Higher Education bills for progress but no transparency?
M.R Madhavan writes in the Indian Express, “Education, whether elementary, secondary or university, is too important to be left to educationists and bureaucrats within the HRD ministry. The ministry should place all the super cialis bills in the public domain for widespread discussion. Parliament’s standing committee should also examine each individual bill as well as the way these bills together regulate the sector. The need is to create a regulatory environment that promotes education and research, and enables the next generation of Indians to compete globally in a knowledge economy.”
He talks about the mentions the structure of current education sector and how it could potentially go through a major change. There have been several bills introduced in parliament which could bring upon these changes. The propecia muscle growth most important perhaps is the oe that established a regulator for all higher education institutions, whether under central or state governments or private management. It envisages a national commission for higher education and research that shall take measures to promote the autonomy of higher educational institutions, facilitate access to all, and provide for holistic growth of education and research in a competitive global environment. Ironically, the same clause of the bill that tasks the commission with promoting autonomy also requires it to develop a national curriculum framework, specify requirements of academic degree and diploma in all fields, develop a framework code of good practices, and maintain a national registry of persons who are eligible to be appointed as vice-chancellors of universities.
However there are several issues related to this bill particularly around the national registry which can give rise to a lot of ‘political manoeuvring’. Also it is yet to be seen if the law is allowed by the constitution to be passed by the parliament and whether such frameworks impede autonomous functioning of institutions. The foreign universities bill which has been thoroughly discussed in media, has not been made public but it has to been if the regulatory requirements are lighter, if there is provision of reservations and a cap on faculty salaries among other things.
Nine more bills related to higher education which deal with accreditation agencies, setting up of new iits, education tribunals, innovation universities, regulation of engineering etc have been listed for introduction but none are in public domain.
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Source: [India Express]
Foreign retailers may decrease their investment.
KPMG has said that the government decision to cap sales by cash and carry players to their group front end companies at 25% of overall sales will reduce the investment plans by around Rs 800 crore. Companies like Wal-Mart, Tesco and Metro have their whole sale (cash and carry) businesses in India as they aren’t allowed to be invest in multi brand retail. “The Indian market is too big to ignore completely but expansion plans will need to be carefully reassessed by the existing players. The immediate result will be a slowing down of their expansion plans by about Rs 600-800 crore, but the long-term impact will be much higher,” KPMG Advisory Services manager Anand Ramanathan said. “They will now have to focus on maximising direct sales to their business-to-business customers, including unorganised players such as kirana stores and to organised players such as the hotels, restaurants and catering segment of the food service business,” he said.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), while issuing a single document on FDI rules on April generic cialis canadian 1, had put a cap of 25 per cent on sale of the cash-and-carry players to the front-end hair loss propecia retail companies owned by their Indian joint venture partners.
“Wholesale trade of goods would be permitted among companies of the same group. However, such wholesale trade to group companies taken together should not exceed 25 per cent of the total turnover of the wholesale venture and the wholesale made to the group companies should be for their internal use only,” the DIPP rule said.
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Source: [Business Rediff]
Large format stores preferred by Retail companies
After the stagnation of the last year in the retail market, several big Indian retail ventures including Spencer’s. Pantaloon, Aditya Birla Retail and the new entrant Bharti Airtel plan to add large format stores with an area of 30,000 to 100, 00 sq. ft. An important reason for this is the question of rents. Rents take up between 15% and 20% of a retailer’s revenue, compared with the global average of 10-15%. By taking in more space, not only the costs are lower but also the store tents to get more say being the anchor tenant.
Large propecia weight gain stores can also generate additional incomes through sub-letting spaces for shop-in-shops and in-store advertising. That’s why Bharti Retail plans to open 10 large stores ranging between 35,000 sq. ft and 50,000 sq. ft in one year, although it will also open 60 smaller stores during the same period. Raheja Corp’s Hyper city which had to abandon the convenience store format in 2008 has expanded and opening outlets in thane, Bangalore and Amritsar. “Many retailers understand that opening of large stores is easier way to achieve scale,” says Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO of Retailers Association of India. “If you achieve volumes through five-six big box retail locations, then it is easy to expand with smaller formats.” He said that there are going to be at least 150 new stores larger than 5000 sq. ft. which include hypermarkets, specialty and department stores as they help the generic cialis canadian retailers achieve scale and become profitable. According to a Spencer spokesperson, the company will open between 15-20 large stores with average size of about 35,000 sq. ft in the next one year. Aditya Birla Retail plans to open a dozen so-called hypermarkets with sizes ranging between 50,000 sq. ft and 70,000 sq ft.
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Source: [India Wine Academy]
Economists: Too soon to say recession is over
The National Bureau of Economic Research (USA) said the panel met recently in the hopes of determining when the economy, which slipped into recession in December 2007, hit bottom. The panel of economists responsible for officially deciding the length of recessions said Monday that it’s “premature” to say when the recent downturn ended. “Although most indicators have turned up, the committee decided that the determination of the trough date … would be premature,” the group said in a brief statement.
The committee stated that many economic indicators which used are ‘quite preliminary’ and could be revised in the coming months. They base their decision not on forecasts but actual indicators about economic growth, the job market etc.
American GDP, which is said to be the broadest cialis online buy measure of economic activity turned positive in the second half of 2009 as per latest figures. A government report stated that US employers added more jobs in March than any other month in last three years.
Developments like these have prompted most economists to state the recession ended around june or July 2009, but the economists at NBER which usually takes a lot of time allowing the dust to settle and identify all trends before announcing an exact end date. They usually take over a year after the economy resumes growth.
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Source: [Money CNN]
The Indian infrastructural growth debate
Infrastructure up gradation has fuelled rapid growth in China. India on the wake of the PM’s announcements, cialis online buy provision of tax holidays and allowing foreign investors in the domain hopes to repeat the success story. However Indian needs to work extra hard to get support and deliver on past promises. India has weaker government finances and an unruly democratic setup unlike the Chinese authoritarian rule which made it easy for them to acquire land and develop sprawling networks of highways, airports and online prescription propecia high speed rail connections. India on the other hand has far too many issues with land rights being contentious and a history of investor unfriendly rules on infrastructure investment.
Kamal Nath has declared his goal is to build 20 kilometers of new highway a day, and he’s seeking $41 billion in private-sector investment over the next three to four years to help fund the construction. He understand the problem and has said that almost 1/6th of the existing highways are ‘not worth driving on’ which lead to a lot of waste in farm produce. He understand the need to attract quality builders as building roads to last and maintaining is the key and traditionally it has been tough to enforce the quality.
India has been using its active stock market to raise funds and needs a lot of private investors to chip and build the infrastructural success story. However Institutional investors are wary because of many so called Greenfield projects haven’t yet emerged and the lack of clear evidence of how existing firms have used the billions raised to execute their plans over the past few years.
However some foreign investors are showin interestin companies and Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings Pte. Ltd. will invest $200 million to fund existing projects of GMR Energy Ltd, the energy unit of India’s GMR Infrastructure Ltd. Also last month, a consortium of global investors led by Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners agreed to invest $425 million in Asian Genco Pte. Ltd.
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Source: [Online Wsj]
India is a top level priority: Google India MD
Shailesh Rao, MD, Google India, took out time at Goafest 2010 to talk to ET about the company’s plans for India and thriving in a digital universe. When asked about Google dominance and some of its image as frenemy and the agencies to struggling to cope with digital reality he said, “I think it’s absolutely counterproductive. Of course, it takes time to adjust to change and we realise the resistance. But we are a new medium; we have to take control of our own destiny and tell the world the rapidly changing technology story. So we built the technology and went straight to the client. Over the years, we have validated cialis coupon the medium for the agencies.
At the end of the day, we are natural partners. But counterproductive comments stunt growth. Nonetheless, Goafest is a good reflection of how the relationship has evolved. Three years ago, I did not know about the festival and today, I am on a first name basis with most of the agency heads here and we are working together .”
When asked about the Indian market and its place in Google’s large scheme of things, he said, “India has Google’s second largest employee base in the world. The country is a top priority market at the board level. It does not materially move the dial on Google’s growth revenue but very select number of countries are reviewed at periodic intervals by the board, and India is one of them.
Sure, there are other more mature markets and there are fast developing markets on the internet penetration front but not very often does one get the kind of headroom will young propecia that exists in India. But on the other side of the ledger, there are countries like Brazil and China which have outpaced us in terms of penetration. Recognising the power of the medium the US has set in motion its national broadband plan, India could really benefit from a platform like that. For a country with a huge young population, growing a cheap platform like a national broadband scheme could be transformational.
We need a story just like the telecom or information technology industry had years ago. The latter’s story was jobs. We need an Internet story. And now is the perfect time because we have reached a milestone, a threshold, for us to aspire for more. For instance awakening the huge small business community in India can be a transformational move. They don’t want fantasy propositions, they want nuts and bolts value.
If we can help them scale, it will provide a massive push to development. India is a true triple threat. It is a centre of operations, great engineering capability and huge head count. The IPL on YouTube was a watershed moment. Not only was it a global board level decision, but also elevated the level of dialogue. It went to 200 countries and is already the most viewed live event Google has done, ever.”
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Source: [Economic Times – India Times]
Cloud computing shakes up traditional IT outsourcing
“Cloud computing represents a fundamental shift in how companies pay for and access IT services,” says Susan Tan, IT services and sourcing research director for Gartner. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 20% os businesses will own virtually no IT assets. This will change the way businesses operate and bring about shifts in the traditional methods of onshore and offshore IT providers, consultants and system integrators.
The old school paradigm of IT services which were associated with servers , data centers, networks, specifications and lines of code with thousands of man hours is going to change into a flexible , asset free, need based enterprise technology thanks to the emergence of cloud computing. However the customization might hv to be foregone while saving on hefty capital expenditure.
The whole chain is moving towards cloud computing. The customers are looking for something better, faster and cheaper. The IT service providers are adding ‘cloud service’ into their portfolio, regardless of their belief in it emerging as the victor or not to cater to the market. The global giants IBM and HP are providing more ‘x-as-a-service’ facilities to serve to all these providers. Infosys is offering end-to-end IT and business processes–Source-to-Pay for procurement, Hire-to-Retire for HR–on a pay-per-use basis built on a cloud backbone. Wipro Technologies is piloting a central computing cloud to study the potential of the trend. Patni Computing Systems is selling a “cloud acceleration service” to brand cialis buy online help developers migrate their processes to a cloud-based model the way it did internally and is experimenting with testing-as-a-service.
We might even witness mergers or acquisitions among large scale infrastructure providers with BPO vendors as cloud services gain more popularity and adoption. The cloud based finasteride proscar propecia firms like salesforce.com, Rack space, Amazon s3, Drop box along with Consultants and System integrators will be the big winners as the cloud wave reaches the shore. However just like e commerce took time to be the norm for retail Cloud computing will take some years before it is as seen as defacto offering.
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Source: [Computer World]
Small & Medium Business adopting technologies to be more productive
For small and medium companies, the smallest of expenses mean a lot but so does manpower. Latest technologies and advancements in cloud computing are giving many SMB’s an opportunities to digitize operations and outsource functions and work at a reasonable cost.
The earlier requirement of costly business software packages, expensive computer and networking infrastructure is now gone with the move to SaaS (Software as a Service) model which runs on cloud computing to meet the business needs for various applications ranging from finance to logistics to communication.
Companies, big and small, from global giants like Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Dell to Eastern Software, Nucleus Software, Tally Systems, see the underpenetrated technology market as both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is estimated to be $8-9 billion a year, growing at 16-18%. For these firms the secret to tapping the market by catering to the need of SMB’s is by creating relevant systems than tweaking or downsizing systems meant for Large enterprises.
Metamorph Learning, a four people Bangalore-based start-up, which imparts training to economically disadvantaged young for employment in retail industry, took up a accounting and financial system to manage billing, invoice, cash flow and profit and loss generic cialis 20 mg records. It costs them around Rs 4,000 a month. Here the technology tools help them operate with efficiency by letting them work in an outsourced model. On the other hand the three-star Hotel Golconda in Hyderabad is currently implementing a wireless LAN from Cisco. This helps them move up the value chain by offering better services.
According to IDC, India has about 7.6 million SMBs and most of the growth will be led by mid-market segment (100-499 employees) propecia pharmacy online rather than small businesses which traditionally lead SMB IT spending recovery. Mr Kumar of Microsoft says over 60% of SMBs is still not touched by any technology and this makes India the most underpenetrated market even if you compare with other emerging countries.
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Source: [Economic Times – India Times]