More Indian companies have begun to flex their muscle as global giants. Twenty-seven Indian firms have been featured in this year's Forbes 2000, a comprehensive ranking measured by a composite of sales, profits, assets and market value. The Indian list is headed by Indian Oil Corp (ranked 243) and followed by State Bank of India (251), ONGC (273), Reliance Industries (303) and Bharat Petroleum (804). The number of Indian companies to make it to the Forbes list is up from last year's 20. The new entrants include Steel Authority of India Ltd, Tata Iron and Steel Co, Union Bank of India, Neyveli Lignite, Bharti Televentures, Indian Overseas Bank, Hindalco Industries and Oriental Bank of Commerce. Ten of the 27 Indian global giants are banking companies and five are engaged in oil and gas operations. The two IT firms, Infosys and Wipro, continue on the list. The other Indian companies in the select band are: ICICI Bank, Hindustan Petroleum, GAIL, Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank, ITC, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, HDFC, IDBI, Ranbaxy Laboratories and MTNL. The one Indian company to be excluded from last year's classification is Hindustan Lever.

Courtesy: Hindustan Times, March 30, 2004

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Guess what is the hottest export from India. IIT grads, of course! According to Businessweek, IIT grads have been one of the "hottest exports India has ever produced. So much so, Indians, most of whom graduated from IIT, founded about 10 per cent of the startups in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 1998. The best and brightest always go off to the West. Those who stay back always rue the decision. All this makes you want to think that IITs were set up with the express purpose of training bright young Indians for jobs in the US. But it was not always so. IITs and IITians were expected to be at the vanguard of India's technology revolution. Tired of creating workers, albeit of high quality, the emphasis is now on training leaders - people who will shape the future of infotech in India. The result is the information technology incubator or the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, KReSIT in short. Funded by Nandan Nilekani and Kanwal Rekhi, both alumni of IIT Bombay, KReSIT formally started operations with the first batch of M Tech students on July 19, 1999. The business incubator (BI) became operative in 2000. Since its inception, eleven companies have been incubated. At present, there are seven companies operating out of the BI. Three companies have been funded. Three companies have moved out of the BI.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, March 30, 2004

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London-based NRI steel baron Lakshmi N Mittal is set to top a list of Britain's wealthiest Asians with a rare distinction of more than doubling his fortune in the past year to £3.5 billion. According to a report in The Sunday Times, Mr Mittal has added more to his wealth than anyone else who would appear in this year's Sunday Times Rich List scheduled to be published this weekend. Second in the list are the Hinduja brothers - Srichand and Gopichand - who have oil, banking and telecommunications interests. Their fortune is put at £2.1 billion, up from £1.8 billion last year, the report said.

Courtesy: The Pioneer, March 29, 2004

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Poll fever in the US is giving sleepless nights to Indians, read BPOs. The intense political backlash in the US seems to be affecting the flow of fresh contracts to Indian BPOs. According to industry sources, some US Fortune 500 companies have asked their Indian vendors to go slow on new bids. A large US bank is believed to have informally told its Indian BPO that large contracts may not be awarded ahead of the US elections in November '04. (BPO Wave: Full coverage) US companies also want their India-based vendors to not publicly announce any new deals in view of the presidential elections. The US economy is witnessing jobless growth and unions claim that this is due to outsourcing, or 'offshoring' in industry jargon. Indian companies, however, denied any slowdown in business. But industry sources said that some US companies have informally told Indian companies not to expect too many outsourcing deals, at least no large ones. However, while several Indian companies might not be getting new contracts, many old deals are being rolled over. The intensity of the opposition to outsourcing in the US can be gauged from the fact that 31 US states have introduced legislation to prevent, ban or control outsourcing of jobs.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, March 29, 2004

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The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) wave is not quite sweeping through Kerala as yet, but a different kind of outsourcing, from the U.S. and Europe is. Enter spiritual outsourcing. Faced with a shortage of clergymen in their countries, Christians in the West are sending their prayer requests to Kerala's priests who are rated high for their faith and religious intensity. Requests for "Mass Intentions'', which involve a fixed sum of money as fees, come by e-mail, telephone or regular post. Mass Intentions relate to the living and the dead, for thanksgiving, forgiveness or requiem - which is a mass for the repose of the souls of the dead. The Mass is offered by a priest in a church. Since a priest can only offer one such mass a day, there is invariably a backlog of requests in Western churches, where a single priest sometimes has to take care of two or more parishes. The 'outsourcing' exercise is meant to tackle the backlog. A senior clergyman said that church bodies had formulated a code governing foreign Mass Intentions and the payment to be made. In the past, Mass Intentions were sent in by an individual priest to one known to him. But now most such requests are routed through church bodies or bishops. In some countries, church bodies or bishops collect requests from individuals and send them to one of the church bodies or a bishop in Kerala, who distribute them to priests on the basis of certain norms.

Courtesy: The Hindu, March 28, 2004

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She has come a long way. From a pin-up girl in India to a serial entrepreneur in America, 44-year-old Anu Shukla is among the six women executives who made it to a list of "rising stars" in high technology companies in the US. The list was compiled by executive recruiting company Christian & Timbers of Cleveland. Anu Shukla's unusual journey to Silicon Valley success began on a farm tractor - not working the fields but as a model for a popular calendar. Her first start-up, Rubric, was a pioneer in enterprise marketing automation software, putting processes that were on whiteboards and spreadsheets into a database. The company was sold to Broadbase Software for $366 million in 2000. Now, with San Mateo-based RubiconSoft, she is on to her second start-up, a venture backed software company that is creating a new category of enterprise applications. Peter Nieh, general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which put in $4.5 million in RubiconSoft, says one of the reasons they invested in RubiconSoft was because Anu Shukla and her founding team are proven enterprise software entrepreneurs who are exceptionally well qualified to define and lead a new software category. While at Rubric, Shukla founded and chaired the eMA Practitioners Initiative, whose members included senior marketing executives from Bank of America, AirTouch Communications, Bristol Myers Squibb, Putnam Investments, Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard. This initiative was formed to advance best practices in Internet and relationship marketing, by bringing together executives from innovative companies who are leaders in their industry categories. Half a world away from her native India, Shukla has proved to be a woman of destiny. When she founded Rubric in 1997, Anu Shukla became a practical visionary of the possibilities of e-commerce. And now with her new start-up, she herself has also turned into an angel investor, seeding the ideas she finds interesting.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, March 27, 2004

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Bansi Lal is a cobbler from Karnal, for whom making shoes and curing tuberculosis (TB) patients are all in a day's work. He has company in Madanlal, who runs a public call booth in Shahdara, who doubles as a health worker. Lal has helped cure 50 people while Madanlal has 140 cures to his credit. The two are among the many volunteers who make sure TB patients stick to their drug schedule and are cured in six months. Gratitude is what they usually get. But this year, the World Health Organisation honoured a few on the eve of World TB Day for their selfless efforts. It's people like them who have made India's TB programme a 'success', as was declared by the WHO on Tuesday.

Courtesy: Hindustan Times, March 24, 2004

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Even as the Supreme Court ponders a law to protect Indian whistleblowers, the cogitation process was arguably given a hefty push in the unforgiving glare of the world's media when Satyendra Kumar Dubey became, on Monday night, the only posthumous winner of London's Whistleblower of the Year award. Analysts said that the award, annually awarded for the courage to speak out against official abuse, injustice and corruption, would put the spotlight on corruption in India at a time when the country was earning plaudits as an emerging power, the world's back office and a viable investment destination.

Courtesy: The Times of India, March 23, 2004

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Iran and India have tripled their bilateral trade in the past few years. Going by the increasing number of joint ventures and collaborations, Tehran is optimistic that trade between the two countries will touch $4 billion soon. Iranian ambassador S.Z. Yaghoubi told The Asian Age that deepening of the bilateral economic relationship had been among the most significant developments in Indo-Iranian ties recently. Ambassador Yaghoubi said the two countries have resolved to strengthen the economic engagement. "I am hopeful that both countries will record trade levels amounting to $4 billion in some time," he said. Regarding the Iran-India gas pipeline, which both countries have evinced keen interest in establishing soon, the ambassador said experts would conduct feasibility studies. Both New Delhi and Tehran have seen an exchange of high-level delegations in the recent months, attesting to the strengthening of relations between the two countries.

Courtesy: The Asian Age, March 23, 2004

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One out of every four high-technology jobs in developed countries today may be outsourced to emerging markets like India by 2010, according to a report by the research firm Gartner. "Global sourcing is becoming a mainstream delivery model," said Ian Marriott, vice president at Gartner, at a Barcelona symposium and released by Gartner on Wednesday. "The potential cost advantages are so persuasive that companies that don't consider it seriously risk doing their shareholders a disservice. Businesses will also be put at risk due to loss of competitive advantage and inability to focus on growth through innovation." India remains "the undisputed offshore leader," according to Gartner, with China and Russia emerging "as strong contenders" and many other countries eyeing the potential offshore IT services. Outsourcing has been a growing phenomenon in the United States and is catching on now in Europe as well, with 2003 a turning point.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, March 18, 2004

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Pulitzer winning journalist and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was on a trip to Bangalore recently. His aim: to experience first hand India's Silicon Valley , much tarnished by the US media for ' snatching away jobs '. Friedman returned to the US bowled over by what he saw in Bangalore. Here are excerpts from talkshow he gave to America's PBS network.

TERENCE SMITH: Why are these jobs going to India, and why to Bangalore?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Why to India? Why is India so well positioned for this? It's a lot of reasons that have come together. One is very simple. You have a huge number of educated people who speak English. You have a culture, also, where being a doctor or an engineer is absolutely the top of the pyramid. It's amazing. You go down any side street in Bangalore, and there seems to be an engineering school, you know, or some kind of software programming classroom.

Another oddity: Their day is exactly the opposite of ours. You can work all day in America, then outsource all the stuff you need done overnight to India. They work all day in India, and send it back the next day. And so a lot of these things have converged.

Y2K comes along, and you need all these software programmers basically to go through code, to see if the date is going to be a problem in whatever software program you're running. Well, what country in the world had that many programmers easily available, cheaply available? And once the Indians did that, they said, by the way, could we do this for you? Maybe you'd like your taxes done also.

Courtesy: The Economic Times, March 18, 2004

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The department of telecommunications has permitted call centres where the annual turnover is over Rs 500 crore or the combined turnover of the promoters is above Rs 1,000 crore to use common infrastructure for domestic as well as international calls. Such companies shall have to submit a bank guarantee of one crore and an affidavit to the government, according to a notification issued on Monday. The department has also permitted domestic call centres to use ISDN for back-up of leased lines. Welcoming the decision, National Association of Software & Services Companies president Kiran Karnik said: "Usage of common infrastructure will also help reduce attrition level in the industry as the agents can be shifted between day and night shifts."

Courtesy: The Hindustan Times, March 17, 2004

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An Indian American student who developed a new method to construct microchips is among the top three in the US's celebrated Intel Science Talent Search competition, often referred to as the "Junior Nobel". Seventeen-year-old Ryna Karnik from Portland, Oregon bagged the third prize of $50,000 in a gruelling six-day event in Washington that was capped by a meeting with President George W Bush. A patent is in the works for her technique of creating a working transistor. Six other Indian boys and girls also made it to the Intel list of 40 finalists from a field of 1,652 students from across the US, winning cash prizes of $5,000 each. Ryna's project involved using a focused ion beam as a "molecular pencil" to directly etch transistors onto silicon wafers. A departure from the traditional photolithography process, her technique is said to make it easier to tweak circuit design during production. Besides Ryna, the other Indian finalists to win prizes were: Arjun Anand Suri from California, Gaurav Subhash Thakur from Maryland, Neha Chauhan from New York, Rohini Subhadra Rau-Murthy, also from New York, Sean Dilip Raj from Texas and Divya Nettimi from Virginia. Arjun Suri presented a project on the effect of tyrosine sulfation, a process in protein synthesis, using a computer algorithm, while Gaurav Thakur, a math wizard, held forth on analysis of generalised factorial functions. Neha Chauhan came up with a project, identifying potential new preventive and therapeutic roles of dietary compounds in preventing Alzheimer's disease. Sean Dilip Raj of Texas studied blood stem cell therapy and its potential as a treatment for heart failure, while Divya Nettimi of Virginia developed a method to calculate the rate at which myosin, a molecular biomotor, reacts with adenosine triphosphate, an energy source, and drives muscle contraction.

Courtesy: The Hindustan Times, March 17, 2004

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For a 28-year-old who started off at $300 a month for a company in Jamshedpur, it was a dream come true to have secured a job in the US at $52,000 a year. And she was not disappointed when she landed at Pittsburgh to join her American employers. But one year down the line, Aishita Pramanik has packed her bags and taken the flight back to India. Pramanik's case, as reported on the Website of Rocky Mountain News, is not an isolated one. After having landed a dream job abroad, an increasing number of Indians are willing to call it quits and make their way home. Call it job insecurity or homesickness, for Indian pros, whether they be in the West or the Orient or the Middle East, the idea of returning to India is increasingly getting popular. The Internet and message boards are replete with Indians abroad looking for opportunities in apna Bharat. Nasscom estimates put the number of Indians returning home from the US of A over the last three years at around 35,000. And most of them have found jobs in India. According to the eetimes, engineers and recruiters cite a raft of reasons for the reverse migration, from rising living standards in India to a sense among some engineers that it's time to give back something to the communities that educated them. Mostly, though, it's because India is now seen as a centre for innovation. The same article also mentions how a Bangalore start-up, Insilica Semiconductors India, was deluged by 150 applications from Indians when it set up a booth at a job fair in the US. Not only US citizens, even Green Card holders are looking at opportunities in India. Culture shock or not, one thing is for sure: for Indians abroad all roads are leading back to India. Did anyone say, "East or West, India is the best?"

Courtesy: www.economictimes.com, March 02, 2004

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