaken during 2006-07 for speeding up the decision process for delivery of EMR funds has started affording results. There has been a sharp increase by about 100% in the number of research proposals received by DST for funding through Science and Engineering Research Council mechanism. During the period between April- December 2006, total of 331 project with an outlay of Rs 6861.5 lakhs have been sanctioned. All efforts have been made to enhance functional efficiencies of EMR funding during 2006-07
Creation of New Mechanisms for EMR Funding Support: The formation of a new Science and Engineering Research Board during the year 2007 has been facilitated by DST. With increasing outlay for the Department of Science and Technology during the eleventh plan period, such new empowered bodies with functional autonomy would be expected to play an important role during the next ten years.
Outputs from Nano Science and Technology Initiative: One of the major highlights emanating from the nationally coordinated effort of DST pertains to the outputs of Nano Science and Technology Initiatives (NSTI). At the national review meeting held on 21-22 February 2007 at Hyderabad, major results emanating from NSTI were presented. The potentials for emergence of a critical mass in research and development in nano science and technology have become evident. Total of 150 students and young researchers participated in the meeting. During the years 2005-07, total of about 250 publications in SCI journals and about 20 patents have emerged from NSTI. Total of 11 units of excellence have been commissioned. In computational material science, globally competitive strength seems to be emerging. Nano mission is expected to be launched during the year 2006-07.
Support to Young Scientists: During the current year, sanctions have been issued for 208 new fast track projects for young scientists under the age of 35 with an outlay of Rs.2220.0 lakhs. Support has been extended also to 298 ongoing fast track projects in various disciplines based on the decisions in previous years. Several interesting and significant results have been reported from the ongoing projects from young scientists.
Science-Student Interface Programmes: Awareness programmes on Geo informatics and PROBE have been conducted in various locations among school students and teachers. Total of 1800 students and 13 teachers have been enrolled into the sub programmes on Geo Informatics. DST extended also support to an international visit of four school children to the United States of America to participate in a programme on Geo Informatics under a Private-Public Partnership model. Seven DST advanced Training Courses / programme have been organized and about 210 candidates (Students, Research Scholars, Scientists and Teachers ,etc ) in the different fields of Earth System Sciences from all over India ( including outside of India ) have participated.
A special programme for motivation of youth in science has been conducted by DST by arranging a special meet of about 400 doctoral research scholars and 600 school students with Nobel Prize winners and some science leaders of India as a part of India-EU Ministerial Conference on Science.
Partial Travel Assistance for Scientific Exchanges: DST provides partial financial support for travel to attend scientific conferences in various locations. Total of 759 candidates have been supported from among the total number of 1595 applications received for support during the year. Out of the 759 grants made to participate in International Conferences/Workshops, Training Programmes etc, 265 belong to young category of scientists. In case of some young scientists, full travel grants have also been extended.
Recognitions to Scientists: During the period April 2006 to February 2007, total of 14 Swarnajayanthi, 69 JC Bose, 9 Ramanujan, 24 Raja Ramanna and 75 BOYSCAST fellowships have been awarded after due processes. Professor Dipankar Chakravorty and Professor Ajay Sood have received Nano Science and Technology Initiaitive Awards for the year 2006-07.
Technology Development and National Outreach Programmes
Joint Technology Projects with Socio Economic Ministries: The eleventh plan initiative has embarked upon a mixed model of both bottom-up and top down approaches to the selection and implementation of joint research, development and dissemination of technology oriented programmes. The need for Pan India initiatives on select nationally important programmes with assured funding has been recognized. The working group constituted under the chairmanship of Dr R A Mashelkar has recommended that socio economic ministries which promote the use of technologies may allocate at least 2.5% of their budget outlay for research and development. A proposal has been mooted that the PAN-INDIA programs might be introduced for integration of S&T with socio-economic growth agenda of the country with specific programs being taken up through participation of STACs in Techno-economic and socio-economic Ministries.
Joint Actions with State Science and Technology Councils: A national consultation meeting of all state councils and secretaries of Science and Technology of state Governments was organized at New Delhi in September 2006. At this meeting, four areas of common interest to Science and Technology agenda of all state agencies represented at the meeting have been identified. They are technologies a) for safe drinking water, b) for decentralized power generation, c) for decentralized solid waste management, d) for remunerative utilization of regional and local natural resources. A strong plea for raising their budget allocations has been made by various State Governments and S&T Councils. A provision of Rs.5000.00 crore has been sought. States would be expected to make a competitive bidding for planned S&T interventions.
Technology Systems programmes: Technology Systems Programme of the Department aims at Development of Technology Systems in certain identified areas of importance. Under the programme, proposals having "Proof of Concepts" are supported and the programme has carved out a clearly identified niche role in technology development chain. During 2006-07, development of technology for removal of arsenic using microbial cum-adsorbent route has been completed and five plants are under field trials in the State of Chhattisgarh.. Two stage sea water desalination units based on indigenous reverse osmosis (RO) technologies has been successfully commissioned. In order to derive synergy of technologies developed in various institutions, a hybrid river water treatment plant involving integration of ceramic membrane based pre-treatment followed by reverse osmosis membrane based desalination is currently under development. A community model for deflouridation of ground water by membrane technology has been successfully developed and plant would be installed at an appropriate location during the year.
The possibility of application of advanced surface engineering technology to improve traditional crafts and modernized traditional techniques tools and skills has been explored. A prototype plasma system has been fabricated which modified the Angora Rabbit Fibre in such a way that it improved its longevity and surface finish. A project on micro-wave based tea dryer has been initiated with an objective of removing the residual moisture after traditional drying processes. Development of indigenous gyrotron for research application has also taken of during 2006-07. A new initiative has been launched to develop platform technologies for various applications including optical sensors to utilize existing infrastructure created for different intended application for the purpose of developing sensing devices.
Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Research Programme: The programme aimed at enhancing capabilities of institutions and the Indian Drugs & Pharmaceuticals Industry towards development of New Drugs in all systems of medicine has been actively promoted during 2006-07. Out of 28 proposals considered for financial support during the year, 15 have been recommended for funding. These included 4 Industry-Institutional collaborative research proposals, 8 for provision of Loan from Industries and 3 for setting up of National Facilities.
Total of twenty two agreements have been signed so far under Drugs research programme during 2006-07. These agreements involved DST as collaborating public partner in Public-Pritave Partnership. In one of the collaborative projects between CCMB, Hyderabad/ IICT, Hyderabad and Dabur Research Foundation (DRF) , Ghaziabad development of anti cancer drug by synthesis and bioactivity determination of antagonist analogues and mimics of vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) has been carried out. It has been reported that the peptides and compositions made using the peptides find pharmacological applications specially in the treatment and prevention of cancer tumours and a patent on " Novel peptides comprising furanoid sugar amino acids for the treatment of cancer has been filed. Similarly from a project carried out undewr a collaboration among DRF, Ghaziabad, IICB, Kolkatta, IICT, Hyderabad, NCL, Pune and University of Hyderabad , Hyderabad, two patents have been filed.
NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM
The National Science & Technology Management Information System (NSTMIS) division of the department continued its efforts of generating and making available information on resources both manpower as well as financial devoted to scientific and technological (S&T) activities by conducting national surveys through in-house as well as sponsored studies.
Two national survey reports bearing research and development statistics corresponding to previous years were brought out during the financial year. In the report, the scope and the coverage of the R&D activities has been enlarged substantially by including the expenditure incurred on R&D in (i) Higher Education Sector (ii) Small Scale Industry (SSI) Sector; and (iii) Industries other than those recognized by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). The national survey for the year 2005-06 has been launched in September, 2006. For online submission of the data, E-questionnaires have been designed and the scope and coverage of the R&D activities enlarged by adding about 200 multinational companies performing R&D activities in India relative to previous years.
Directories for R&D projects executed during the years 2002-03 and 2003-04 have been brought out during 2006-07. A list of 2749 R&D projects carried out with a support of 570.5 crores from public funds has been brought out.
INTERNATIONAL S&T COOPERATION OF INDIA
The Department of Science and Technology has been the coordinating agency of the Government of India in all international S&T cooperation related activities. The Department has developed a strategic plan for stepping up the S&T cooperation activities of the country with other nations during 2006-07. Technology diplomacy, technology synergy and technology acquisition have formed the basis of international S&T cooperation related programmes of the Department. There has been an annual growth rated of ~25% in various programmes being organized by the Department under International cooperation in the form of workshops, number of exchange visits, projects and thematic events.
High point of the International S&T Cooperation related programmes of the Department during 2006-07 are a) Indo Asian Ministerial Meet on Science, b) Indo-EU Ministerial Conference on Science, c) Indo-UK Science and Innovation Council, d) Indo-Russia Research Centre) Indo-German bilateral cooperation and Indian partnership in the establishment of Facility for Anti-proton Ion Research (FAIR) f) Indo-Japan agreements for S&T cooperation; and g) Joint projects in India involving Scientists, Technologists of Indian Origin living in foreign countries.
New mechanisms for supporting joint research under Indo-UK Science and Innovation Council and Indo-EU Science and Technology Steering Committee have been developed. Initiatives have been made for stepping up the S&T cooperation activities of India with countries where technology synergy is desired. The year 2006-07 has been eventful for India in international S&T cooperation.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PROGRAMMES FOR SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The department has been playing a pivotal role in promotion of Science and Technology for socioeconomic development. Flagship programmes under the societal initiative are Science and Society programmes, Special scheme for Tribal populations and Scheduled castes, Technology and Entrepreneurship Development, Science communication and popularization and state S&T programme. A major focus of these programmes has been referencing of technologies to the social contexts in which these technologies need to perform, replication of technologies in states through synergy with state S&T councils, active promotion of entrepreneurship based on technology and attracting and nurturing young talent to science and nurturing a scientific temper among citizens of our country.
Core support a unique programme for providing support to Science and Technology based Field Groups has been continued to address problems in rural environment though the science and technology. A core group based in Trivandrum, Kerala has been able to develop devices which reduce drudgery in work. A costeffective rotary sand sieve as well as a prototype of motor added pedal for Jacquard Loom has been developed. A patent for a cost effective rubber sheet dryer ideal for rural areas has been filed in collaboration with RRL, Trivandrum.
Under an agro climatic zone specific initiative (Technology Intervention in Mountain Ecosystem (TIME) Programme) projects have been supported in different mountain regions to improve livelihoods of the community by value addition to local resources through technology. The emphasis on improved productivity and value addition through technology include projects a) a model water shed in Rajgarh Area of Himachal Pradesh, b) eco-restorative farming in the hilly district Wayanad, Kerala, c) base Flow Water Harvesting from Shivaliks in Jammu, J&K, d) higher biomass production in relevance to hilly region of Garhwal Himalaya, e) Vermicomposting as a socio-biological study in Papumpare district of Arunachal Pradesh. And f) commercial cultivation of Lavender (Lavandula officinalis) at Zimthung, Dirang valley, West Kameng, Arunachal Pradesh.These projects may bring visible change at respective project locations to benefit and empower local communities.
The Coordinated Programme on Biological Integration of Farming Activities & Resource Management (BIOFARM) for resource poor small farmers is being implemented at 18 locations in different agro-ecological regions of the country. At one of the location in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, 15 farmers have adopted multi-cropping system, Azolla culture, bio-composting linked with bio-gas system and backyard gardening as a integrated approach of farming and resource management.
During 2006-07, thirty two action oriented multi-sectoral projects have been supported covering the technology areas of horticulture, biodiversity, medicinal plant cultivation, aquaculture, fisheries, animal husbandry, sustainable agriculture, rural engineering and health and sanitation.An intervention programme on exploring the efficacy of water filters based on membrane filtration technology, developed by NCL with financial support from DST,after a pilot phase involving 150 water filter units in different regions of the country to provide safe drinking water, additional 520 units of this filter have been installed in Kohima/ Mokokchung district (Nagaland), Ruskin Division (East Siang District) & Dirang Block of Arunachal Pradesh. The objective is to assess the impact of the newly developed technology on the health, through reduction in water born diseases in the two States.
All the ongoing projects under the science and society programmes were monitored involving expert groups in three separate Group Monitoring cum Sensitization workshop organized at Shillong, Trivandrum, and Bhopal.
Under the beneficiary specific schemes ie SCSP(Scheduled caste component plan) and TSP(Tribal sub plan) projects have been initiated in technology areas such as Some representative projects which have made visible impact on the well being of the weaker segments of population on account of skill building interventions include a) a comprehensive training package for 120 women of the SC community in TN have been trained in quality fibre extraction techniques of banana o revive the art of banana fibre extraction and utilization, b) skill up-gradation in improved techniques to increase the Mulberry leaf production through evolving new high yielding elite varieties, c) skill development training programme for SC youth in testing and analyzing of exhaust emission from vehicles, actual valve timing, concept of ignition timing, importance of emission testing and d) integrated training package for 128 Scheduled Caste women from 10 villages of Uttaranchal in off-season vegetable cultivation using poly-house technique
National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board
Policy Issues and Support : Based on the initiatives of the DST, Union Budget announcement 2006 has extended fiscal benefits to incubates with an annual turn over less than Rs 50 lakhs. This is a major fiscal support intiative for incubation processes.
Support in Global Bench marking of Best Practices: The Department has initiated programmes jointly with International organizations like UNDP on vocational training. This has broadened the scope and content of entrepreneurship development activities and brought in the international expertise for socio-economic upliftment. Under a Public Private Partnership (PPP) initiative, DST partnered with Intel for organizing a Business Plan Competition. Although the innovative ideas were recognized and awarded, the ownership of the ideas remained with the individuals. India is the only country from which two teams reached the finals. A study on Business potential on European Union (EU)-India Business Incubation Partnerships was undertaken during 2006-07. Nearly 100 business incubation managers from India have participated in the specially designed training interaction modules. This has resulted in preparing the ground for promoting cross cultural ventures through EU India Business Incubation networks. The study has particularly focused on sectoral preference and the potential of university technologies for promotion of cross cultural ventures.
Technology Business Incubator: Two new TBIs have been established in reputed institutions during 2006-07.
Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development (STED) : STED Project aims to bring socioeconomic development in a region by promoting the entrepreneurial temper and motivating the unemployed youth for establishing micro enterprise based on innovative skills and technology. With the support to 39 STED Projects in the current financial year 2006-07, it is expected to establish more than 2200 microenterprises / units all over the country. Seven new projects were established in Amritsar (Punjab), Bogaigaon (Assam), Karim Nagar (Andhra Pradesh), Kolhapur (Maharashtra), Sultanpur (Uttar Pradesh), Tiruchirappalli (Tamil Nadu) and Vadodara (Gujarat).
Entrepreneurship Awareness Camps (EAC): Entrepreneurship Awareness Camp (EAC) is conducted in the premises of an academic institution to create awareness amongst students of the college about various facets of entrepreneurship and the merits of pursuing it as a career option. During the year, over 300 EACs have been organized, thereby exposing about 25,000 students to the concept of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship Development Programme (EDP): The Entrepreneurship Development Programme (EDP) is an important strategy for developing human resources for promoting economic progress in India as well as in other under-developed countries. An EDP brings about a sound combination of techniques of behavioral psychology, tools of management science and available information on technology with a view to identify entrepreneurs, particularly 'first generation' entrepreneurs, strengthen their achievement motivation and train them in enterprise management so that they can confidently start and successfully run their own business ventures. During 2006-2007, 38 EDPs were organized with the support of DST.
Skill Development Training through Science and Technology (STST): Skill Development Training through S&T (STST) scheme aims at demonstrating the effectiveness of short term market oriented technical skill training in empowering unemployed youth to earn a sustainable livelihood. More than 8000 persons were trained during the year under report in various skill areas at different locations in the country by over 80 institutions
National Council Of Science & Technology Communication (Rashtriya Vigyan Evam Prodyogiki Sanchar Parishad)
The Rashtriya Vigyan Evam Prodyogiki Sanchar Parishad (National Council for Science & Technology Communication) of the Department of Science and Technology has been at the forefront of devising and developing ways and means for taking science to the masses. A variety of well-orchestrated and innovative programmes and activities on different aspects of science and technology communication were accomplished over the period.
Appreciating Physics in Everyday Life: A nationwide campaign titled "Appreciating Physics in Everyday Life" was launched. Over 300 colleges had been selected as resource centers for conducting these activities and undergraduate students were oriented to become resource persons for secondary school students. A 80 feet long poster on Turning Points in Physics' has been designed and made.
During the year, in collaboration with AIR, Delhi, DST produced a radio serial in Hindi titled 'Rahi Ye Matwale' in docu-drama format on the work of many Indian Physicists. The total number of episodes in the serial was 33-26 scripted and 7 interactive, based on feedback from listeners. It was an interactive serial in which about 10,000 listeners, generally college/higher secondary schools and members of science or eco-clubs were registered.
Lights and Shades of Science - Science Jamboree: Both amateur and professionals were motivated to look at science & scientific phenomena from an artistic perspective. A Science Jamboree" was organized during 19-28 November 2006 at AIFACS, New Delhi. The Jamboree created a synergy between science and art of photography and provided a means to popularize science through photography.
Field based Science learning Projects: Some low-cost and easy-to-handle science kits have are promoted by DST. A science kit on micro-organisms has been jointly by ASTEC, Guwahati and Botanical Hobby Centre, Cotton College, Guwahati... The Module comprises a small microscope, some other tools and materials, a few posters and an audio visual CD along with this Activity Manual. All these are meant for carrying out some open ended experiments described in the Manual and also available in CD format.
Teachers' Workshop in Innovative Pedagogy: Multifarious activities are being going on across the nation for liberating the teaching processes from its old traditional lecture method using chalk and talk only in teaching Science and allied subjects to meaningful pedagogy. An advance level teachers' workshop was organized during 13-16 May 2006 at Nitika Seva Kendra, Kolkata. About 140 teachers from different schools of the State participated in the workshop. Several experts conducted the workshop. The workshop was followed by holding vacation camps during summer vacation. All the districts will organize such camps with 70-75 children from 3-4 schools (classes VIII and IX) and in future these schools will form a cluster to implement the processes as envisaged.
Science Exhibition: In order to communicate science and technology achievements among the public urban and rural population, DST conducted a series science exhibitions in different parts of country. The overall response was tremendous at Kausani and Tarikhet, Uttaranchal during April-May 2006, Amethi, Uttar Pradesh in September 2006, Deoghar, Jharkhand in October, 2006, Erode, Tamil Nadu, in December, 2006. In addition, a thematic science exhibition on 'Planet Earth' was displayed at Indian Science Congress in January 2007 and o the occasion of Ardh Kumbh Mela held at Allahabad during January-February 2007 an attractive science exhibition was displayed in order to demonstrate S&T for common man being used in daily life. Further, on the occasion of celebrating anniversaries of two great historical events namely 150th anniversary of the Sepoy Mutiny and 250th anniversary of the battle of Plassey, DST has also participated with its activities as an exhibition "Bharat Kranti Utsav" at Ravindra Sarovar stadium, Kolkata in January, 2007. A state level science awareness fair was put up in North Lakhimpur, Assam, where 250 participants from different district of Assam participated.
National Children's Science Congress: The 14th National Children's Science Congress (NCSC) was organized in all 35 states and UTs of the country. The national event 2006 of the year long activity was held at Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Majitar, Sikkim. The local host was Sikkim State Council Science & Technology. It was organized during 27- 31 December 2006. NCSC is a thematic programme. The focal theme of year 2006 congress was "Biodiversity - Nurture Nature for our Future". Around 542 team leaders of 10 - 17 years age group screened through districts and state level congresses made their presentation at national event. Around 80 best projects selected at state level also participated in 94th annual session of Indian Science Congress held during 3-7 January, 2007 at Annamalai University, Anna Nagar, Tamil Nadu. In addition to the child scientists from National Children's Science Congress stream, children from Jawahar Lal Nehru National Science Exhibition conducted by NCERT, Lead India 2020 and children drawn from many districts of Tamil Nadu also participated.
Initiative for Research and Innovation in Science (IRIS): In order to promote and nurture the invention and innovation among youths and students of this country this department has joined hands with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Intel India and launched this activity. The national fair was held at Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi during 7-9 December, 2006. The International exhibition for Young Inventors (IEYI) was held during 13-16 February, 2007 at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. Around 300 participant from 39 countries and equal no form India participated. Around 179 projects comprising of over 250 participants from different parts of the country participated in the event. After intense rounds of evaluation and interviews, 6 projects (4 individuals and 2 team) were selected to represent India at the Intel ISEF 2007 at Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Ten projects were also selected as subject category winners and were awarded summer internships at prestigious science institutes in India. Five participants were selected for the special category award in recognition of participants efforts in research and development.
Motivational Programmes for Talented Students : These programmes aim to encourage bright students to select careers in science; the programme has been developed for class XI science students. The selected students closely interact with the scientists teachers in a national S&T laboratory/university science departments in their region in a batch of 25-30 for 5-7 days. On the concluding day, competitions are organized on report presentation, debate/speech/essay writing, with recognition to the winners.People's Association of Hill Area Launchers (PAHAL), Almora, Uttaranchal also organized a programme during 17-23 September 2006 at Kumaun University, Almora Campus, which benefited 26 brilliant science students of different districts of Kumaun Division.
National Science Day Celebration: National awards for best science communication efforts were also presented.
National Science Teachers' Workshop on Low-cost, No-cost Teaching Aids: A national level workshop for science teachers and communicators was successfully held at Nagpur from 24th to 28th Oct. 2006.. 41 Participants from 12 states and 20 from Nagpur and surrounding districts participated in the workshop. The participants also demonstrated experiments which they themselves had developed. Later on, about 35 school children (Classes 7th to 9th) were invited for one session.
"Science in Daily Life": Content Finalization Workshop:A workshop was organized on 4th August 2006 at Indian Social Institute, New Delhi. The aim of the workshop was to discuss and decide a specific and comprehensive format for the script writers. The workshop was attended by experienced scriptwriters, experts from the field of science, teachers and activists working with the visually impaired students and some visually challenged professionals.
Popularization of Astronomy using Mobile Planetarium: A project was supported to PAHAL, a science based voluntary organization for acquiring mobile planetarium to popularize astronomy and its related activities in rural schools of Uttaranchal.
Women & Child - Health & Nutrition Programme: DST is coordinating a countrywide campaign tilted 'Women & Child-Health & Nutrition Programme". This is a women specific programme targeted to women of different age groups (child, adolescent girl child, pregnant women, lactating mothers and old ladies). To avoid duplication of the programmes and softwares available with Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and Ministry of Women & Child, a repository in the form of data base is being made consisting of all the available educational material/literature in the form of posters, pamphlets, books, booklets, leaflets, training manual, guidelines, audio-video cassettes/CDs etc. produced by various government and nongovernment
organizations.
Science for Women- Sakthi Arivaayadi: In a Community Radio Initiative in Participatory Science Communication, catalyzed and supported by DST, a series of 365 episode radio magazine programme was produced and broadcast regularly from India's first campus based community radio, Anna FM @ 90.4 MHz, situated at the Educational Multimedia Research Centre, Anna University, Chennai. The project aimed at disseminating scientific awareness needed for everyday living amongst a participatory group of 600 women from two urban slums in the FM coverage zone, namely Kannigapuram and Kotturpuram through the broadcast of a radio science serial titled "Sakthi Arivaayadi" in a magazine format was to sustain the momentum generated and draw strength from the new found resources in the community to facilitate total participation.
Natural Resources Data Management System (NRDMS)
Natural Resources Data Management System (NRDMS) Programme of the Department, makes efforts to develop methods and tools to make those data / information sets available and accessible to the potential users and agencies. During the year 2006 the Government of India adopted a resolution to constitute the National Spatial data Infrastructure (NSDI).
During 2006-07, activities were pursued to prototype and test various standards made available by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) / International Standardization Organization (ISO), demonstrate their utility in improving data sharing/ access mechanism, popularize geo-spatial data amongst different stakeholder communities, and work towards developing domain-oriented web-enabled data nodes at different levels of the planning hierarchy. Some of these domains include bio-diversity, hydrology, land administration, and disaster management (tsunami & landslides).
District GIS Centers: Training programmes were conducted to train officials and staff from the line Departments on the use of analytical tools and expose them to possible uses of GIS databases. On the initiative of the Chief Election Officer, Uttaranchal, a one-day Training on Election-GIS was conducted on 28 December 2006 at the GIS Centre in Almora (Uttaranchal). During 2006-07, GIS centres have been set up at districts like Jammu (Jammu & Kashmir) and Theni, cuddlore, and Nagapattinam (Tamilnadu) with active participation of the concerned State Governments.
Interoperability and spatial data sharing: Geo-spatial data and process standards prescribed by Open Geo-spatial Consortium (OGC) and International Standardization Organization (ISO) have been tested for spatial data/ information sharing. In particular, OGC's standard specifications like Geography Markup language (GML) Simple Feature, Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Map Service (WMS) have been prototyped and tested. A Geography Markup Language (GML) Relay was organized at NSDI (SOI), New Delhi to test a sample GML data created from sample DVD data from Survey of India for interoperability. Leading vendors like ESRI India, Oracle India, and Rolta India participated in the event and demonstrated the use of their Interoperability Extension Tools in importing and exporting the test GML data.
Ontology Tool - Sangam: Spatial data sets are produced by various organizations using different data models and standards. In order to resolve differences, ontologies ('explicit specification of a shared conceptualization') of features are required to be created by a user from the available metadata or application schemas for establishing a knowledge-based mapping between them. An Ontology Tool, named SemANtic Geographic Data Access Methodology (SANGAM), has thus been developed to help resolve differences among GIS data. Capable of registering ontologies and storage metadata usable by different resources, the Tool compares descriptions of data across several organizations and establishes possible similarities with different levels of probability.
Disaster management (Tsunami and landslides) : Following the South Asian Tsunami in December, 2004, a set of multi-disciplinary studies were initiated with the objectives of preparing damage assessment maps on natural and physical resources on 1:8,000 scale, determining soil salinity and land use/ land cover changes including coastal erosion and deposition, assessing the contamination in portable ground water resources so as to prepare sustainable plans, and preparing risk maps for devising future planning strategies. Four sites in Tamil Nadu, one in Andhra Pradesh and one in Andaman & Nicobar Islands have been identified for the studies. With the help of satellite data and aerial photography, large scale maps have been prepared for developing GIS databases.
Detailed geological and geotechnical studies have been undertaken in 10 areas for developing model for calculation of factor of safety and slope stability. These models will help in improving preventive measures for landslides. A book on 'Landslides: Perception and Initiatives of DST" was compiled with the help of Indian Society of Engineering Geology, Lucknow. It can serve as a reference book for the scientific community engaged in landslides research and the field engineers in controlling the problem of landslide. A Landslide Hazard Zonation Atlas has been prepared with the technical collaboration of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune. The Atlas will provide vital inputs on slope stability to planners in the hill areas while undertaking planning construction activities. Under the Mission Project on "Landslide for Uttaranchal", 8 sites have been selected (4 with the help of Border Roads Organization and 4 with PWD Uttaranchal) for detailed studies. Six R&D projects have been launched to undertake detailed geological/ topographical mapping and geotechnical investigations to understand the mechanism of slope failure.
Land Administration: Land administration is an important item of activity for the Nagarpalikas or Municipalities. Studies were launched for the Indore Municipality (Madhya Pradesh) and Chandni Chawk (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) to demonstrate the utility of geo-spatial data and technologies in improving tax administration and monitoring encroachments. Officials from the user agencies have been trained on the use of the tools developed under these studies. In order to demonstrate the capability of 3D visualization techniques and establish real time systems for monitoring building construction using high resolution satellite imagery, vehicle borne and static laser systems have been deployed on an experimental basis. A 20 sq.km area in Chandni Chowk, Delhi has been taken up for detailed studies. A 3D GIS database has been developed for use by a real time monitoring control room set up by the MCD on a pilot basis.A Tax Collection System has been developed for Chandni Chowk using cadastral maps to support the officials from the MCD in assessing land revenue based on the size of the cadastres and their land use type.
Science and Technology for Women - Empowering rural women through S&T
"S&T for Women": The Scheme is a pioneering gender initiative of the department The broad objectives of this scheme are to promote development and adaptation of appropriate technologies, transfer of proven technologies and demonstration of live technology models to benefit women. During the year under the scheme, 44 projects have been sponsored in technology areas such as natural resource management, bio attractants for honey bee, production and fabrication techniques of optical components for scientific/ optical instruments, paper recycling technology, root mat production and other modern agricultural practices, nursery techniques for aromatic and medicinal plants cultivation, rural dairy, watershed based soil and water conservation, preservation, processing and post harvest technology of off seasonal vegetables, tissue culture technology.
Technology Development and Transfer: During the course of the year technologies developed were transferred to user groups one such cost effective technology for production of sanitary napkins was based on waste rayon has been developed at Shriram Institute of Industrial Research, New Delhi. Fifteen groups have been trained in the technology on a pilot scale production plant. The technology package is now ready for field trials after location specific adaptation. Total of five villages namely Bon, Malla, Tukhar and Mukhva of Uttarkashi district and Ambiwala village of Dehradun district of Uttaranchal have been developed as pulse villages. About 120 women (25 from each village) have been trained in cultivation practices, grading and packaging and value added products from pulses. Twelve Enterprise Incubators for Rural Women or "Udyamita Suvidha Kendra have been established with a view to providing opportunities for women for enhanced livelihood.
Women's Participation: A well articulated development strategy evolved has ensured the total involvement of women in design and development, implementation and post project sustainability of the programmes. In order to sustain activities started in the Women Technology Park set up at Dehradun, women have been encouraged to set up a cooperative under Women's Initiative for Self Employment 'WISE'. WISE has a membership of more than 2500 women in Uttrakhand who are involved in S&T based livelihood generation in both farm and non farm activities and micro credit.
Rural Women's Technology Park: Rural Women Technology Parks are set up for special terrains such as coastal, hill and arid zone. Eighteen Women Technology parks have been facilitated in the States viz. Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharahtra, Pondicherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal..
Fodder and Animal feed: A need based programme to ensure availability of fodder round the year to rural women engaged in animal husbandry is being implemented in 12 different agroclimatic regions of the country. Technology areas include (a) Year round fodder production technology- cultivation of cereals and legumes in rotational manner (b) Up gradation of poor quality roughages (c) silage preparation (d) preparation of silo pits (e) silvipasture development (f) fodder production bunds (g) cultivation of perennial grasses. The technology for preservation of fodder has now been standardized. Ten women at each site have been trained in profitable usage of this technology. As an outcome of this project: (i) a simple low cost chara cutting device has been developed women (ii) training has been conducted for all project partners at BAIF, Pune to impart modern techniques of preservation and management of fodder.
Programme on women's health: A multicentric study on Development of prevention and intervention strategies for nutrition related non-communicable disorders among post reproductive period women has been launched at 8 locations of the country involving medical doctors and nutritionist.
National Award for Women's Development through Application of Science & Technology : This award was instituted in the year 2000 with an aim to recognize the contribution of individuals/organizations who have worked at the grass root level for women's development through application of science and technology. The award carries a cash award of Rs.1.00 lakh along with a citation. Awards for the year 2005 have been presented and selection made for the year 2006.
Fellowship Scheme for Women Scientists: The 'Women Scientists Scheme (WOS) of the Department of Science and Technology is aimed at providing opportunities to women scientists and technologists for pursuing research in frontier areas of science and engineering. Out of the total of 390 new proposals received during 2006-07, fifty six (56) projects were approved for financial support under WOS-A scheme.47candidates were selected for awarding the scholarship for the year under WOS-B scheme.
Autonomous Institutions
The Department of Science and Technology supports total of 19 institutions and five professional associations. Among them total of 14 are engaged directly in research and development. The institutions engaged in research and development could be broadly grouped among four categories based on their research focus. The four categories are a) Outer space Observations, b) Global history and health, c) molecules to materials and d) science applications for well being. Apart from these 14, Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council, (TIFAC), Vigyan Prasar, National Accreditation Board for Laboratories and Technology Development Board are four institutions that support science and technology related advance functions.
Distant observations
Indian Institute Astrophysics (IIA), Raman Research Institute (RRI) and ARIES are engaged in research relating to astronomy and astrophysics. These institutions are engaged in discovery of natural processes and phenomena in interstellar systems. Major outputs emanating from this group of laboratories are in the nature of publications in highly peer values Science Citation Indexed journals. These laboratories maintain an outputs of about 5 to 5.5 publications per scientist per year with an average Impact Factor aggregate of 3.3 per paper. Efforts to build one of the most powerful astronomical telescope facilities in Asia have been
initiated during 2006-07.
Global History and Health
Birbal Sahni Institute for Paleobotany (BSIP), Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology(WIGH) and Indian Institute of Geo magnetism (IIG) are three institutions engaged in observations leading to the better understanding of global history and dynamical processes of earth. These institutions are engaged in recreating historical events on earth and relate to predictions of natural and gigantic events. Major outputs of these institutions are in the nature of new global observations, which form publications in peer valued journals. Total of four publications have appeared in globally high impact journals like Science from these laboratories during the last two years. Modernization of research facilities in these laboratories formed the major thrust during 2006-07.
Molecules and materials
A set of laboratories with high research productivity formed this group. They are a) Jawahar Lal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences (IACS), Bose Institute, SN Bose Centre, Center for Liquid Crystal Research (CLCR). Research outputs as measured by publications in SCI journals of high impact have been in the range of 6+2 per scientist per year with an average Impact Factor per paper of over 2.5. Outputs of institutions like JNCASR in terms of publication in SCI journals compared favorably with the global bench marks for such research agencies. Some important land mark contributions in basic research have been made in the area of nano and material sciences.
Science applications for Well being
A set of institutions supported by the Department of Science and Technology focused science applications for well being of people. They are Advanced Research Center International (ARCI), Sree Chitra Thirunal Institute for Medical science and Technology (STIMST) and Agarkar Research Institute (ARI). SCTIMST has made balanced contributions in the form outputs to basic research, development and commercialization of technologies and capacity building. SCTIMST figured among the second highest academic centres of the country in generation of patents second only to the group of seven Indian Institutes of Technology in a recently conducted survey. ARCI has been successful in commercialization of several technologies including the one for nano coating of water filters for low cost house hold applications for safe drinking water. ARI has been successful in developing an industrial enzyme formulation which render enzymatic depilation of skins and hides in leather processing a global reality. This represents a technological breakthrough.
Advanced Science and Technology Functions
A set of four institutions play the role of science and advanced technology service functions. They are
a) National Accreditation Board for Laboratories (NABL), b): Technology Development Board (TDB),
c) Technology Information, Assessment and Forecasting Council (TIFAC) and Vigyan Prasar (VP). In addition,
DST is engaged in providing Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) Certification.
NABL is the National agency for accreditation of laboratories with a net work of more than 850 laboratories has gained brand equity among laboratory service providers. This entity is economically self sustaining and plans to expand its network in a planned manner. During 2006-07, the NABL accredited laboratory network expanded to include 126 new laboratories. TDB has completed ten years of its establishment. An internal review of TDB has been undertaken. New mechanisms for scouting and supporting technology innovations have been undertaken. During the year 2006-07, total of 14 projects have been supported. Four projects supported during earlier years have gained considerable commercial successes and national visibility. They included ventures like Human Health care products as well as electronic engineering advanced technology products. TIFAC has been engaged in the implementation of technology missions relating to sugar, fly ash, and bamboo. Significant advancements in spreading of technologies in the areas of sugar, fly ash and bamboo have been reported. Capacity Building in new areas of science and engineering through TIFAC -Core has been undertaken. Some institutions supported by TIFAC are now diversifying into research in advanced areas in association with industrial users. Advanced composites and CAR projects added new dimensions during 2006-07. TIFAC mounted a new security technology initiative for promoting coordinated research and development of new tools and techniques for Home land Security during 2006-07. VP is engaged in number of activities relating to reach of science through various media. The content preparation for such outreach has been the main strength of VP. During the year 2006-07, several science serials in different Indian languages and English were produced and broadcast through All India Radio. The popular science serial designed and developed by VP "Aisa Hi Hota Hai" has been dubbed in to eleven Indian languages and telecasted through regional channels of Doordarshan Kendras (DDK). Around 50 innovative experiments on magnetism, light, mechanics, electricity etc. have been demonstrated at several places. VP has developed for itself a new vision this year. Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) certification has been successful in certifying total of one laboratory for GLP during the year 2006-07.
Survey of India and National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization
The Department of oversees the programmes and activities of the Sub departments namely Survey of India and National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization. Survey Of India has assumed a leadership role by providing user- focused, cost-effective, reliable and quality geospatial data products to meet the needs of national security, consumer demands for such information products. SOI participates in the national development by partnering with state and public agencies. Restructuring of SOI to meet the challenging and emerging needs of the country for value added Geo spatial data products of required resolution and data intensity matched with flexibility of operation for meeting challenges of dynamic market competition has been undertaken. Plans for creation, development and maintaining of National Topographic Data Base of entire country on 1:10,000 scale and generation of 1:2,000 scale Maps for 400 Cities/Major Towns have been developed. Proposal for the establishment of Survey Board has been made. Modernization plans for SOI have been finalized. Following mapping policy statements, demand for map products for urban development has increased manifold. More than 3900 maps with the 1:50000 resolution have been already cleared for wide use in public domain.
NATMO has been able to develop compete city map for Kolkata for Web applications during the year 2006-07. This is one of the most important highlights of Geo products from the Department through NATMO.
Way forward
The Department of Science and Technology has embarked upon a grand plan to strengthen the science and technology base of India during the eleventh plan period. Founded in the year 1971, DST, in the past, has played the role of a catalyst and assumed reactive functions. During the year 2006-07, DST has formulated its own vision for the year 2015 and announced its intention to play the proactive and participative function in preparing the S&T agenda for the country during the XIth and XIIth plan periods. DST plans to partner with other socio-economic ministries and link its activities to the technology led growth agenda of India. During 2006-07 many new initiatives have been made. The best is yet to come. The Department commits to deliver the best for the science and technology of the country.
http://dst.gov.in/about_us/ar06-07/overview.htm
Articles 121 through 220 of 500:
- Population Policy Needs Overhaul (Deccan Herald, PRASENJIT CHOWDHURY, May 17, 2007)
Does any one remember Thomas Malthus and his discredited "Essay on the Principle of Population"? According to him, the power of population is infinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. - Under-Investment In Health Costs Lives (Hindu, Editorial, The Hindu, May 17, 2007)
Spending on health services is not expenditure but an investment. The time to act is now. - In A Time Warp (Deccan Herald, Editorial, The Deccan Herald, May 17, 2007)
The BJP strategy was based on the presumption that the House would be hung and it could play the king-maker. - Irreversible Fallout On People And Ecology (Deccan Herald, Asha Krishnaswamy, May 16, 2007)
Public platforms exist to discuss the economic importance and environmental threats of mining but few key players take advantage of it. - Prez Seeks Steps For Policy On Human Development Cadres (Deccan Herald, Correspondent or Reporter, May 15, 2007)
Taking note of the shortage of skilled manpower in the days to come, President APJ Abdul Kalam on Monday sought steps to evolve a national policy for creating a global human development cadre for India. - Kalam Stresses Corporate Social Responsibility (Hindu, Correspondent or Reporter, May 08, 2007)
Thrust on growth of creative leaders SAIL, Tata Chem and NLC win CSR award Building infrastructure for schools suggested - Lead The Nation: Kalam To India Inc (The Financial Express, Correspondent or Reporter, May 08, 2007)
Stressing the need for management stewardship for giving a thrust to nation's economic development, President APJ Abdul Kalam urged the corporate India to contribute to the upliftment of society besides creating wealth. - Kalam Urges India Inc To Provide Creative Leadership (The Economic Times, Correspondent or Reporter, May 08, 2007)
Stressing the need for management stewardship for giving a thrust to nation's economic development, President APJ Abdul Kalam on Monday urged the corporate India to contribute to the upliftment of society besides creating wealth. - Numbers Alone Can Be Misleading (The Economic Times, Editorial, Economic Times, May 08, 2007)
Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar's view (ET, April 25) that economic reforms affect regional disparity is a myth. Precisely because development is always a complex matrix, average growth rate over the periods cannot alone act as a sufficient measure . . . - Not A Solution At All (Deccan Herald, S. L. Rao, May 05, 2007)
The level of deprivation is not uniform among particular communities, which makes reservations less effective. - Spiritual Guidance (Hindu, Correspondent or Reporter, May 01, 2007)
While the desire to seek happiness is basic in all individuals, the ability to recognise what makes one happy, and the means of attaining it is rare. - Government'S Iims Fixation (The Economic Times, V RAGHUNATHAN, Apr 28, 2007)
The original decision of the six IIMs to release the list of successful students in the general category had seemed like a welcome move. - 'I Was Always Leftist. Economic Reforms Made Me Completely Marxist' (Indian Express, Editorial, Indian Express, Apr 24, 2007)
In a speech at a CII meet, Mani Shankar Aiyar argued that policy is hijacked by a small elite. That the cabinet he belongs to is quite comfortable with this hijacking. - Comments From The Ringside (OutLook, Correspondent or Reporter, Apr 23, 2007)
The 'outsider' analysis has value, but a wariness of messy democracy lurks in his prescriptions - The Forgotten Poor (Deccan Herald, Editorial, The Deccan Herald, Apr 23, 2007)
The mass media has in recent years rarely focused on the problems and plight of the poor in India. - "One Million Saplings To Be Planted By 2010" (Hindu, Correspondent or Reporter, Apr 21, 2007)
Sheila Dikshit asks children to focus on sustainability - Migration: Challenges And Opportunities (Dawn, Editorial, Dawn, Apr 17, 2007)
The growing diasporas of expatriate populations across the world and their multiple but mutually reinforcing identities and allegiances are a feature of globalisation. - So Many Inequalities (Indian Express, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Apr 15, 2007)
A few years ago, there was some contention in Indian society over whether or not minorities deserve special treatment. - So Many Inequalities (Indian Express, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Apr 14, 2007)
A few years ago, there was some contention in Indian society over whether or not minorities deserve special treatment. Now — courtesy a rather ill-considered view enunciated by one high court judge — we have a debate on who is and who is not a minority. - The Tasks On The Education Front (Hindu, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Apr 12, 2007)
A system that creates disparities among rich and poor students, and those from urban and rural backgrounds, poses the risk of causing unrest. - Government Turns A Deaf Ear (Deccan Herald, Editorial, The Deccan Herald, Apr 11, 2007)
Shrinking health services are a growing concern for people with disabilities in India. - Make Education Of Masses A Priority (Tribune, Correspondent or Reporter, Apr 11, 2007)
The role of education in the progress of a nation can never be over emphasised. Through right kind of education, we can inculcate citizenship values, liberate people from ignorance, empower them with knowledge, information and skills to . . . - Education Is A Priority (Gulf News, Correspondent or Reporter, Apr 11, 2007)
Education is more than a catalyst to development, it is a pillar that determines countries' capability to build their own future. - Tide Of Suffering (Deccan Herald, Editorial, The Deccan Herald, Apr 10, 2007)
The rich world has been responsible for climate change threats. It must now help the rest of the world deal with the consequences. - Maternal Mortality And Budgets (Deccan Herald, Correspondent or Reporter, Apr 09, 2007)
Improving facilities and their access are vital to lower the maternal mortality rate. - For Better Or For Worse (Telegraph, S.L. Rao, Apr 09, 2007)
India has very many poor and deprived people. There are large groups like small farmers, landless labourers, urban slum-dwellers and women (especially in low-income families), aborigines and other tribes, lower castes as scheduled in the . . . - Maternal Mortality And Budgets (Deccan Herald, Editorial, The Deccan Herald, Apr 09, 2007)
Improving facilities and their access are vital to lower the maternal mortality rate. - Realising The Uniqueness Of Saarc (Hindu, A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM , Apr 07, 2007)
The various member states have core competencies that can be pooled together for mutual benefit. - Mission Without Direction (Deccan Herald, S. L. Rao, Apr 07, 2007)
Research institutions should not be dependent on government or funding agencies but try to be self-sufficient. - Now Uri Dam In Ihk (Pakistan Observer, Editorial, Pakistan Observer, Apr 07, 2007)
Though Pakistan has objected to India in strong worded terms about launching of another power project in Indian-held Kashmir without the clearance from Islamabad as required under the Indus Water Treaty, yet New Delhi has not paid any heed to it. - An Inconvenient Truth (Hindustan Times, Correspondent or Reporter, Apr 06, 2007)
So, predictably, the politicians will hide behind the pretence of consensus. An all-party meeting will be ordered and the Supreme Court will be unanimously denounced for its decision to put a hold on OBC quotas. - Kerala Can Grow Ten Times Faster: World Bank Official (Hindu, Correspondent or Reporter, Apr 05, 2007)
Vinod Thomas' mantra for State's faster development Combine economic reforms with social sector development Focus on eco-tourism and new generation industries - Means And Ends (Telegraph, ABHIRUP SARKAR, Apr 03, 2007)
The author is professor of economics, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta Raskolnikov, theoretically the murderer in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, had resolved to kill an old woman who was greedy, malicious, charged interest and . . . - Sleepwalking Into Disaster (Frontline, Praful Bidwai, Apr 03, 2007)
As the misguided policies of the U.S. and Israel aggravate the crisis in West Asia, India must change its short-sighted, pro-Washington approach to the region. - Property Debate (Frontline, PALLAVI AIYAR, Mar 31, 2007)
China provides the first legal basis for the protection of private property since the Commnuist Party came to power in 1949. - Caste Irony (Pioneer, Editorial, The Pioneer, Mar 30, 2007)
By ordering a stay on the Central law enabling 27 per cent reservation for the so-called 'Socially and Educationally Backward Classes', popularly known as OBCs, in Union Government controlled educational institutions, including IITs, IIMs and AIIMS, . . - Education — A New Dimension To India-Bangladesh Relations (Business Line, Arindam Banik, Mar 23, 2007)
India providing education and vocational training to the Bangladeshi youth can help ease tensions and develop a strong long-term relationship. - Importance Of Awareness (Business Line, M. R. Narayana, Mar 17, 2007)
No data on the nature and extent of awareness of prevention of disability is available and the welfare programmes do not include awareness activities. - 'The Real Problem Is Not Income Inequality, It Is Inequality Of Opportunity' (Indian Express, Editorial, Indian Express, Mar 16, 2007)
This week the UNDP released the Human Development Report for Arab Countries, with a focus on the 'Rise of Arab Women'. It is believed that there was tremendous resistance in the Arab world for several years to such a study. - Against Monopoly (Frontline, Sarah Hiddleston, Mar 14, 2007)
YUSUF K. Hamied is the chairman of Cipla, one of India's largest pharmaceutical companies and the country's fifth largest private spender in research and development. - Restating The Faith (Frontline, VENKATESH ATHREYA, Mar 14, 2007)
Economic Survey 2006-2007, which ascribes the high growth to economic reform measures, emphasises the neoliberal agenda. - Children In Neglect (Tribune, Editorial, The Tribune, Mar 13, 2007)
A few public-spirited citizens led by Jean Dreze, Aruna Roy and others through a letter published in The Tribune have expressed dismay at the small increase in the allocation for the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) in the Union Budget . . . - Sachar Report (Tribune, K.N. Bhat, Mar 10, 2007)
Justice Sachar's report is no Mandal rehashing — its emphasis is not on reservation in colleges or jobs. Naturally so, because to be qualified to seek reservation benefits, some minimum educational qualifications are needed — not a madarsa certificate. - Administrative Incapacity (Deccan Herald, Editorial, The Deccan Herald, Mar 10, 2007)
PC has been more pro-poor than any other finance minister but it will take time for his plans to bear fruits. - Empty Stomachs And The Union Budget (Hindu, Jean Dreze, Mar 09, 2007)
The need of the hour is to increase expenditure under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. - Budget: An Incremental Approach (Business Line, T. C. A. Ramanujam , Mar 09, 2007)
A great opportunity had presented itself to the Government. GDP was growing at 9 per cent, savings at 32 per cent and investment at 34 per cent of GDP and buoyant tax revenues scaling all-time high. - '1931 Survey To Remain Basis For Obc Quota?' (Times of India, Correspondent or Reporter, Mar 08, 2007)
Supreme Court on Wednesday began hearing the petition challenging the just-promulgated reservations for OBCs in central educational institutions, directing sharp posers at the Centre on the basis for pegging it at 27%. - Need For Safety (Deccan Herald, Editorial, The Deccan Herald, Mar 08, 2007)
As always the International Women's Day is an occasion for reflection on the year gone by and the achievements or the lack of them. Although globally gender equality has been recognised as central to human development, it is still not a reality in . . . - Igniting Women Entrepreneurship (The Economic Times, Rama Bijapurkar, Mar 08, 2007)
The new buzz in the conference circuit is the arithmetic argument that there could be a big GDP boost if more Indian women became economically active (77% of urban housewives, 60% of rural do not work outside the home). - Invest In Children (Tribune, A.J. Philip, Mar 07, 2007)
THE first five years are critically important in the life of a person. Studies have shown that 90 per cent of the brain growth happens during this period. - Populism Prevails (Tribune, Editorial, The Tribune, Mar 07, 2007)
With a year or so left for the Assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh, Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, who also holds the Finance portfolio, has come out with a populist budget, which is understandable given the drubbing the Congress received in the . . . - Changing Paradigms For Development Banking (Business Line, Samik Dasgupta, Mar 07, 2007)
Micro-credit will have to play as critical a role in the urban context as in the rural areas if India aspires to make any positive impact on its citizens' economic well-being. - Power Of The Pen (Dawn, Correspondent or Reporter, Mar 04, 2007)
CHANGE in any society is beyond reach without a change in the social attitudes of the common people. - More For Education, Health (Tribune, Editorial, The Tribune, Mar 02, 2007)
With the allocation of 34.2 per cent more money for education and 21.9 per cent more for health, the 2007-08 Union Budget stands out for its thrust on the country's human development profile, which is poorer than some of the smaller . . . - Off Target (Times of India, Editorial, The Times of India, Mar 01, 2007)
Finance minister P Chidambaram's Budget for 2007-08 is best evaluated in terms of its impact on growth, prices and rural incomes. There is no mistaking the writing on the wall: High prices fanned the anti-Congress sentiment in Punjab and . . . - Booster Dose For Education, Healthcare (Business Line, Editorial, Business Line, Mar 01, 2007)
The Budget is in line with the Government's focus of sustaining the current growth rate. There was a concern that while the overall GDP growth rate has been on target, the agriculture sector has been lagging. - Discovering The Guru (Deccan Herald, RAMNATH NARAYANSWAMY, Mar 01, 2007)
The Satguru is none other than God in human form. Mahatmas descend to assume human birth to selflessly serve humankind. - Charity Begins At Home (Dawn, Correspondent or Reporter, Feb 25, 2007)
Adil Najam examines the philanthropic attitudes and preferences of expatriate Pakistanis in America. - Masters Of Unplanned Growth (Hindustan Times, Jagmohan , Feb 23, 2007)
A city is a living organism. Like a human entity, it has both a structure and a soul. Congenial, creative and constructive living requires that while a city's soul must reflect its inner urges for peace, progress, justice and order, its structure . . . - Masters Of Unplanned Growth (Hindustan Times, Jagmohan , Feb 22, 2007)
A city is a living organism. Like a human entity, it has both a structure and a soul. Congenial, creative and constructive living requires that while a city's soul must reflect its inner urges for peace, progress, justice and order, its structure . . . - Masters Of Unplanned Growth (Hindustan Times, Jagmohan , Feb 21, 2007)
A city is a living organism. Like a human entity, it has both a structure and a soul. Congenial, creative and constructive living requires that while a city's soul must reflect its inner urges for peace, progress, justice and order, its structure . . . . - Higher Education: The Other Side Of The Picture (Dawn, Editorial, Dawn, Feb 20, 2007)
This is with reference to Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy's article titled 'HEC's unconvincing mega projects' published in the February 10 edition of Dawn. Dr Hoodbhoy has painted a very bleak picture of the entire Pakistani higher education system. - Masters Of Unplanned Growth (Hindustan Times, Jagmohan , Feb 20, 2007)
A city is a living organism. Like a human entity, it has both a structure and a soul. Congenial, creative and constructive living requires that while a city's soul must reflect its inner urges for peace, progress, justice and . . . - Pdp Minister Writes To Cm On Demilitarisation (Tribune, Correspondent or Reporter, Feb 19, 2007)
The People's Democratic arty (PDP) today released the draft of its "self-rule" concept providing a package that takes care of not only external and internal dimensions of the Jammu and Kashmir problem but also its geographical aspects. - Pdp Releases Draft Of Self-Rule Concept (Tribune, S.P.Sharma, Feb 19, 2007)
The People's Democratic arty (PDP) today released the draft of its "self-rule" concept providing a package that takes care of not only external and internal dimensions of the Jammu and Kashmir problem but also its geographical aspects. - Betting On Farming (Frontline, V. Sridhar, Feb 19, 2007)
Bihar's transformation depends crucially on the transformation of agrarian relations. But is it on the policy radar? - Global Meet On Bihar (Frontline, V. Sridhar, Feb 16, 2007)
Biharis from across the world gather in Patna to discuss the State's plight, hoping for a Bihari renaissance. - 'India Is A Better Place To Grow Than China...' (New Indian Express, Correspondent or Reporter, Feb 15, 2007)
"India is a better place to grow than China because of political democracy," thumped Nikhil Meswani, Executive Director Reliance Industries at the recently held Chemtech 2007. - Enforcing Human Rights In South Asia (Dawn, Zamir Ghumro, Feb 11, 2007)
While the citizens of Europe are clamouring for third-generation human rights that go beyond those considered essential to the ideals of freedom and democracy, South Asia is still grappling with the enforcement of fundamental first-generation rights. - Toy Story (Hindu, SOMA BASU, Feb 11, 2007)
KOPEDEG has been extremely successful in providing hope for marginalised women and in finding a growing space for their products at home and abroad. - India Has Lessons To Learn From China On Health Care: Amartya (Statesman, Correspondent or Reporter, Feb 11, 2007)
The dip in life expectancy or longevity in China despite a period of economic boom holds lessons for India which is faring badly in healthcare today despite top medical facilities, Noble Laureate professor Dr Amartya Sen said today. - India Facing Grave Water Crisis (Daily Times, Khalid Hasan, Feb 10, 2007)
India is facing a grave water crisis and in some parts of New Delhi, the water table has sunk to 130 feet, while the slum dwellers of Mumbai have no tap water, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). - Re-Engineering Social Sector Development (Business Line, M. R. Venkatesh, Feb 09, 2007)
The performance of the social sector assumes centre-stage, as the ongoing reforms process — both internal liberalisation programmes as well as globalisation — does not seem to have benefited the underprivileged sections. - Ibm Ceo Gets Nasscom Leadership Award 2007 (Deccan Herald, Dilip Maitra, Feb 09, 2007)
National Association of Software & Services Companies (Nasscom), country's premier IT trade body and the "voice" of the Indian IT industry, on Thursday, announced the winners of Nasscom Global Leadership Awards 2007. - Rs. 20,200-Crore Plan Outlay For Maharashtra (Hindu, Correspondent or Reporter, Feb 08, 2007)
Ahluwalia says State has improved in almost all sectors Additional assistance of Rs. 200 crore for priority projects Deshmukh seeks funds for first phase of Mumbai Metro - Engagement With Dalit Feminism (Hindu, Anupama Katakam, Jan 30, 2007)
First person accounts of Dalit women bringing alive the profound deprivation they faced and their struggles. - Courage Key To Prosperity: Kalam (Tribune, Correspondent or Reporter, Jan 27, 2007)
President A P J Abdul Kalam today advised courage for launching a national movement of development to make India prosperous with a 'visible global presence in strategic sectors' even before 2020, the deadline set under Vision 2020 for becoming a .. . - Has It Become A Model? (Deccan Herald, S. L. Rao, Jan 27, 2007)
Though elements of a Karnataka development model exist, it is not holistic as its Kerala counterpart. - Bihar Needs Development Strategy (Tribune, Andalib Akhter, Jan 25, 2007)
In 1952 Dr. Paul H. Appleby, a US scholar, presented a document on Indian States to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru which suggested that Bihar was the best administrated state in the country at that time. He used various criteria and interviews with . .. - A Common Minimum Programme For The Nation (Hindu, SURESH PRABHU, Jan 23, 2007)
Experts from various political parties should come to a consensus on solutions to some basic issues of interest to the nation, which could then be implemented without much difficulty.
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| CHAPTER ONE Indians and Americans This experience will change your life,' said Victor Menezes, a member of the board of directors of the American India Foundation (AIF). A group of recent college graduates and young professionals stood absorbing Menezes's words. New AIF Service Corps Fellows, they had all made it through a rigorous selection process and were now gathered at a reception in their honour at AIF's New York headquarters. With wine glasses and small plates of Indian appetizers in hand, some shifted nervously on their feet, others beamed confidently. A few had been to India before. Some were Indian Americans who spoke an Indian language. Many had no connection to India at all, aside from a desire to gain practical experience in areas as diverse as improving livelihoods, women's health, and primary education. Connecticut native Margorie Schulman, a petite blonde woman in her early twenties, wanted to learn more about microenterprise so she could better serve poor communities in the United States. Vimala Palaniswamy, raised in Augusta, Georgia, was headed to South India. She confessed, 'My Tamil's not fantastic, but I can get along.' The daughter of immigrants from India, Vimala looks unmistakably South Asian but she sounds every bit like the American she is. She told me that a stay in India a couple of years earlier made her realize how American she really was. 'They all referred to me as the American girl,' she told me, still a little amazed, having been the Indian girl growing up in Georgia. All the fellows I spoke with invariably intended to take their experience in India and apply it in careers they hoped to pursue in banking, medicine or public service. I cornered Victor Menezes, dressed in an elegantly understated business suit and a red silk tie, and asked him what, beyond the skills and education these young Americans were taking to India, the value of the programme was to AIF. 'These young Americans become ambassadors for India and Indian causes when they get back,' he explained. 'Look, there is far more in common between India and the United States than there are differences. India is a wonderful laboratory for a lot of issues. It is a microcosm of every important policy question the world faces.' AIF was awarded a major grant from the Ford Foundation last year to encourage philanthropy in the Indian-American community. The Indian-American trend towards giving back will likely be spurred to new levels by this effort, enhancing a virtuous cycle that benefits both India and the United States. The United States and India: Until this century, the India-US relationship was almost exclusively a people-to-people affair. Business and political relationships were negligible, not the least because for a considerable time the government of India was that of Great Britain. Under British rule, Indians identified with the United States as a fellow British colony and admired it for having achieved what India so desired: independence. Strong philosophical currents flowed back and forth between the two countries, currents that significantly affected the political futures of both nations. Indian philosophy and theology were sources of profound inspiration to the American transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read Indian sacred texts, including the Vishnu Puranas and the Mahabharata. Both wrote poems and essays inspired by their Indian readings. My parents' wedding invitation cited the following lines from Walt Whitman's poem 'Passage to India' from his famous 1855 collection Leaves of Grass: Passage to India! Their Indian-American union was unusual in 1957. Quoting Whitman helped ground it in a recognizable American tradition. This did not prevent the dean of women students, however, from summoning my mother to her office to try to dissuade her from making a terrible mistake: while she might not be doing anything illegal in the state of Oregon, she would be breaking antimiscegenation laws in the American South. Mahatma Gandhi, like thousands of other Indians of his generation, including my own grandfather, read Emerson and Thoreau. Gandhi was inspired by Thoreau's notion of civil disobedience and integrated it into his political tactics of nonviolent resistance. Gandhi was also haunted early on by a chance encounter, the day after the famous incident when he was thrown out of a whites-only compartment on a train, with 'an American negro' as dispossessed as himself in apartheid South Africa. Gandhi and his followers identified the plight of subjugated Indians, especially of untouchables, with that of African-Americans in Jim Crow America. During the 1920s and 1930s, African-Americans closely followed the progress of Gandhi and India's freedom movement in such widely read publications as The Crisis. In 1936, Howard Thurman led a Negro Delegation of Friendship to South Asia and met Gandhi. They discussed the similarity of the oppression of India's untouchables with that of African-Americans. Martin Luther King came to know about Gandhi and his philosophy via Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited. In the footage of Martin Luther King delivering his famous 'I Have a Dream' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the followers flanking him are wearing white Nehru caps. King said of Gandhi's contribution to his movement, 'Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.' Sympathies between the Indian struggle for independence and the African-American struggle for equal rights ran deep. Historically black colleges encouraged Indian students to come to study at their institutions. Writer Marina Budhos told me that her father, an ethnic Indian from Guyana, attended Howard University in the 1950s along with a group of students from India. On the West Coast, Punjabi Sikhs and other immigrants from India came to Seattle and California's Central Valley around 1900 to work as labourers in logging and agriculture. Acutely aware of their unprotected status as colonial subjects of Great Britain, they started a revolutionary movement for India's independence from British rule called the Ghadar movement. The Ghadars were headquartered in San Francisco, where they published a newspaper. These Indian Americans raised money for their homeland's freedom, organizing a boat (which sank) loaded with guns and ammunition for freedom fighters in India. Other Punjabi immigrants to California saved enough money to buy land and start their own farms. A thriving Punjabi community still exists in and around Yuba City, California. Allowed into the United States as single men, many married Mexican-American women. When their farms were threatened with confiscation under the terms of the 1913 Alien Land Exclusion Act, many put their properties into the names of their wives to save them. While the peoples of India and America drew inspiration from each other's struggles for freedom and social justice, the governments of the two countries pursued a very different tack. After a brief warming following India's independence in 1947, the United States and India drifted into wary estrangement, each aligned with the other's archenemy: India with the Soviet Union, and the United States during the Afghan war with Pakistan. Ironically, the Cold War imperative to beat the Soviets opened the doors of the United States to immigration from India. Racing for technological and military dominance, the United States sought to harness the skills of the best and brightest, even if they had to come from Africa and Asia. In 1965, the United States moved to open its borders to highly skilled workers from non-European countries whose immigration had previously been severely limited. When my father came to the United States in 1949 on a student visa, there were only ten thousand persons of Indian origin in the entire country, the same number as in 1900. After 1965, Indian engineers, doctors, scientists and other college-educated individuals or people seeking an education in these fields began arriving in increasingly large numbers. The Indian engineering student stereotype was born (my own father, though he came earlier, became an aeronautical engineer), to be replaced a couple of decades later by the Indian information-technology whiz. The numbers of Indians studying, living and working in the United States increased steadily during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. For the last several years, India has consistently sent more students to study in the United States than any other country. In 2005, more than eighty thousand students from India came to the United States for higher education. That's nearly 30 per cent more than the sixty-two thousand who came from China. Not every Indian who comes to study or work in the United States stays. Many return to India. This used to be true only of members of the upper class, where the opportunity to take over a family business or to scale the heights of government service was attractive. An impressive number of India's top business and political leaders have studied, lived or worked in the United States. Many more have children or other close family members who have. The number of Indians in senior positions I have met who have MBAs from prestigious American institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, or Kellogg -- where many of the top professors are Indian as well -- is amazing. These experiences create powerful links to the United States, and a natural affinity for an American approach to policy and business. By 2000, 1.2 million persons of Indian origin were living in the United States. There are now approximately 2.2 million. Fuelled by ongoing immigration and by the natural growth of the resident population, that number is expected to double every decade, making Indian Americans the fastest-growing Asian immigrant group. Indian Americans Indian Americans are one of the most prosperous and well-educated immigrant groups in America. Fifty-eight per cent of Indian Americans have a college degree, whereas only 27 per cent of the general population do. Their median household income is $64,000, as compared with the national average of $50,000. Indian Americans command a whopping $76 billion in disposable personal income. Many of these impressive numbers derive from US immigration laws, which favoured highly skilled and highly educated immigrants from India, who had the opportunity to get high-paying jobs. Indian Americans command a disproportionate presence in certain fields, such as medicine, the hospitality industry, information technology, research science and business management. Americans have become used to entrusting their medical care to Indian doctors. According to the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, there are forty-two thousand physicians and fifteen thousand medical students of Indian origin in the United States. CNN's Dr Sanjay Gupta is the media-icon version of the trusted American family physician from India. The market value of the properties in the United States owned by members of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, an organization founded by immigrants from India and dominated by Patels originally from the Indian state of Gujarat, is estimated to be $29.9 billion in franchised properties and $8.1 billion in independent properties. The association explains on its Web site the origin of the name Patel: 'In ancient India, rulers appointed a record keeper to keep track of annual crops on each parcel of land, or "pat." That person became known as a "patel."' This group's success in the American hotel and motel business has given rise to the expression Patel motel. Prominent Indian-American senior managers include Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo; Rajat Gupta, worldwide managing partner and former CEO of McKinsey and Co.; Vikram Pandit, former president and COO of the Institutional Securities and Investment Banking Group at Morgan Stanley; Shailesh Mehta, former CEO of Providian Financial Corporation; and Victor Menezes, senior vice chairman, Citigroup. One factor in this phenomenon is the highly competitive Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), which admit only one out of sixty applicants and give those who make the cut an outstanding education. Graduates of these schools are snapped up by leading companies around the world. The contribution of Indians in Silicon Valley to the United States' technological leadership and to India's economic take-off has been tremendous. Veteran journalist Michael Lewis wrote in his comprehensive study of the Silicon Valley phenomenon in The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story back in 2000, the 'definitive smell inside a Silicon Valley start-up was curry'. Many IIT and other technical graduates gravitated to Silicon Valley, contributing to the tech boom there in the 1980s and 1990s. Others ended up in business or scientific research. Of Indians who went to Silicon Valley, a significant number started their own companies. By 2000, Indian Americans either owned or were in top management positions at 40 per cent of all Silicon Valley start-ups and had a collective net worth of $62 billion. Some of the better-known Indians who made huge fortunes during the tech boom include Vinod Dham, the creator of the Pentium processor; Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems; Sabir Bhatia, who created Hotmail.com; Suhas Patil, the founder of Cirrus Logic; and Kanwal Rekhi, the founder of Excelan. One day in 1992, a group of Indian Silicon Valley entrepreneurs was waiting at the airport to meet a visiting Indian government official. They got to talking, and decided to start something that could help aspiring entrepreneurs benefit from their experience. TIE, The Indus Entrepreneur, was born. TIE began with one hundred members. It now counts ten thousand members in forty-five chapters and nine countries. India is the country with the most chapters after the United States. TIE has become one of the most powerful networks of entrepreneurs in the world and is expanding at a dizzying pace. Since 1992, individuals associated with TIE have created businesses with a combined market capitalization of $200 billion.9 Born in Silicon Valley, TIE was very much a product of the unique set of circumstances that gave rise to the information technology revolution: the proximity of Stanford University with Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and the success of the original techie garage tinkerers, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the founders of Hewlett-Packard. TIE, however, introduced something uniquely Indian to this environment: the ancient learning relationship of guru-shishya, or teacher-disciple. TIE mentors (gurus) help budding entrepreneurs, professionals, and students (shishyas) learn the ropes by sharing their experience and knowledge. TIE also fosters the principle of doing well by doing good. When asked about the role of social entrepreneurship and TIE, Vish Mishra, senior venture partner with Clearstone Venture Partners and a charter member of TIE, explained, 'Social entrepreneurship caters to the needs of the poor. Bottom-tier markets have thus far been neglected.' The commitment on the part of successful Indian Americans both to give something back to their country of origin and to help others succeed has grown into an important engine driving the US-India relationship. Private investment capital is pouring into India, much of it flowing from successful Indian Americans who are familiar with both countries. 'At Clearstone,' Vish Mishra told me, 'we're very familiar with India as a talent source and as a market. We really believe that India has achieved ignition. An educated population is the fuel. The oxygen is a stable sociopolitical environment. The spark is the young, upwardly mobile population that wants to consume.' Clearstone now has an office in Mumbai. During the twelve-month period ending in August 2006, venture capital (VC) firms invested $2 billion in early- and late-stage companies, and several new India-focused VC funds were being raised totalling $3 billion. Last year, Matrix Partners announced a $150 million India fund. Sequoia Capital India was created by Sequoia Capital's acquisition of Westbridge Capital, a five-year-old fund focused on India. Other VC firms investing in India include Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Norwest, Battery, Sierra and Canaan Partners. Especially exciting is the focus of many of these private investments on microfinance, improving the environment, and tackling pandemic disease. Silicon Valley-based venture capital focused on India is reinventing the concept of 'green' to mean both environmentally friendly and profitable. Vinod Khosla was cofounder of Sun Microsystems and a longtime general partner at Silicon Valley VC giant Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers, which has funded Google, Genentech, and Sun. Having made his billion dollars and helped many other companies and individual make theirs, Khosla has left Kleiner Perkins. He is now doing his own investing, picking and choosing socially relevant investments such as biofuels, fuel cells and solar cells. His new benchmark is 'maximum social impact rather than maximum profit'. This doesn't mean Khosla is looking to lose money. It means that he is taking a wholistic approach when he does cost-benefit analysis on a prospective investment that includes environmental and social factors. Khosla is bringing together the best of California and India. Efforts such as these are changing the paradigm for Indian philanthropy away from a traditional concept of charitable giving, toward a paradigm of socially responsible investment. Perhaps the largest philanthropic organization focused on India, AIF was born from the rubble of the catastrophic earthquake that hit India's Gujarat state in 2001. At the urging of President Bill Clinton, a number of high-achieving Indian Americans from across the United States were brought together under the leadership of Rajat Gupta and Victor Menezes to respond to the disaster. Working with carefully selected local NGOs, AIF has since extended its mission to address key areas of need in India, including internal stress migration, women's empowerment, HIV/AIDS prevention and care for HIV/AIDS victims, and water scarcity. In just five years, AIF has raised more than $35 million. Clinton remains honorary chair of AIF. Rajat Gupta is also the chairman and one of the founders of the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. ISB is an associate school of the Kellogg School of Management, Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania and the London Business School. Its executive board is as much a Who's Who of Indian business as its governing board is of international business. From building a school in their home village to million-dollar donations to an alma mater, Indian Americans are dedicated to improving their country of origin. The creation of an institution of the caliber of ISB, closely tied to American and British business schools and to prominent members of the Indian diaspora, will help forge strong linkages between India's future business leadership and the international business elite. In the spring of 2006 in Bangalore, the big news was the salaries garnered by graduates from the local Indian Institute of Management. On average, IIM Bangalore graduates were offered starting salaries of $90,000 (£45,000). The highest offer, a record-breaker, was for $193,000 (£97,000) offered by Barclays Bank in London. That record fell a short time later when ISB produced a graduate who received a starting offer of $233,000 (£117,000) -- from an Indian company. It would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago that Indian graduates would command starting salaries such as these -- from an Indian company no less. Indian talent is peppered across the American business-school landscape, where some of the most celebrated professors hail from India. Many have explicitly made a philosophy of doing well while doing good a cornerstone of their intellectual legacy. The most famous of these is undoubtedly University of Michigan's C. K. Prahalad, the author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, who argues that capitalism and poverty eradication can go hand in hand. Harvard Business School's Rakesh Khunara is working on reforming an American culture of greed into one of equity. Dipak Jain, dean of the Kellogg School of Business, has invited author and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra to give courses to executives searching for ways to be better businessmen and better people, and has made courses on ethics and social responsibility a part of the curriculum. A Powerful New Political Force With growing economic clout and sheer numbers, Indian Americans are coming of age politically. First-generation Indian immigrants' confidence in their ability to participate in the American political process has grown in tandem with their economic success. Second-generation, native-born Indian Americans have grown up comfortable with asserting themselves publicly. Many have been nurtured in ethnic organizations through the Indian and South Asian clubs that have proliferated on college campuses across the country. Indian Americans, such as Louisiana Republican congressman Bobby Jindal, San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris, Maryland legislative majority leader Kumar P. Barve and New Jersey state legislator Upendra Chivukula, have been elected to public office. Others work for prominent elected officials or closely advise the current administration. Neera Tanden is a senior policy adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, and was her legislative director before joining the Center for American Progress where she now works. Mumbai native Ashley Tellis, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, worked closely with former ambassador Robert Blackwill during his tenure as US ambassador to India during the first term of the George W. Bush administration. Tellis, one of the main proponents of the nuclear deal signed by President Bush and Prime Minister Singh last year, took a leave of absence from Carnegie in 2006 to advise the Bush administration on securing passage of the deal by both houses of Congress. While Tellis was advising senior members of the Bush administration, his former boss Robert Blackwill was working for the Indian government on the same issue. Blackwill now leads Barbour, Griffiths & Rogers, a powerful lobbying group on Capitol Hill. His company was paid $700,000 by the government of India to help push through congressional approval of the deal. India also paid $600,000 to Venable, a lobbying outfit staffed by, among others, former Democratic senator Birch Bayh. In their quest to get Congress to approve the nuclear deal, the government of India and the Bush administration tapped a formidable ally: Indian-American lobbying groups. Though relatively new actors in Washington, Indian Americans are flexing strong political muscles. The US India Political Action Committee, USINPAC, created in 2002 by Sanjay Puri, is the most active Indian-American political action group on the Hill. Other groups include the Indian American Center for Political Awareness (IACPA), the Association of Indians in America (AIA), the National Federation of Indian Associations (NFIA), the National Association of Americans of Asian Indian Descent (NAAAID) and the Indian American Forum for Political Education (IAFPE). These are all dwarfed in terms of influence, however, by USINPAC, an organization with more than twenty-seven thousand members. As a member of USINPAC's e-mail alert list, I regularly get messages exhorting me to write or call my senator or congressman every time something is coming up on the congressional agenda that affects US policy towards India or Indian Americans. The stated mission of USINPAC is to advance the interests of the Indian-American community by providing 'bipartisan support to candidates for federal, state and local office who support the issues that are important to the Indian American community'. The organization has pinpointed five areas of particular importance: US-India relations, immigration, anti-hate-crime measures, equal opportunity and civil rights, and entrepreneurship and business. The last, rather vague category is explained by USINPAC on their Web site as 'advocacy for issues such as small business'. From its inception, USINPAC has worked closely with pro-Israel lobbying groups. The organization got its start under the tutelage of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. On the AIPAC model, USINPAC has placed, under advice from AIPAC's Ralph Nurnberger, young Indian-American interns in congressional offices, building a corps of former insiders who know the ropes and have connections with members of Congress. 'It's pointless to reinvent the wheel,' USINPAC founder Sanjay Puri has pragmatically declared. As Kumar Barve told the Washington Post in 2003, 'Indian Americans see the American Jewish community as a yardstick against which to compare themselves. It's seen as the gold standard in terms of political activism.' Another pro-Israel group USINPAC works closely with is the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The AJC features USINPAC on its Web site under its 'advancing interethnic and interreligious partnerships' heading.19 The real glue between these two organizations is around strategic and defence-related issues, particularly those aimed at combating terror, especially by Islamic groups. USINPAC lobbies specifically to support a US-India strategic alliance and defence cooperation between the two countries under the rubric 'terrorism and homeland security'. In particular, the group seeks to ensure 'India's inclusion in National Missile Defense'. Many Americans believe that supporting Israel is in the best interest of the United States; USINPAC and other Indian lobbying groups are working hard to convince Americans the same is true of India. The efforts of these lobbying groups were critical for passage of the nuclear deal, which required changes in US law and the transformation of decades of US nuclear nonproliferation policy. Efforts to fuse the notion of US security with selling nuclear technology to India took inventive routes. Last year, Jack Bonner of Bonner & Associates created yet another lobbying group: the Indian American Security Leadership Council. The purpose of the group, according to PRWeek magazine, was to 'mobilize military veteran groups in favour of legislative changes to enable nuclear power technology to be sold to India even though it is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty'. The group had its work cut out for it: India was not top-of-mind among US veterans. 'Quite frankly,' Bonner confessed, 'the veterans' groups weren't very aware of the issue when we first talked to them about it, so we had to work with them in order for them to be comfortable with it.' Why target US veterans' groups when it is US representatives who will vote on the nuclear deal? 'The issue is not just the message,' Bonner explained, 'but the messenger -- who is credible on this.' This is a strategy of training the mouse to kill the cat: what congressman or senator can resist an issue pushed by US veterans as crucial to America's security? According to PRWeek, the Indian American Security Leadership Council effort was paid for by affluent Indian Americans from both parties, including Ramesh Kapur, a trustee of the Democratic National Committee, and Krishna Srinivasa, a campaign supporter of Bush in 2000 and 2004. The Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans was created in 1994. It counts 173 members of the 109th Congress, including 105 Democrats and 68 Republicans. 'The objective of the Congressional Caucus on India & Indian Americans is to push the Indian American community's agenda on the Hill.' Robert M. Hathaway, who served for twelve years on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is now the director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, underlined the power of the India Caucus, saying it 'is to an important extent - certainly not exclusively, but to an important extent -- responsible for that sea change and it genuinely is a sea change in the attitude of members of Congress about India and about the importance of the US-India relationship.' In 2004, the US Senate followed suit and established the Friends of India. The group is co-chaired by the Republican freshman senator from Texas, John Cornyn, and Democratic freshman senator Hillary Clinton. It is the first-ever group of its kind in the US Senate focused on a single country. Then Indian ambassador to the United States Lalit Mansingh was reportedly delighted: 'I have to commend all the Indian leaders of the Indian-American community that finally made this happen.' India 'may one day be second only to Israel among international interests able to influence Washington policy makers', stated Robert Hoffman, a lobbyist for Oracle, for an article in the International Herald Tribune in July 2006. The US-India Business Council (USIBC), part of the US Chamber of Commerce, channelled a huge lobbying effort on behalf of the two hundred US companies it represents, including General Electric, Boeing, J. P. Morgan Chase, American International Group, Ford, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin and the Bechtel Group. The US Chamber of Commerce also weighed in, hiring Patton Boggs, Washington's biggest lobbying firm, to help push through approval of the deal. The nuclear deal is all about profits for American companies: the US Chamber of Commerce estimates $100 billion in energy sales to companies such as GE and Bechtel. GE has raised its forecast for 2010 sales in India from $5 billion to $8 billion. Supporters of the deal estimate that India could spend $27 billion on nuclear plants through 2020. American companies are hopeful they would build at least one of India's new plants. According to a senior adviser to the US-India Business Council, Raymond Vickery, if the deal is approved, Lockheed would have 'a reasonable chance to get a $4 billion to $9 billion contract to supply 126 combat fighter planes to India's navy, a contract that India would have been unlikely to approve while sanctions were in place'. Vickery further estimated that US companies could get 'a considerable portion of the $20 to $40 billion in acquisition that the Indians plan to make by 2020'. Indian companies were no less focused on the potential profits to be reaped. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has worked tirelessly if discreetly to woo members of Congress, paying out more than $538,000 in travel expenses to India for nineteen Congress members, eleven spouses, and fifty-eight congressional staffers between 2000 and 2005 - and that was before CII registered as a lobbying group. In April 2005, after registering to lobby for the first time, CII paid Barbour, Griffiths & Rogers $500,000 to lobby various US government agencies 'including Congress, the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Defense'. As Illinois senator Barack Obama, who has expressed strong views supporting nuclear nonproliferation, quipped, 'There appears to be a very coordinated effort to have every Indian-American person that I know contact me.' He also said he'd received calls from 'prominent investment bankers'. On July 26, 2006, the US House of Representatives gave overwhelming approval to the US-India nuclear deal. Days after midterm elections gave back to Democrats control of both houses of Congress, the Senate approved the US-India nuclear deal by a substantial margin of 85 to 12 votes on November 16, 2006. Growing India-US Trade Commercial links between India and the United States are growing rapidly. Both Indian and American companies have a bigger and bigger stake in major foreign policy decisions affecting the relationship between the two countries. Between 1990 and 2006, through a series of different governments led by different political parties, trade between the United States and India grew a whopping 400 per cent to over $26 billion. Bilateral trade between the two countries was set to grow by 21 per cent last year alone. At a meeting of the US-India Trade Policy Forum in New Delhi last May, the two governments pledged to double this to approximately $60 billion within three years. While this still remains far lower than US trade with China, pegged at $280 billion in 2005, everyone expects that India-US trade will continue to increase dramatically. The Indian government is anxious to increase US investment, without which there is little hope of obtaining the $150 billion it says it needs over the next decade to upgrade its severely underdeveloped infrastructure. In a startling acceleration of the tearing down of barriers to foreign companies doing business in India, Minister for Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath last year announced rises in the foreign direct-investment ceiling to 100 per cent in a range of sectors, including airport construction, oil and gas infrastructure, and cash-and-carry wholesale trading. This is all the more radical when one considers that the first two of these areas were nationalized for decades. The United States continues to press hard for remaining limitations on investment to come down. Multibrand retail, for example, is a sector in which foreign companies are not allowed to operate in India, but Wal-Mart has already set up an office there, and press reports of its plans for the Indian market were proliferating as this book went to print. In autumn 2006, the Bush administration organized the biggest delegation of US businesses to India ever. The trip was pitched as a rare profit-making opportunity. According to the US Department of Commerce's Export.gov Web site about the then planned delegation, 'India, the world's fastest growing free-market democracy, presents lucrative opportunities for all types of businesses - especially US companies. In 2005, US merchandise exports to India were almost $8 billion, double what they were in 2002.' Level Playing Field As Amartya Sen has pointed out, democracy is legitimate when it is fully participatory, at the ballot box and in terms of economic opportunity and social justice. India's burgeoning economy is growing unevenly, with significant disparities between regions and social classes. The United States, though far richer, faces similar challenges. Both democracies need to harness growth to the purpose of creating jobs and economically enfranchising all citizens. The challenge is clearly greater for India, but it is a challenge neither country can afford to ignore. The examples of South Korea, of postwar Japan and Germany show that when the right kind of government policies are married to economic growth, with a premium placed on high literacy, agricultural reform and basic social security, miracles can happen. Brazil, on the other hand, was blessed with extremely high growth in the 1980s, but because it failed to make the investments in its people required to reduce social inequalities, it has remained a country of economic extremes. India is working hard to avoid this fate. The United States is not. In 2006, The Economist magazine did a special report on inequality in America. The magazine cited a widely discussed study by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California and Thomas Piketty of the École Normale Supérieure on just how startlingly wealth is being concentrated toward the very top of the American socioeconomic ladder. According to Saez and Piketty's study, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1 per cent of Americans doubled from 8 per cent in 1980 to over 16 per cent in 2004. The top one-hundredth of 1 per cent -- 14,000 taxpayers -- quadrupled between 1980 and 2004. The Economist predicted that this trend was not likely to be temporary because it was due to structural changes in the US job market caused by global economic integration, especially of India and China. 'The integration of China's low-skilled millions and the increased offshoring of services to India and other countries has expanded the global supply of workers. This has reduced the relative price of labour and raised the returns on capital. That reinforces the income concentration at the top.' The trend towards extreme inequality is so pronounced that Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, cautioned in August 2006 that steps needed to be taken 'to ensure that the benefits of global economic integration are sufficiently widely shared'. India's role as a source of relatively low-cost, highly skilled labour is increasing rapidly as corporations race to gain competitive advantage and maximize profits. Pleading that a shortage of skilled workers, particularly in information technology, impairs their ability to grow, US companies have pressed to increase the cap on H-1B visas -- visas that admit highly skilled workers for up to six years when sponsored by an employer. The H-1B visa and offshore outsourcing are two sides of the same coin: connecting highly skilled workers from foreign countries, particularly from India, to American jobs, either by bringing the worker to the United States or by taking the job to the worker overseas. Last year, Microsoft and others pressed hard to get Congress to raise the cap from 65,000 to 115,000 and to allow some foreign students to bypass the visa programme and move directly from completion of their degree to a sponsored green card. Meanwhile, before the Committee on Small Business of the US House of Representatives, Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology and chair of the R&D Policy Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers -- USA (IEEE-USA), testified 'on the offshoring of high-skilled jobs' in October 2003. Professor Hira told the committee, 'According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, electrical, electronics, and computer hardware engineers continue to face a higher unemployment rate than the general population, and over double the rate for other managers and professionals. The news for engineering managers is even worse, with an unemployment rate of 8 per cent.' Hira attributes this directly to the growth of offshoring and of H-1B visas given to foreign technical workers. Moreover, he identifies Indian Americans (he is himself of Indian origin) as a prime factor in this process. 'There's a clear connection between the Indian diaspora in the United States, the use of H-1B, and offshore outsourcing,' he says. Indian nationals account for 37 per cent of H-1B recipients. The Programmers Guild, an advocacy group for computer-industry workers, is concerned that H-1B body shops are exploiting foreign workers while driving down US wages, paying wages of less than $45,820 to computer professionals when the Department of Labor puts the median wage for computer occupations at over $62,000. Ron Hira is not opposed to bringing in needed technical workers with H-1B visas. He is opposed to the body shops that bring in workers at salaries far below American industry levels, driving down wages, and contributing to high unemployment among American computer professionals. The flip side of the H-1B visa question is offshoring. An estimated one million American jobs have already been offshored. By 2015, it is estimated that 3.4 million white-collar US jobs will be offshored. In all, a staggering 14 million US white-collar jobs, or one in nine, are at risk of being offshored, with India being the top outsourcing destination. The US government must acknowledge how the third industrial revolution, including offshoring and H-1B visas, is affecting US workers, and come up with policies that will help American workers survive these sweeping structural adjustments. The Indian Side of Offshoring I recently had a problem with my laptop that required me to contact customer service at IBM, Microsoft and Linksys. All three companies routed my call to India. I spoke to a young woman in Bangalore with IBM, a young man in Gurgaon with Microsoft and another young man in Pune with Linksys. These young Indians were unfailingly polite and surprised to have someone on the line who knew something about their country. But when I repeated the tagline Koi desh perfect nehi hai (No country is perfect) from Rang De Basanti, a recent movie hugely popular with college-age kids in India (and which they had all seen), one of them replied, sounding a bit frightened, 'Actually, ma'am, we're not allowed. We have to speak English only.' Call centres are magnets for urban Indian youth, providing them with income sometimes greater than their parents', and a chance to work in an environment filled with young people their age. Their job is hard, no doubt. They work the night shift, when it is daytime in the United States, and are frequently subject to abuse from irate customers. A whole call-centre culture has sprouted up, with restaurants, coffee shops and nightclubs catering to a pool of young people with disposable incomes who are, to a large extent, free from parental overview (most young Indians live at home). Last year, Chetan Bhagat published a novel that became a best-selling sensation in India called One Night @ the Call Center. A cast of characters set adrift in the barren night of the Delhi satellite city Gurgaon wrestle with a host of problems unique to their generation. The group's boss is a conniving, greedy guy who sucks up to his American bosses. All of the young people I spoke with during my computer-problem tour of India told me they had heard of this book, and one had read it. When I asked him if it portrayed his experience accurately, he replied, 'Ma'am, it depends a lot on your boss.' And then I remembered that 'this call may be recorded for quality-assurance purposes'. Before India's technological revolution, social mobility was almost nonexistent. A young person's prospects were largely determined by his family's status, connections, and wealth. India's information technology companies have changed this. They have proven that it is possible to be hired and to succeed purely on merit. Narayana Murthy, chairman and cofounder of Infosys, told me the meritocratic paradigm introduced by Infosys was 'the most revolutionary thing that has happened in this country'. For India, offshoring provides a vital and growing stream of new jobs for a young population hungry for opportunity. It has been a major factor in the growth of India's information-technology sector, which is projected to increase from 1.4 per cent of India's GDP in 2001 to 8-10 per cent by 2008. Infosys, the blue-chip, Bangalore-based company that is the poster child for India's potential in BPO or business process outsourcing, is growing at the astonishing rate of 50 per cent per year. From its beginnings a mere twenty-five years ago as a start-up launched by a group of friends who possessed nothing more than a passion to create a business, Infosys now has sixty-six thousand employees in twenty different countries. The average age of its employees is twenty-seven. Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services are the two other Indian IT giants, and there are hundreds of smaller companies. All of these companies are fast expanding the range of services they provide, moving from systems maintenance into software development, systems redesign, consulting services and other areas. Jobs are shifting away from middle-aged Americans with expensive health care and benefits to Indians in their twenties eager to get a job. The starting salary for a software engineer in India is about $5,000 (£2,500) That same job in the United States goes for $60,000 (£30,000). By 2009, 20 per cent of IBM's worldwide workforce of approximately three hundred thousand employees will be in India. Intel, Cisco, Microsoft and HP are just some of the other US-based companies with facilities in India. These companies are looking at India as a two-pronged opportunity: one, as a way to significantly reduce labour costs and access high-quality research, and, two, as a market with the potential to outstrip markets in the United States, Europe and developed East Asia. As Amar Babu, managing director of Intel India, told me, 'Intel views India as a critical research and development site for Intel worldwide. At the same time, India is a consumption market for IT. A lot of future growth will come from emerging markets. Intel's India business is growing at thirty per cent.' Americans in India For many years, the only Americans I saw in India were tourists at the airport. Now, the new restaurants and bars are filled with young American and European expats who are in India partly for the adventure, and partly because they see India as an opportunity destination. According to an article in BusinessWeek last year, thirty thousand expats work for tech and outsourcing companies in India, an increase of 300 per cent in just three years. Time Out Mumbai, the Mumbai edition of Time Out magazine, estimates the number of Americans working and living in Mumbai at four thousand.39 This is not a huge number compared with, say, the fifty thousand Americans who live in Paris or the hundreds of thousands of expatriates from around the world who make their home in New York, but it is a lot more Americans than ever used to live in Mumbai. Aside from the Indian Americans or Indian nationals who were US residents that are returning to India in droves, there are recent college grads like Nathan Linkon, a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Peter Norlander, a graduate of Cornell University. Both in their early twenties, they work for Infosys at the company's posh complex in Bangalore. When I visited Infosys early last year, their boss, Nandan Nilekani, set me up in a conference room overlooking the company's entrance so I could chat with them. Peter was the more savvy of the two. He had visited India with his family and had also lived in Mumbai on his own for a while during college as an intern writing for the Financial Express. Nathan had never been to India before taking the job with Infosys. When I asked him how a boy from Wisconsin ended up in Bangalore, he told me, 'I was doing my job search, just like everyone else, and I stumbled on the Infosys listing. I didn't even realize it was for a job in India. When I spoke with my father about it, he basically said he'd disown me if I didn't go for this. So, then I got the offer, and I'm like okay, this will never happen to me again.' They told me there were seven American employees at the company. They live in an apartment complex owned by Infosys. While it is only seventeen kilometers, a little over ten miles, from the Infosys campus, it takes them between one and two hours to make their way through the terrible Bangalore traffic between home and work. 'We don't cook,' explained Nathan. 'We order in. There are a couple of Chinese places. Pizza Hut. Domino's. Or we go across the street to a place where we can get a whole South Indian meal for twenty rupees [about twenty pence].' They told me about Bangalore's nightlife, and the difficulties dating Indian girls. Either girls don't go out, or, as Linkon told me, 'the girls are, like, way richer than you are, you know? Like really rich. They are so snobby. If they talk to you, it's because they've been abroad and they know it's okay to talk to guys.' After I met with Nathan and Peter, Infosys dramatically expanded its US hires, picking up three hundred new employees, many with technical backgrounds from top schools such as MIT. Most of these new recruits will spend a couple of months training at the company's facility in Mysore, India, then move out to company locations around the world, including back in the United States. The trend is clear: companies from any country will seek the best talent they can get, wherever they can find it, and that includes Indian companies hiring Americans and Europeans. Infosys isn't the only Indian company hiring Americans. Anand Mahindra, a graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude) and the Harvard Business School, started hiring Ivy League graduates in 2003 when a Yale graduate, Ryan Floyd, e-mailed him asking about opportunities. In November 2004, after a year with the company, Ryan made the rounds for Mahindra & Mahindra, hitting Harvard, Tufts, Yale, Princeton, Penn and Columbia for recruits. Anand Mahindra's strategy is straightforward: 'These guys might stay two years but they become ambassadors for the country and the company. A person like that is going to have a drive and intelligence beyond the usual. I pay them what I pay an Indian MBA. We get the value.' When I asked him how he knew which young people would be up to an India experience and which ones just wouldn't, he replied, 'I use the Matrix pill question. I ask them, "Are you a person who takes the red pill or the blue pill? Certainly, if you come, your life will be changed."' I was chatting with Anand in the foyer to the private dining room in Mahindra's corporate headquarters in the Worli neighbourhood of Mumbai. Off the main road, in the middle of the old mill area, the angular redbrick building was broken up by open spaces, landscaped areas, and different levels going off in different directions. Anand called David Aranow, a Harvard graduate who was working for him, to come and talk to me. A clean-cut, tall twenty-three-year-old with blue eyes that matched his tie, David Aranow had never been to India before. 'I wanted to work in Latin America,' he told me. 'I hadn't really heard about India's boom. But I was intrigued by the opportunity to work on auto exports to Latin America by an Indian company.' He paused. 'You know, most of the companies that come to recruit are consulting firms. There is almost nothing international. This seemed like an unusual opportunity.' I asked him if he liked his job. 'You get more responsibility here and you can get a lot more done than you could ever do in consulting. I'm learning so much,' he replied. I wondered what it was like for these young Americans to live in Mumbai. 'The first two months were really difficult. I had to relearn everything. I had to relearn how to walk down the street,' David said. Two other Americans were working for Mahindra when I was there last year. 'The three of them share an apartment in Bandra,' explained Anand Mahindra. Bandra, Mumbai's first suburb, where old bungalows and modest apartment buildings are scattered along tree-lined streets and some of the newest restaurants and clubs have opened, is a popular spot with young people, less expensive and more happening than south Mumbai. Anand smiled and said, 'They're known as the Mahindra boys.' Glancing at David with a glint in his eyes, he said to me, 'I heard about the Christmas party where they were dressed as elves.' David looked up surprised and exclaimed, 'You know more than we know you know!' Anand laughed. Copyright © 2008 by Mira Kamdarhttp://www.simonandschuster.net/content/book.cfm?tab=73&pid=616732&agid=2 |
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