Welcome To World Of Knowledge ..

The Way We Sit & What It Mean

2012-03-11T17:52:00.000+05:30

Sitting comes easy to us. But the etiquette of sitting down, maybe not. Here’s how to take a seat — at work or on a date

How do you sit? You take a chair and plonk yourself. Sometimes you cross your legs, sometimes maybe the ankle or with your legs in a wide four with the ankle resting on the opposite lower thigh aka the American way of sitting. Apparently every time you take a seat your body is engaging in a non-verbal communication, body language for the simpletons. Now think about the way you sit down and maybe rethink it.

At a Formal Do Emily Post — the first lady of good manners — talks about the art of sitting gracefully. Her advice: a woman should never cross her legs or sit with legs wide open. The perfect pose is a cross between sitting in an easy yet dignified pose. When sitting in a formal meeting or party, men/women should sit with an erect posture and with poise.

Do: Sit erect in the middle of the chair with legs in a 90 degree with a gap of 6-7 inches between one’s feet or slightly sideways in the corner of a sofa. Women shouldn’t cross legs at the knees, especially if they are wearing a skirt or a dress, it can ride up. Instead cross at the ankles. For men, unless it is a deep lounging seat, should lean against the back and put a hand or an elbow on the arm

Never: Scramble for a seat. Having greeted everyone, survey the room discreetly and make your move

At Work If you are a junior sitting in front of a senior then ideally you should not cross your legs. A complete no-no would be the American style of sitting — basically the ankle resting on the opposite knee in a wide four. That position reflects arrogance and power. A lot of people in the corporate sector make the mistake of sitting in the wide-four style. Only when you want to project power consciously, sit like that. And remember to nod frequently to show you are listening and smile. Your body language should show others that you are attentive, interested and involved in the meeting.

Do: In a meeting, make sure your posture is erect and lean in to show interest in what your senior is saying.

Never: Sit with a slouch or sink in your chair. It reflects disinterest or tiredness and can be construed as an attitude problem.

At a Business Lunch or Dinner In a business lunch or dinner, if the place cards are missing, then the protocol is that the senior most heads the table and the second in command sits next to him or her. The management trainee would sit towards the end from the CEO on the table. The sitting posture should follow the one in the formal do. At a sit-down dinner, talking across the table is considered a major gaffe.

Do: Sit up straight with your legs at a 90 degree

Never: Sit with elbows on the table.

On a Date If you are in a restaurant, first of all a male should not sit next to the lady, he should sit opposite her. To begin with his posture should be erect as time goes by he can be relaxed but still maintain an erect posture. Maintain a pleasant and expressive face.

Do: Lean in to show interest — in her and what she’s saying

Never: Stretch out your legs under the table. You might end up hitting her and it can send out a wrong signal.

You Sit: With legs crossed, foot kicking slightly It means: Boredom

You Sit: With legs slightly apart, not wide open It means: Openness, relaxed attitude

You Sit: With legs wide open It means: Arrogance, combative, sexual posturing

You Sit: With hands clasped behind head, legs crossed It means: Confidence, superiority

You Sit: With legs apart but thighs joined at the knee It means: Nervousness

You Sit: With parallel legs together (for women) It means: You are propah, a finishing school grad

You Sit: With locked ankles with knees apart It means: Apprehension, defensiveness

You Sit: With legs intertwined and all twisted, especially for women It means: Insecurity, nervousness

Dosa Plaza: How Prem Ganapathy built Rs 30 crore empire with seed capital of just Rs 1000(one of best Entrepreneurship Story. Must read )

2012-02-21T19:14:00.004+05:30

A class X passout with no particular skill set, I was lured to Mumbai, only to be robbed. It was an inauspicious start to my entrepreneurial journey, but it turned out for the best.

I belonged to a poor family from Nagalapuram in Tamil Nadu's Tuticorin district and had to abandon my dreams of higher studies to support my parents and seven siblings. I headed for Chennai, but only managed odd jobs, which fetched around Rs 250 a month that I'd send back home.

One day, an acquaintance offered me a job promising a salary of Rs 1,200 per month in Mumbai. I knew my parents would never approve of my decision to shift base, so I left for Mumbai without informing them. It was 1990 and I was just 17 years old. The acquaintance robbed me off the Rs 200 I had, leaving me stranded at Bandra.

I hardly understood the language and did not know anyone in the city, but returning wasn't an option since I was penniless. So I did the only thing I could: I decided to stay on and try my luck.

The very next day I got a job washing dishes at a local bakery at Mahim for a salary of Rs 150 a month. The good bit was that I could sleep at the bakery itself. In the next two years, I picked up odd jobs at various restaurants and tried to save as much as possible.

In 1992, I managed to save up enough to start my own food business, selling idlis and dosas. I rented a handcart for about Rs 150 and ploughed in another Rs 1,000 to buy utensils, a stove and basic ingredients, and set up shop on the street opposite the Vashi train station.

The same year, I brought in two of my brothers, Murugan and Paramashivan, who were younger than me by two and four years, respectively, to help with the business. We were very particular about quality and cleanliness, and unlike the people running other roadside eateries, we were very well-dressed and wore caps.

I got the recipes for dosas and the sambhar from my native place, which attracted a lot of customers. Soon enough, the business was booming and we were generating a net profit of around Rs 20,000 every month.

We even managed to rent out a small space at Vashi, which doubled as our living quarters and a makeshift kitchen, where we would prepare all the ingredients and masala every day.

However, it wasn't smooth sailing. We faced the risk of the cart being seized by the municipal authorities as handcart foodstalls do not get licences to ply their trade.

In fact, our cart was seized several times and I had to pay a fine to have it released. Thankfully, the harassment ended when we saved enough to open a restaurant.

In 1997, we leased a small space in the same locality by paying a deposit of Rs 50,000 and named it Prem Sagar Dosa Plaza. We paid a monthly rental of Rs 5,000 and also hired two people.

The restaurant was frequented by college-goers, some of whom became good friends. They taught me how to use the Internet, which helped me get new recipes from across the world. Soon, I began to experiment with dosas, rolling out offerings, such as the schezwan dosa, paneer chilly, and spring roll dosa. In the first year, we introduced 26 innovative dosas.

By 2002, we had managed to create more than 105 dosa varieties and our outlet had become very popular. However, I dreamt of opening a shop in a mall and even tried to get a place in some of the suburban malls. I was repeatedly turned down as the space was reserved for branded eateries like McDonald's and Pizza Hut.

My luck turned the day Centre One mall decided to open up in our vicinity. Its management team and staffers had often dined at our restaurant and enjoyed our fare. They suggested that we set up an outlet in the mall and we happily complied.

Our dosas won us publicity and people began approaching us with franchise requests. We agreed, with the stipulation that we would supply the dosa batter and other ingredients. The first franchise outlet opened at Wonder Mall in Thane, in 2003. Around 4-5 years ago, we got a new brand logo, Dr D.

We've been getting several requests from people who want to set up Dosa Plaza outlets in other countries. We have three outlets in New Zealand, two in Dubai and are looking at opening some in Muscat this year, along with 10-15 more restaurants in India.

These will add to our current tally of 43 (including franchisees) across 11 states. The business I started with a seed capital of Rs 1,000 has grown into a Rs 30 crore company and we are aiming for a Rs 40 crore revenue for this year.

Marketing must be perceived as an investment, rather than an expense

2012-02-20T20:51:00.002+05:30

It is possible to have a brand without a business, it is almost impossible to have an enduring and profitable business without a brand. Two recent events that occurred within days of each other exemplify this rather vividly: the first was the declaration of bankruptcy by Kodak, an iconic brand not just in the US but also around the world (who can miss the 'branded' Kodak moments at virtually every potential photo spot).

The second was that Apple overtook Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable company in terms of market capitalisation at around $421 billion. What makes a great brand and how do great brands contribute to great business? The experience of directly handling iconic brands like Cadbury and Coke globally, and now Britannia in India leads me to assert that 'the brand is the business'.

In 2003, the market capitalisation of both Apple and Kodak was the same at around $10 billion (the decline of the Kodak business model and the eroding relevance of the Kodak brand offering was well under way by then). The Kodak business started in 1889 with a simple promise to consumers, "You press the button and we do the rest," and for decades, that is exactly what happened.

Then came Canon and said, "You click the button and you do the rest." The digital era had arrived; Kodak was too entrenched in its position to change and ultimately lost its relevance and relative differentiation altogether. The failure of Kodak was the inability to contemporise its product offering in line with technology changes and the changing needs of the consumer. Once again, the incumbent was trumped by the insurgent!

Apple, on the other hand, started out as an insurgent in 1976 and changed everything in the rule book: from the combination of design, aesthetics and technology to the way it went to market. Its business delivered $109 billion in revenues in 2011. Both brands, Kodak and Apple, iconic in their own way, followed different trajectories and looked at consumers and markets very differently.

One was arrogant enough to not recognise the need to change. The other was arrogant enough to not do anything that was conventional. One went out of business and the other became the most valuable company.

So, what can incumbents learn from insurgents? What insurgents do really well is represent choice and change. They set an example of bold initiative. The big innovation of shampoo in a sachet came from a small company based in Chennai called Cavincare, not the many MNCs selling shampoo in India for years. The introduction of tea bags in the Indian market didn't come from Lipton or Brooke Bond, it came from Tata Tea when it entered the market.

Insurgent brands constantly break the rules, oftentimes rendering the brand and business models of incumbents redundant. In today's marketplace and advertising world, unless incumbents start thinking like insurgents, it is going to be really hard to be relevant and differentiated.

Insurgents target the opportunity; they don't cover the entire spectrum. They take control of the dialogue and create a solid bias for action. Whether you look at political leaders or brands or businesses, those who challenge/question the status quo are the ones that actually create something new and different. So, the leadership challenge relating to brands, branding and advertising is to determine how to create value on a sustainable basis, in a competitive landscape.

In the late 1970s, we had marketing stalwarts like Ayaz Peerbhoy, Subhas Ghoshal and Mani Iyer who believed in distilling the 'idea' behind every brand. That idea is what creates the brand, and distinguishes it from all others, that idea is what brands live by and it's that idea that the company must reinforce in every action it takes. Today, we see a lot more of 'lazy marketing and lazy advertising' that simply means, "let me get a celebrity to endorse my brand".

The advertising fraternity, the marketing fraternity, brand managers and businesspeople really have to think long and hard about the value that they are creating for the business. Equally, how we are creating that value through the totality of our actions across the value chain. The culmination of this effort is consumer preference converted to sale. We have to win the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers. This is as true in B2B businesses as it is in B2C businesses - only the levers are different.

Interestingly, some businesses are a result of advertising campaigns. Absolut vodka had ads before they had any vodka and went on to create one of the most successful print campaigns that any liquor brand has ever done. On the other hand, there's Starbucks or CafA© Coffee Day closer home for which we have never seen any advertising on television, and yet, both these brands have created enduring and sustainable businesses.

Irrespective of the business you are in, what really gets the sale is what consumers think and feel about your brand and whether they care enough to be willing to pay for it in preference to other alternatives.

The other thing to remember is that everything communicates. What you do, what you don't do, what you say and what you don't say. Products, politicians, film stars, athletes, etc, are all 'brands'; each of these 'brands' have a perception and imagery associated with them and people decide whether they want to buy into that imagery or not. You, therefore, have to position yourself, your brand, your company, etc, because if you don't, somebody else will. That somebody else in the case of a company will most likely be your competitor, in which case you lose the dialogue and once you lose the dialogue, it is very difficult to get back into the game.

Marketing must continually reinvent itself to create relevant and differentiated brands and business models that are embedded in the business. And, since marketing is too important to be left to the marketing people alone, every other function in the company becomes a collaborator in the creation of that value. It is the brands and how they go to market that ultimately determines value for the enterprise, and every function in the company must contribute to that: from formulation, design and logistics to sales, distribution and advertising, and everything in between.

But, even today, marketing is perceived as an art and intuition. And the results of marketing efforts are hard to predict, quantify and replicate. Unless we can figure out a way to demonstrate empirically the impact of various elements of the marketing mix (e.g., if advertising budgets are cut, sales will suffer), marketing will never win the dialogue. In a world where competition is getting more intense, where return on investment is looked at from every angle, where opportunity and returns dictate how resources get allocated, marketing has to reinvent itself. And that change begins with the marketing mindset, which, in turn, influences the business mindset, when marketing activities are not viewed as an expense but an investment that must yield measurable returns.

So, it is not only about building brand equity, but ensuring that equity converts into profitable sale and growth that, in turn, create differentiated advantage for the business. For, if we believe in brands, if we are convinced that brands are what make a business, then we must be convinced about how we measure the return on investment we get from those brands. The challenge for marketing and business people is getting the right metrics to give answers that fundamentally enable us to understand 'what is working and why' and 'what isn't working and why not', and have the courage to change it.

Source ET

Respect the Mob: How To Manage Customers?

2012-01-14T15:26:00.000+05:30

As customers get increasingly connected, brands will have to treat them with greater care

Companies have often grappled with the 'ownership' of their brands. Ultimately, the brand is simply what it represents in the minds of consumers. Strong brands generate strong emotions and consumers can have a real sense of ownership — and an equal willingness to criticise decisions that affect that brand in ways that they do not like. When The Coca-Cola Company tinkered with its formula and introduced New Coke in the mid-80s, the subsequent uproar from consumers forced a u-turn.

It used to be said that consumers having a negative experience with a brand might tell as many as ten people whereas those with positive experiences might tell only as few as three. In other words, negative word of mouth spread faster than the positive. The advent of the internet and various social media facilitates opinionated consumers to exchange ideas and influence others. Word of mouth has been turbo charged. Opinions reach billions. Consumers have formed a collective. They have unionised.

The free-flowing exchange of information, the inter-connectedness of consumers, has changed the marketplace. Now, the market bears many of the characteristics of an organisation, albeit a loosely-formed one. The famous u-turn imposed on Coke by its consumers stands out as a rare, iconic moment in marketing history, when consumers exerted control over the legal brand owner. It will be less rare in the future.

To avoid the wrath of the aligned masses, it now makes more sense to treat customers as one might employees — with Facebook replacing the watercooler — who need to be prepared for and supported through major changes, rather than as wallets with demographic data attached.

Like employees, consumers now need to be managed, nurtured; change must be introduced carefully and with great tact. Springing changes on our connected consumers of the 21st century can go spectacularly wrong, as Gap learned at a great expense last year. On October 4th, out of the blue and with little explanation, it launched a new logo. Two days later, it was energetically defending its new look against criticism from designers ('a shockingly poor attempt at a rebrand') and customers ('cheap and nasty'; 'it sucks'; 'boring, just like their clothes').

On October 11th, it dropped the new logo and went back to its old marquee. Now compare this with the way in which Starbucks changed its logo. It started the year before with an announcement that explained what it planned to do and why. It explained it wanted to be more than a coffee company, hence the second word in its name, Starbucks Coffee, would be dropped. By reassuring customers that its core values were not changing, that coffee would always be important, its change has, by and large, been accepted.

Thinking of how we manage employees might help us as we grapple with the new phenomenon of the connected consumer.

MANAGING CUSTOMERS
1. Communication: To employees' eyes, their employers can always improve communication — there should be more, or there should be less; communication should be timely and/or more regular etc. The connected consumer similarly places high demands on the brands he buys. And, he is not afraid to ridicule communications that are inconsistent or poorly thought through. A brief scan of YouTube illustrates the point — countless user-generated parodies of advertisements are available, with many viewed much more than the original.

2. Motivation: What motivates consumers to buy or to be loyal to a brand is even more important nowadays. As the number of touch-points between the brand and the consumer proliferate, it is important that the messaging from the brand is consistent with the motivations of the consumer.

3. Delegation: Many companies are already involving the connected consumer in a variety of interesting ways. Companies are co-creating products and solutions with consumers. The key issue, as with the case of managing employees, is what does one delegate to consumers and what does one keep for determination by management. Involving consumers in even the most simple of decisions can have unintended consequences as Next, the UK-based clothing chain, learned when it put the determination of its models for 2011 to popular vote and customers selected a model that did not reflect the Next brand 'image.'

4. Accessibility: Employees like employers to have an 'open door' policy, whether it is to HR, or their boss. Similarly, brands should have an open invitation to consumers, whether it is to complain or compliment. Many companies now go beyond passively waiting for consumers to contact them to complain and operate a sort of outreach programme, where blogs, chat rooms etc. are scanned to address issues being discussed among consumers.

5. Learn from mistakes, openly: Good managers learn from their mistakes and the same is true when dealing with connected consumers. Marketing-savvy companies have grappled with the impact of Facebook, Twitter etc., where opinion, whether ill-informed or ill-intentioned, can flow freely. Even Procter & Gamble has misfired, having struggled to quell (incorrect) suspicions that a change to its Pampers product caused diaper rash. However, after much time simply denying the problem and quoting statistics, P&G admitted that it could have handled the situation better and that it needs to consider the impact of public internet forums.

6. Fairness: Nobody likes to be treated 'unfairly' and the connected consumer can be quite vocal if he perceives an injustice. However, fair need not necessarily mean equal. Consumers can be valuable to companies because they buy large volumes and perhaps those who buy more should receive a lower per unit price. However, even consumers who do not purchase much might be of great value because they can, for example, refer other customers to a brand, provide suggestions for improvements etc.
The connected consumer is here to stay. Firms should accept that relationships between consumers play a greater role in consumer decision-making than before, with a consequent diminution of the relationship of the consumer with the brand. Dialogue, not monologue, represents the future. Truly engaging with the community of connected consumers asks a great deal of today's marketing organisations. And, the target is moving as the ways and means that that community interconnects evolves with time.

How This Worked Di?

2012-01-14T15:12:00.003+05:30

How This Worked Di?

Facebook and K o l a v e r i D i have one big thing in common — no one knows why they succeeded

So here is a little thought experiment. The year is 1999, and the world around you is going mad about this thing they call a ‘dotcom’. You have started emailing around a year ago, and love the experience. A friend of yours is sitting somewhere in Silicon Valley, and he suddenly realises that he has this brilliant idea to launch his own website. Before he approaches venture capitalists — who are ready to fund almost anything which sounds a little different — he thinks it's wise to run the idea by you. You have always given him good advice.
    "So I had this idea about a website," he tells you while chatting on Yahoo Messenger.
    "Oh yeah," you reply, suddenly feeling all important. "Tell me about it."
    "Basically I plan to launch a social networking website."
    "A social what?" you ask.
    "In real life you meet people and become friends, and then share things with them. Similarly, the website will allow you to make friends online, share your thoughts with them and even upload your photographs online."
    "Hmm. But I am already doing that in real life. Why would I want to make friends online?" you question.
    He doesn't have an answer to that. He agrees it's a dumb idea, and that's where the conversation ends.
    Now twelve years later, the kind of website your friend had in mind is making the world go round. It allows you to make friends online, put up status messages of your innermost thoughts and even lets people you hadn't invited for your wedding see your honeymoon pictures.
    It's called Facebook. And it now has 800 million users. The website was launched in 2004, and back then no one really knew it would be such a huge hit. As Duncan J Watt explains in Everything is Obvious - Once You Know the Answer, "If you'd asked...people who currently belong to Facebook back in 2004 whether or
not they wanted to post profiles of themselves online and share updates with hundreds of friends and acquaintances about their everyday goings-on, many of them would have likely said no, and they probably would have meant it. The world, in other words, wasn't sitting around waiting for someone to invent Facebook so that we could all join in."
    What this example tells us is that it is very difficult to know in advance what will work and why it will work. Also, Facebook worked, but some other websites with very similar concepts like Orkut, MySpace etc did not go anywhere. But once something succeeds, everybody and anybody will have an explanation for its success.
    Take the case of the mega hit Kolaveri Di from the Tamil movie '3', which even has my mother dancing to it, since she first saw it on Youtube. A rather nondescript video of the song was put up on Youtube
    and it was trending within days. On the last count, the song had had 30 million hits (which Aishwarya R Dhanush, director of the movie, has as her status message as I write this).
    So the question everyone is asking how did this Tamil-English number capture the imagination of all of India? The Indian Institute of Management at Ranchi has even organised a seminar on it. Articles appearing across a section of media have come up with their own reasons. One article has attributed the success to the KISS (Keep it simple, silly!) strategy. Another said it is an outcome of out of the box thinking. ‘Hummability’ counts, not meaning, pointed out another.
    All valid points. But points, which could be applied equally to a lot of other songs and
    music floating around on Youtube which no one has ever heard. The basic lesson from both these examples is that things like Facebook and Kolaveri Di just happen, you can't make them happen even though you might have an explanation for why they happened, once they have happened.
    In the cultural markets this has been proven time and again. As Watts writes "The history of cultural markets is crowded with examples of future blockbusters - Elvis, Star Wars, Seinfeld . Harry Potter, American Idol —that publishers and movie studios left for read while simultaneously betting big on total failures."
    Closer to home a brilliant example is that of the film Sholay. The film was massacred by critics when it released. As Anupama Chopra writes in Sholay: The Making of a Classic, "Taking off on the title of the film, K.L.Almadi writing in the India Today called it a 'dead ember'… Filmfare's Bikram Singh wrote: 'The major trouble with the film is the unsuccessful transplantation it attempts — grafting a western on the Indian milieu. "The film went onto become the biggest blockbuster in Hindi cinema. Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, the second biggest blockbuster of Hindi cinema (adjusted for inflation) was referred to as an extended wedding video by the film critics.
Joanne ‘Jo’ Rowling, better known as J K Rowling, finished the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1995. The publishers weren't interested. It got rejected twelve times before Bloomsbury, a London-based publishing house agreed to publish it. The initial print run was 1000 copies and the advance Rowling got for the book was£1500.
The book and its sequels were a smashing success and according to Forbes magazine, Rowling was the first person become to dollar billionaire by writing books.
What rings true about books and movies also rings true new businesses. The spectacular success of home-grown IT giant Infosys is a case in point. The initial public offering (IPO) of the company in 1993 was undersubscribed and the company was bailed out by the investment banker Morgan Stanley, which picked up 13% stake in the company.
When Bharti Televentures (now Bharti Airtel Ltd) went in for an IPO in January 2002, it set the floor price at Rs 45. Several analysts back then found this price to be expensive. The stock fell to a low of Rs 20.75 within a year of listing on January 10, 2003.
If people had seen the potential of the stock, when it listed on February 18, 2002, at a price of around Rs 45, they would have multiplied their money by 7.6 times (At the time of writing this, Bharti quotes at Rs 344) by now. And this after the stock price has taken a tremendous beating over the last couple of years.
The same stands true for Google, whose founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page tried to sell the company for $1.6million in the late 1990s. Google currently has a market capitalisation of around $216.5billion.
The moral of the story is that it is next to impossible to predict what will work when it comes to complex systems like culture and business. Given these reasons the explanations people come up with to explain the success of these things is largely irrelevant. On most occasions we don't know. Watt puts it best when he says, "Ultimately, in fact, it may simply not be possible to say why...the Harry Potter books sold more than 350 million copies within 10 years, or why Facebook has attracted more than 500 million users. In the end, the only honest explanation may be the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold because lots of people bought it." Similarly Kolaveri Di succeeded because a lot of people heard it.

Source :ET

12 most likely and crucial science & technology breakthroughs for 2012

2012-01-04T17:49:00.001+05:30

Phones that can be rolled up. Computers that boot instantly. Ultra-cheap gene sequencing. Health care mobile apps...and more.

1) Cloud computing goes viral

Cloud computing has been one of the most discussed subjects in recent years. But it has so far remained just that: a widely discussed tech with few adoptions. This year will be an inflection point, as CIOs find the Cloud irresistible and start using it slowly. Many real benefits will accrue when the technology and business models start maturing soon.

So far, scientists and internet companies have been the main users of big data. Now, traditional firms will find uses for it. Consumers too will begin to use the cloud in a big way and integrate the multiple devices they use. You could take a picture using your smartphone and view it on your computer, or TV, instantly through the cloud. Consumer journey on the cloud has just begun.

2) Hybrid Supercomputers

Big data does not drive cloud computing trends, but it does push supercomputing hard. New supercomputers are being developed rapidly, and their progress is not determined by computing needs alone. Economics and power consumption are vital components too. This year would see the birth of several supercomputers that are lightning fast and others that are low-cost and energy-efficient, but much faster than desktops.

The so-called hybrid supercomputers, which use a combination of mainstream processors and graphics processors, should become popular. But the proliferation of supercomps could pose new problems in software development. By the year end, it could set off a completely new approach towards high performance computing software.

3) Flexible displays

Won't it be wonderful if your phone or tablet could be rolled up and put away in your pocket? Or the newspaper could be read in an e-format yet rolled up like a traditional paper. The first steps towards this goal will be taken this year when Samsung, Nokia and others launch the first phones with flexible displays.

More devices will follow soon. Fully flexible devices are still a few years away, as they also require new kinds of batteries, processors, etc. But we will get there quickly as several new inventions are waiting to be commercialised. On the cards are electronic shelf labels in stores, electronic writing paper, windows that double up as displays, and so on.

4) Memristor
This newly discovered circuit element needs some luck to enter the market this year-end, but if will herald a big change in many industries. Memristor's first use will be as a cheaper and faster alternative to flash memory.
Later, it will also be used in place of solid state drives and transistors. All of them will lead to a big improvement in computing performance Memristor chips will result in computers that can be booted instantly.

Memristor was discovered in 2007 by Hewlett Packard (HP), and is the fourth circuit element after resistor, inductor and capacitor. The first three are indispensible to the electronics industry, and the memristor will be equally important. HP is reported to have progressed rapidly towards commercialising its invention. A launch by the year end is difficult but possible. Get ready to say goodbye to flash memory.

5) Algal biofuel

Last year was bad for biofuel firms, as several of them shut down. Many question the viability of the technology itself, as algal farms need plenty of nutrient and energy inputs that make them expensive. Yet industry observers believe oil prices and other factors might make algae biofuel viable.

This year is significant because algae biofuel would go from labs to commercial plants. Several algae-based oil plants are coming up in Chile, Sri Lanka, Australia and the US. The technology will work in places that have salt water, lots of sunlight and empty non-arable land. An Indian company is experimenting with seaweed, a form of macroalgae, and it will also start work at a pilot facility this year.

6) Low-cost gene sequencing

It took $3 billion to first sequence the human genome. In 2009, the cost was $100,000. Now it is under $10,000. By this year-end, it could touch $1,000 a genome.

The drop in gene sequencing costs has even outstripped that of computing as described by Moore's Law. Sequencing data analysis is becoming a problem, but it will soon be solved by increasing computing power.

There is a good chance that sequencing prices will soon drop to a tipping point where it becomes a part of routine health care.

It will become part of clinical trials, letting us understand diseases and drug responses at a level the industry has only dreamed of. It will take at least five years before patients begin to feel the benefits, but 2012 could be the year that started it all.

7) Green Chemistry

Technology advances mentioned so far can be felt by a large number of people directly. Green chemistry happens below the surface but makes the world a safer place.

Many big companies are switching to benign processes, taking inspiration from nature. This trend will accelerate this year. Pike Research estimates that the green chemistry market will grow to $98.5 billion by 2020 from $2.8 billion.

A large number of safer products and processes are being developed in labs and will be commercialised over the years. For example, chemical polyurethane is made using isocyanates (methyl isocyanate caused the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984). Now a safe alternative is under development, which will make polyurethane biodegradable.

8) New Solar cells

It will be inappropriate if this list did not include solar energy, although we are not identifying any single development. A large number of breakthroughs are waiting to be commercialised over the next few years.

Some of them will be in the market this year. This list includes 3D solar cells, high-powered organic solar cells, efficient printable solar cells, simple manufacturing processes, new methods of storage at night, and so on.

Solar energy will achieve grid parity in many more markets this year, observers claim that it will prove a game changer over the next decade in spite of hurdles like trade wars.

For example, 3D solar cells developed recently by MIT could change the economics of solar energy by making it possible to generate sufficient electricity on cloudy days. A 30,000-cycle battery from Stanford could make solar energy available at night.

9) Hybrid Electric Cars

Like solar energy, electric cars have long been considered a technology of the future. But they have not yet had a big impact on the transport sector because their sales have been restricted to a small group of environment-conscious people. This will begin to change from this year, as technology improvements and new product launches give them wider acceptance.

IDC calls 2012 the "true year of the electric vehicle". This year will see several product launches in the category called the plug-in-hybrid.

These include the Volvo v60, Toyota Prius plug-in-hybrid, Ford C-Max and several others. The price of lithium ion batteries has dropped enough for them to be the primary choice in vehicles, but several alternatives are in research labs, and some of them could break through into the market.

10) Smart Grids

When the electric car market picks up, smart grids have to follow suit. But smart grids have much wider applications. Without them, a big switch to alternative energy is not possible.

Smart grids also make homes, buildings and cities more energy efficient and let utilities manage their loads. Several new cities are being developed with smart grids as a unifying concept. Smart grids also allow advanced services like emergency response.

The switch to smart grids will help utilities save hundreds of billions of dollars. Globally, 2012 is a key year for smart grids with three distinct kinds of activities.

Early movers like Italy, Sweden and parts of the US and Canada go to the next level and deploy data applications. Singapore, parts of Europe and Brazil would see a big push towards building the infrastructure. Late movers like India would have some initial projects on a small scale.

11) Metamaterials

We have deliberately chosen a field that is expected to make significant advances but not likely to create headlines. Metamaterials are artificial materials with properties not found in nature.

These properties depend on the structure of the material rather than its chemical composition. Light goes around certain metamaterials as if they do not exist and have become famous as a means of building an invisibility cloak.

Such a cloak is far away in time, but engineers are exploring a large number of potential applications. Last year showed glimpses of possibilities for wireless power transmission, improved antennas and space and military applications. We expect several advances this year, particularly in the photonic metamaterials. Watch out for new sensors and nano-antennas.

12) Healthcare Mobile Apps

We end this list with an obvious choice. Mobile apps are now all-pervasive but they are yet to reach even a fraction of their potential.

In spite of quadcore phones and other hardware developments, it is applications that will truly transform the mobile landscape. The number of applications recently crossed the one million mark, and they will touch and change many industries. Health care is one such key sector.

Companies like Philips, GE and Siemens are developing mobile applications that are already being used in clinics and hospitals. For example, it is possible for doctors to see images of scans immediately on their mobile device now. This will change the speed and reliability of health care.

Source :ET

12 WHIMSICAL NEW YEAR WISHES

2012-01-02T00:02:00.000+05:30

We want cross-border infiltration, we don’t want ‘B’, we want Anna back at his home, we have a wish on petrol/beer relative price…

Dr Singh Turns Dr Talk The PM talks and talks and talks this year. Pundits want him to act on big things. But we are just being irresponsible mediapersons. We want some buzz (“India loves you, George Bush”), some excitement (“a quarter of Bangladesh is in the clutches of ISI”), easy headlines…So, two pressers a month, and one-on-one interviews every quarter, starting with ET of course.

Rahul Comes of Age Rahul stops being called a youth leader finally. He will be 40-something this year. Just what does young mean? Note that even the film press doesn’t call SRK or Salman or Saif — all 40-somethings — young. And if Rahul’s going to be the Congress PM candidate, or, as excited whispers suggest, even a mid-term PM, all the more reason to drop the “youth” tag.

M&M Turn Friends Mayawati wins UP and tears down all her statues. Or, she loses, quits politics and turns sculptor. Or it’s a coalition government in UP and she and Mulayam join hands and govern peacefully, spreading development all round. Yes…really fantastical wishes. It’s nice to dream.

Veena Malik Beats LeT O Pakistan, our dear neighbour, send us more of your Veena Maliks and less of your LeT-types. Obviously, Ms Malik does less damage than your average LeT chap. The more Pakistan’s Ms Maliks do ‘un-Pakistan’-like things in India, the more Pakistani moral arbiters, who also happen to be close to LeT-types, get agitated. Result? Less attention to LeT-types.

Economists Get it Right What’s common between the weatherman and the Indian economist? Both get their predictions wrong. The Indian economist’s forecasts on just about every economic indicator — inflation, interest rates and growth — were wide off the mark in 2011. Hope they get something right this year. Perhaps, the rain forecast.

Suhel Writes New Book In 2011, Suhel Seth told us how important it is to have an opinion. Soon after, ITC sued him for his opinion on YC Deveshwar. Here is wishing Seth writes a book in 2012 on ‘how to have an opinion and not get sued’. Ah, the possibilities of what happens next…

Bachchans Protest ‘B’ Tag Big B, Small B, Lady B, Momma B…now, Baby B. Too much, we say. Here’s hoping it gets too much for the Bachchans also. The Bachchan family protests, via a joint family Twitter account, at being tagged ‘B’. There are newspaper headlines, TV news goes crazy…then we, and they, drop ‘B’.

New Anti-Terror Squad This one is different. The Angry Young and Old Men of Delhi, who kill over parking and parathas, man a special squad. That should teach them a lesson. By ‘them’, we are of course referring to the terrorists. We can hear their teeth chattering already. Again, we are talking about the terrorists.

India Ends Chindia Realisation sinks in that we are years behind. The Chinese are not bothered. Let’s not give them a reason to laugh at us. Instead, let’s tell ourselves that they build a city in the same time we take to build a road.

Anna Goes Home Let’s hope corruption is wiped out in India this year, just so that Anna Hazare can return to Ralegan Siddhi and never ever has a reason to venture out. One year of him was enough. Maharashtrians have had him for years. They are clearly tougher than Indians elsewhere.

Bolly-Holly Act Stops Can we stop toasting Anil Kapoor and Freida Pinto as Hollywood stars? Kapoor’s toothy grin during the Mission Impossible promos eclipsed even the Taj. Both should stop looking back at Slumdog Millionaire. Even the kids in the movie have moved on.

King Parties Vijay Mallya spent 2011 carping, with reason, about jet fuel prices. But did he notice that in 2011, petrol became costlier than beer? Here’s wishing petrol remains costlier than beer this year, too. Before you reach for the gun, spare a thought for him. Costly jet fuel is bad for Mallya. But costlier beer? That would make the Kingfisher crisis look like a Mallya New Year party.

Source ET

happy new year to all :)

2012-01-01T00:46:00.001+05:30

Happy new year to all :)

JUST A STORY BUT REALLY WORTHY MUST READ

2011-12-29T00:08:00.001+05:30

A boy was born to a couple after eleven years of marriage. They were a loving couple and the boy was the apple of their eyes. When the boy was around two years old, one morning the husband saw a medicine bottle open. He was late for work so he asked the wife to cap the bottle and keep it in the cupboard. The mother, preoccupied in the kitchen, totally forgot the matter.

The boy saw the bottle and playfully went to the bottle and, fascinated with its color, drank it all. It happened to be a poisonous medicine meant for adults in small dosages. When the child collapsed, the mother hurried him to the hospital, where he died. The mother was stunned. She was terrified how to face her husband.

When the distraught father came to the hospital and saw the dead child, he looked at his wife and uttered just four words.

What do you think were the four words?

The husband just said "I Love You Darling"

The husband's totally unexpected reaction is proactive behavior. The child is dead. He can never be brought back to life. There is no point in finding fault with the mother. Besides, if only he have taken time to keep the bottle away, this will not have happened. No

point in attaching blame. She had also lost her only child. What she needed at that moment was consolation and sympathy from the husband. That is what he gave her.

Sometimes we spend time asking who is responsible or who to blame, whether in a relationship, in a job or with the people we know. We miss out some warmth in human relationship in giving each other support. After all, shouldn't forgiving someone we love be the easiest thing in the world to do? Treasure what you have. Don't multiply pain, anguish and suffering by holding on to forgiveness.

If everyone can look at life with this kind of perspective, there would be much fewer problems in the world.

Take off all your envies, jealousies, unwillingness to forgive, selfishness, and fears and you will find things are actually not as difficult as you think.

By : Safia Afreen

10 Things You Should Not Say to Your Boss

2011-12-26T17:24:00.000+05:30

10 Things You Should Not Say to Your Boss

Telling off your boss is a temptation impossible to resist. But letting your guard down can have disastrous consequences. Here’s a list of phrases most bosses hate to hear

When you are interacting with the boss, the most trivial thinking-aloud moment can turn into a nightmare — who knows how your words would be interpreted. So it is absolutely necessary to ensure that your foot doesn’t find a place in your mouth at the workplace, especially around the people you report to. Agreed, telling off your boss is a common fantasy and a temptation almost impossible to resist. But bear in mind, letting your guard down and telling the power-that-be exactly what you feel can have disastrous consequences.
It could be just an innocuous statement, but you may come across as lazy, careless and/or disrespectful to your boss. So, if there isn’t a mental filter in place, or if the existing one has proved to be ineffective, here’s a list of phrases that most employers would hate to hear. Make no mistake, this list is not exhaustive and is in no-particular order.

That’s Not in My Job Description
Nowadays, companies hire those who can wear many hats. So, if a particular task doesn’t come technically under your job description, try not complaining about it — unless it’s completely off the track. “If your boss thinks you are unwilling or incapable of doing what you’ve been asked, you will be considered a weak player,” says Vinay Grover, CEO of Symbiosis Management Consultants, a headhunting firm.

I Can’t Do This Task
You maybe nose-deep in work but an instant refusal gives an impression that you just don’t want to carry out a particular task. “You should always give valid reasons first and then say no,” says Sunil Goel, director, GlobalHunt, an executive search firm. If you happen to be one of those who find it difficult to say no, don’t fall into the trap of saying an instant yes, only to go back on your word later.

I Just Never Got Around To It
It’s quite simple: if your boss has entrusted you with something, you’ve just got to do it. “I was given an interesting assignment to work on while I was on something else. Call it poor time-management, I was unable to work on the project. When my manager inquired, I decided to be honest,” says Nishit Mishra, a marketing executive with a multinational banking giant. Mishra had to hand over the assignment to a colleague; never a pleasant thing to do, and you’d agree.

I Don’t Know How To Do It
You may actually be clueless but you need not say it in as many words. Saying “I don’t know” shows a weakness and it also may be interpreted as an excuse that you just don’t want to do it. “Tell your boss that you are prepared to do the task but that you may require assistance or guidance because you haven’t done it before,” says Grover of Symbiosis.

I Am Overqualified For This
The task at hand might appear ‘lowly’. However, you are at work and instead of playing a big shot, you should just roll up your sleeves and get to work. “This is what your boss expects of you and anything less will show that you are actually not qualified to get things done,” says Ronesh Puri, managing director, Executive Access, a headhunting firm. Do it yourself or delegate it to someone else — come what may, but get it done!

Sorry, I Missed That Point
You might be nursing a hangover or missing your caffeine shot while sitting in a painful early morning meeting. No matter what, be clued in to what is being discussed. Don’t dream of the sundae you plan to have post-lunch when the boss is talking to you. “This phrase can do more harm than good. If you are coming up with such excuses then it leaves an impression that you are not attentive and are losing interest in your work,” says Goel of GlobalHunt.

I Need to Talk to You, It’s Important
Two simple rules that will justify the presence of this statement in this list.

Rule#1: Your time is only half as precious (or even lesser) as your boss’.
Rule#2: What is important to you might not be all that important to your boss. Consider both of these unsaid rules and you will end up making some qualitative changes like saying “slightly urgent” or “somewhat important”.

I Will Try
Your bosses don’t want you to try doing a task, they want you to do it. Trying is not an option here. Saying “I will try” will tell your boss that they cannot depend on you. It will not give them the assurance that the task will be taken care of. You wouldn’t want to hear what management trainee Swati Pillai was told when she muttered the unacceptable. “The company pays you for doing not trying.” Ouch!

Don’t Blame Me — It’s Not My Fault
In the face of criticism or a reprimand, your defense mechanism will inevitably kick in. However, avoid dodging the responsibility or blaming someone else. Of course, you would want to clear the air, but there’s a time, place and way to do it. Don’t defend when the boss’s voice is at a higher-than-comfortable pitch.

Why Do I Need To Do This? This is Stupid!
You maybe on back-slapping terms with your boss, but at the end of the day, he’s the senior. Anything that questions his authority and judgment is to be avoided at all costs. “If your bosses have asked you to do it, they must think it is important enough. By saying this you openly challenge their competency as a boss,” warns Grover.

11 Global Trends That Defined 2011

2011-12-25T20:27:00.005+05:30

It was a year when tyrants ceded power, economies teetered on the edge of collapse, the world’s most wanted terrorist was killed and a tech icon departed. Here’s looking back at the key events of 2011

1. Euro zone alarms kept the world sleepless The sovereign debt crises in the Euro zone had already arisen before 2011 began, but this year saw a marked deterioration that demonstrated the limits of piecemeal solutions. The EU’s leadership duo of Germany and France were clueless as the markets came out baying for foolproof bailout guarantees in the form of a “big bazooka” rescue fund or ‘Eurobonds’.
With austerity pummelling society across Europe with no prospects of economic growth, treaty changes for “more Europe, not less”, i.e. more doses of Brussels — and Frankfurt-based technocratic control over spending priorities of member states — will fuel disenchantment of citizens that they are being exploited by distant, investor-beholden policymakers.
As 2011 ended, the allure of the EU had worn thin. A juggernaut that had absorbed 27 member states in two decades now looks febrile and dangerously close to disintegration. Tough love leadership that can steer the ship towards a ‘United States of Europe’ is the best we can hope from this region.

2. The US economy descended into institutional stasis

The year began with talk of a faster-than-expected economic recovery for the US, which had gained momentum and shown some growth tendencies in exports and consumer spending. But this stimulus-induced effect evaporated in no time, partly due to the infectious Euro zone woes and mostly because of political paralysis caused by a divided government between a Democratic presidency and a Republican Congress.
The politics of balancing budgets and reining in the runaway public deficit consumed America and left a wreck of indecisive policies in its wake. With stimulus drying up and unemployment soaring, Republicans butted in with proposals for across-the-board spending cuts and tax breaks. The resulting chaos behooved a failed state rather than the world’s largest economy, as a countdown began for a dreaded ‘government shutdown’ in September that was narrowly averted. Institutional torpor is all set to keep pegging the US economy back, as political brinkmanship becomes the ‘new normal’ in 2012, a presidential election year.

3. ‘Occupy Wall St’ refashioned the challenge from the Left If the global economic crisis revealed deep flaws and iniquities in capitalist societies, 2011 witnessed the rise of remodeled Left wing politics aimed at the financial elites who were swimming in a sea of profits and bonuses. Instead of targeting amorphous phenomena like ‘globalisation’ and ‘capitalism’, youth in advanced economies began to rally against the hated big banks which had dodged out of regulatory nooses.
Protests, camping and laying siege to public places in the vicinity of financial temples across America and Europe brought back memories of the anti-Vietnam era. 2011 looked a lot like 1969, with a gradually coalescing sense that ‘the people’ had common interests against establishments. Millions agitated and sacrificed personal comforts in ways unfamiliar to a generation that preceded them, implying that change is speeding and new paradigms of power are emanating from the indignation of the masses.
Social mobilisation with an economic justice platform was not as potent in recent history as it was this year, and it threatens to return in even bigger proportion along with the flowers of the spring season in 2012.

4. Arab dictatorial barricades were stormed TheArab Spring uprisings in North Africa and West Asia reaffirmed that political freedom matters as much as economic security for humans to lead dignified lives. 2011 will remain etched in memory as the year when crowds in Tunisia and Egypt shook off hitherto impregnable authoritarian regimes with the speed of lightning. The socially networked youth there accomplished ‘leaderless revolutions’ that were horizontal and non-violent, feats not seen since the fall of apartheid in the mid-1990s.
Although the Arab Spring commenced spontaneously, it was usurped and tweaked in the later half of 2011 by other despots in the region and their foreign benefactors. The destructive wars waged by anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya and anti-Saleh tribal militias in Yemen forced more regime changes, but not without dragging in regional and extra-regional ‘humanitarian’ interventions. War displaced revolution as the central theme by the time 2011 ended, as status quo tyrants like Assad dynasty in Syria hung on with every sinew left in their armoury. Can people savaged by brutal dictators not only overthrow oppressors but also rebuild anew with institutions that distribute power more evenly between state agents and social actors? This is the most key question vis-à-vis the Arab world for 2012.

5. The end of Bin Laden started a virtual US-Pakistan war The daring military operation by American Navy Seals in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, which killed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, is an unforgettable vignette of 2011. The world was transfixed by the news that a man who goaded many with the gospel of radical Islam and a clash of civilisations was eliminated right under the noses of Pakistan’s military, which was allied with the US.
For international security in the coming year, the undeclared USPakistan war is going to pose more headaches than the declared war between the Americans and the Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The unswerving pursuit of institutional self-preservation by the Pakistani military, which has warned the Americans that it has nuclear weapons and is hence not a pushover, puts the US in a situation where it can only declare “victory” and pull out of Afghanistan if Pakistan is realistically tamed and democratised. Al Qaeda has enough traction left in Pakistan to make this a deadly proposition filled with terrorist violence in 2012.

6. China’s Rise: It sneaked past the West and riled Asians
On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11, some wondered whether the West’s war against “Islamofascism” was a strategic blunder or diversion that allowed China to close the power gap with the US. The China of 2011 was much more formidable than the China of 2001 in economic and military means to compete with and outplay the US. While America and its allies were busy battling Al Qaeda, China conserved its vitality, and focused on growth, military modernisation and global relations.
In 2011, the drumbeat of an “Asian century” sounded ever louder as China put to rest speculation that it would stutter from global downturn and clocked 9.3% GDP growth. 2011 also showcased a China that was combative in disputes with its neighbours, evoking fears of a new dominion in Asia. The theory of China’s “peaceful rise” was met with growing cynicism and hand wringing that no one, least of all the US, is able to restrain Chinese aggression any more. With the EU in a shambles and rest of the ‘BRICS’ not yet in China’s league, 2011 could be the year when we settled into a bipolar world order with Washington and Beijing as the two axes.

7. The Iraq war folded while war with Iran still loomed As 2011 closed, the US withdrew all its combat troops from Iraq, with few positive outcomes to take home. The colossal costs in Iraqi and American lives might still be justified ex post facto if a stable and non-discriminatory political system emerges in Baghdad. But authoritarian impulses remain rooted in Iraqi politics along with the vicious strain of Shia-Sunni-Kurdish enmities.
Did America “liberate” Iraq after all or has it abandoned it to the machinations of wily Iran? Suspenseful shadowboxing between the US, Israel and Iran continued in 2011, stoking fears of a regional or even a world war. With the Palestinian statehood drive stalemated, chances of a fireball of military conflicts engulfing West Asia remain on the cards for 2012. Iran’s oppressive polity could also generate internal mass discontent of a scale that could put the Arab Spring to shame.

8. A media mogul’s empire creaked & new media arrived
The travails of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch overflowed in 2011, triggering a climate of introspection about unethical press practices and concentration of information power in the hands of a connected few. Calls for regulating the media echoed from Murdoch’s English heartland all the way to developing countries like India.
2011 was the year of popular pushes for democratic accountability of states, corporations as well as media houses. Internet-based whistleblower journalism of the WikiLeaks variety mushroomed and took on old media stalwarts, powerful militaries, privileged diplomats and corporate bigwigs. Media democracy was a phrase increasingly thrown into the public arena.

9. A nuclear disaster unleashed new energy politics
Just as more and more states were moving in the direction of developing nuclear energy sectors, 2011 introduced a dark shadow of doubt in the form of the Fukushima accident in Japan. Its aftermath saw feverish campaigning against nuclear energy and pushed countries like Germany to declare abandonment of this source.
The role of nuclear lobbies in bending regulatory strictures and flouting safety standards came for intense scrutiny, adding fuel to an anti-nuclear mood in countries as far apart as India, Mexico, Italy and Taiwan.
Will the post-Fukushima blowback give wind to wind and solar energy technologies and help them leap past the nuclear energy sector in 2012? The politics of industrial lobbies, environmental activists and green political parties hold the answer.

10. The world’s largest democracy coped with new democratic currents India’s economic bandwagon slowed in 2011 under the duress of policy drift; the central government scored self-goals while trying to usher in fresh reforms. The flip-flop made by the government on opening the retail sector was one manifestation of what former Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad termed as “too much domestic politics and abuse of freedoms to protest and argue at will”.
Yet, anti-corruption movements and exposure of governance failures that abounded in 2011 happened, thanks to new, non-electoral democratic stirrings in Indian society. They held out hope that the ‘India story’, which was a leading global narrative alongside China’s rise, may return to track in 2012.

11. A business icon shed mortal coils and gave capitalism back its good name The death of Apple’s saintly genius, Steve Jobs, produced a subtle counternarrative to the anti-capitalist mass protests that swamped 2011. Here was a daring entrepreneur and an innovative business leader whose products and services not even ‘Occupy Wall Street’ could skewer with honesty! Karl Marx grudgingly admired the creativity and revolutionary nature of capitalism. In contrast to the ‘greedy bankers’, Jobs’ exemplary life conveyed that not all was lost for the free market in a seesaw year.
2011 is special because it spawned conditions that would define the rest of this decade. Such transformative years come at rare conjunctures in history when existing forms and principles of organising economies, polities and societies become untenable and adjustment or change are inexorable. We can look back at 2011 with the thought that it was the year when the wheels of time took fateful turns.

2011 Biggest Winners & Losers

2011-12-25T20:10:00.002+05:30

Like every year, 2011 changed the fortune- for better or worst - of Public figures, Companies, Brands and countries. Some started the year strongly , but finished lamely. a few leaped into the big league unexpectedly.
Some of the names show why a year can be so volatile in the life of a Person or a Company or a Brand or a Country.

Source : ET

All about banning 3G roaming pacts

2011-12-24T21:14:00.001+05:30

The government canceled the 3G intra-circle roaming pacts among Airtel, Vodafone and Idea. When 3G spectrum was auctioned last year, no company could win the rights to operate in every circle. So, all agreed that they would share some of the others' radio waves in circles where they didn't own a slice of spectrum. The government was asked and it approved of this arrangement at the time. Today, under a different minister, it would be wrong for the government to revoke spectrum sharing, even if on the advice of the law ministry and regulator Trai. The term intra-circle roaming is misleading. Roaming happens when a customer registered in one circle travels in another, possibly with the same operator; in this case, what happens is that a player, say Airtel, with no 3G spectrum in a particular circle makes use of, say, Vodafone's spectrum to acquire customers in that circle. The government's argument in this case is that since in that circle, Airtel did not pay for any 3G spectrum, it should not be allowed to acquire customers in that circle. It says that these arrangements are causing a revenue loss to the government, because in that circle, Airtel paid no money to acquire spectrum.

This argument is specious, because the government's own auction rules limited the number of players in each circle to two. State-owned BSNL was given 3G spectrum for free earlier, and it was the first player to start intracircle roaming. By limiting the number of players in each circle, the government created a scarcity and raised the price: the government raised nearly $13 billion from the 3G auction alone. The revenue loss it refers to now would easily be offset by the scarcity premium it has earned earlier. The revocation move will also aggravate the wasteful use of spectrum, a scarce natural resource. If one player has spare capacity to rent in one circle, it should be allowed to do so, thereby maximising usage. Can the government afford to return the $13 billion if 3G players surrender the spectrum they bought earlier? It's a pity that fear of ill-informed criticism forces the government to embrace suboptimal, anti-consumer policy.

Mobile companies like Vodafone, Bharti Airtel slam government for banning 3G roaming pacts

Open warfare has broken out in the country's telecom sector once again, with a clutch of top mobile operators taking on the government and accusing it of reneging on promises with "retrograde", "irrational" and "illegal" decisions.

A day after the department of telecom (DoT) declared 3G roaming pacts between mobile operators illegal and ordered them to stop them within 24 hours, the country's top mobile phone companies hit back at the government, terming its actions as harmful to customers and to the cause of investments in the sector.

"This decision is tantamount to reneging on a promise," Bharti Airtel, the country's biggest mobile operator, said in an uncharacteristically harsh statement on Friday evening. The company said it was 'shocked' at the 'retrograde' decision and warned that it will take "appropriate recourse to protect its rights".

Vodafone India termed the telecom department's actions as "completely unreasonable" and "totally irrational".

Idea Cellular said it was dismayed and shocked by the government's decision, which it said would adversely impact investor sentiment. Officials said Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular had approached the Telecom Dispute Settlement & Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) to stay the telecom department's order. The case will be heard on Saturday.

The outbreak of open hostilities risks plunging the sector, once viewed as a poster child of the success of liberalisation and now riven by internecine warfare, into further chaos. The sector is already at the centre of the political discourse in the country.

The 2G spectrum sale of 2008 has snowballed into a huge scandal that has jailed a former telecom minister, top officials and embarrassed the government.

Earlier this year, operators, such as Bharti, Idea, Vodafone, Tata Teleservices and Aircel, entered into 3G roaming deals, enabling them to sign up 3G customers across the country even in areas where they did not have third-generation spectrum.

These pacts allowed them to use each others' airwaves and offer 3G services, such as video calling and high-speed Internet, on phones seamlessly across the country. Bharti, Idea and Vodafone entered into one agreement while Tata and Aircel forged another.

But the telecom department and sector regulator Trai viewed these pacts as illegal, a position that received the backing of the law ministry. Various sections of the DoT warned that such agreements could have negative revenue implications for the government.

On Thursday, DoT moved to strike down these pacts saying companies could not offer 3G services to subscribers in service areas where they do not have licences and ordered them to stop offering roaming within 24 hours.

This will mean that an operator like Bharti Airtel will not be able to 3G services to customers outside the 13 service areas where it has 3G spectrum.

The DoT's action came despite vigorous opposition from industry bigwigs. Last month, Airtel boss Sunil Mittal, Idea chief Kumar Mangalam Birla, Vodafone's global CEO Vittorio Colao and a raft of other senior industry officials met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to plead for an endto policy flip-flops and a stable regime.

Mobile operators, none of whom were able to secure all-India 3G licences in auctions in 2010 and were therefore banking on using each other's network to plug in the gaps in networks, were particularly scathing of the DoT's order to discontinue roaming in 24 hours.

"It is going to affect millions of our customers adversely," Vodafone said. A Bharti statement added: "To add to our and customer's dismay compliance is being forced within 24 hours without stating why this haste! ... Customers have to be informed and their financial commitment towards the service has to be protected."

Operators said they had entered into these roaming deals with the full knowledge and blessings of the DoT, which they said had allowed such pacts before the auction of 3G airwaves.

"The 3G roaming agreements... are in complete compliance with all government rules and regulations and this issue was specifically clarified by the DoT before the 3G auction was held-...Based on this clarification, we went into the auction in good faith," Vodafone said. Independent experts sided with the operators.

Prashant Singhal of Ernst & Young said the agreements were not illegal as the government had told operators before the 3G spectrum auction that roaming agreements would be allowed.

"It's a lose-lose situation for customers and telecom companies," he said, adding the decision would create doubt and uncertainty in the minds of investors and "goes against the government's policy of providing broadband to millions".

Mobile industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) called the government's decision a "major setback" and said "the huge investments and tremendous efforts of the operators in rolling out and provisioning 3G services to subscribers" was at stake.

"The unfavorable policy decisions of the regulators and the DoT, scarcity of funds from lending institutions... are all leading to further delays and difficulties for service operators. This is putting at serious risk the ambitious plans of the government itself to close the digital divide in India," COAI President Rajan Mathews said.

Just 10% beneficiaries of NREGA are poor, if you believe statistics

2011-12-24T20:51:00.000+05:30

An inconvenient truth? Or yet another case of shoddy data collection by state agencies? The government is scrambling to prove that it is the latter, after data on the UPA's flagship poverty alleviation programme shows that it may not be reaching its intended beneficiaries, those classified in official-speak as below the poverty line (BPL).

A recent note circulated to all state departments by the rural development ministry revealed that only one crore (10 million) out of the 12 crore job cards registered under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (or NREGA) were officially classified as poor during 2010-11.

Further, the note stated that only 36 lakh (3.6 million) so-called BPL families have worked for at least 15 days during 2010-11 compared with 366 lakh families classified as above the poverty line (APL). This ratio remains little changed this year too, so far in 2011-12, some 20 lakh BPL families are shown to have worked for at least 15 days compared with 202 lakh APL families.

Concieved and enacted as a job guarantee scheme in 2005, the NREGA, which guarantees 100 days of employment to its beneficiaries, became one of the trophy schemes of the Congress-led UPA, giving it a pro-poor halo and helping it land a second term in office after the 2009 elections.

Spending under this scheme steadily rose to Rs 39,377 crore in 2010-11 from Rs 8,823 crore in 2006-07. For 2011-12, the government has budgeted Rs 40,000 crore for NREGA. While talk of fraud and misuse has bedeviled the scheme for years, these have become more common in recent months.

States such as Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh have in the last two years taken action against hundreds of elected representatives respectively for misappropriating NREGA funds. The irregularities include forming musters of ghost workers leading to payments into ghost accounts, delayed and nonpayment of wages and preferential treatment to some farmers.

A clutch of influential ministers and economists have also lately blamed NREGA for rising inflation and acute farm labour shortages in the hinterland. If the rural development ministry's numbers in its note to state governments are to be believed, it means that APL beneficiaries have monopolised the scheme at the expense of the poor.

But ministry officials say this is not correct, noting that data underpinning the numbers was highly unreliable because most states did not correctly mark the BPL status of registered families.

"Basing any conclusions on these numbers will be highly misleading. States have not marked all the families that are BPL and that has resulted in the high numbers of APL," said one official, asking not to be identified. The official contended that if state governments did not have data regarding the status of families and do not mark beneficiaries specifically as BPL, the system automatically classifies it as APL.

"This is totally not what the situation on the ground is. We have asked states to update the information. This is wrong," he added. Independent analysts who closely track NREGA agreed, saying the scheme largely catered to the very poor. "From experience I can tell that people who turn up for work are poor. There is some truth that a lot of benefits are being misappropriated, but on a national basis that cannot be true.

This must be a case of faulty classification of poor and non poor," said Pramathesh Ambasta of Samaj Pragati Sahyog, a grassroots organisation that implements the scheme in the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh.

State government officials also concur with the line taken by the rural development ministry, blaming district authorities for poor recording of data. "Many districts have plainly forgotten to collect the BPL, APL data of workers. That is the reason the MIS data is unreliable as we have not been able to update the status for majority of beneficiaries," said an official in Uttar Pradesh's rural development ministry.

This official said that in UP for instance, while 80% of the job cards belong to BPL families, but state departments have marked only 20% as such in their monthly reports due to unavailability of data from districts. Similarly, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra say that BPL families logically account for up to 80% of the overall work demand.

The central government has started asking for greater granular information, notably the APL or BPL status of beneficiaries, as part of attempts to extend health insurance cover under the Rashtriya Swathya Bima Yojna to all MGNREGA families. Most BPL families already have this insurance cover and the government's wants to better capture data on APL families which fall under the unorganised worker category.

Source :ET

Can Nokia win market share in iPhone era with its first Windows Phones Lumia 800 & 710?

2011-12-18T14:42:00.001+05:30

Like its fall, Nokia's rise to glory would make a epic story. Will its first window phones- the Lumia 800 and 710 - launched this week and the company's comeback in the dual segment , be its beginning?

Weight watchers will know how it feels: to cut the flab and get going with more energy, more buzz. Stephen Elop is now on that side. The Nokia president and CEO has got two new phones, Lumia 800 and 710, out of the lumbering giant in under nine months. They were launched in India three days ago.

For a moment, ignore Lumias' specifications (they don't read half bad). Don't compare them with other Windows Mango devices. Consider what it means for the company. From idea to the store shelf, the Lumia journey is a quick turnaround from handset industry standards. Benchmark it to the old Nokia, it looks like a sprint.

But the real mad dash was the slew of dual SIM phones. More than two years late into India and other emerging economies, the company has announced seven such phones since June. And though late, Nokia came good. It loaded the dual SIM phones with features: Ovi services and specific innovations. The result: it shipped over 18 million such phones since their launch.

Elop is already gushing. In a media interaction in September he claimed that the success of dual SIM phones had a "halo effect on our single-SIM phones. India has shown that brand plus team plus great execution can deliver strong results".

Innovation and agility at both ends of the handset market: does this signal that Nokia is getting its act back together? Or do the achievements pale against the goings on in Apple, Samsung and local manufacturers in emerging economies?

ET on Sunday dissects the anatomy of the dual SIM success to find out whether it can be replicated across phone segments and questions whether Nokia's Lumia can win mind and market share in the iPhone era.

BEST LATE THAN NEVER

There are a lot of things that Nokia did right in the dual SIM segment. But the most important one is that it entered this market at all. Many consumers bought Indian brands because there was no Nokia option. As soon as they had one, the choice was Nokia.

"The brand enjoys high credibility, especially at the low-end. It did the right thing by launching handsets at competitive price points. A consumer did not have to spend more, if anything at all, to switch from an Indian brand to a Nokia dual SIM," says Kunal Bajaj, director India, Analysys Mason, a telecom consultant.

But Nokia did not rely on brand power alone. It included relevant value-additions and innovated for the consumer. Says D Shivakumar, managing director, Nokia India: "We refused to treat the dual SIM market the way the industry was treating it, as a vanilla commodity. We segmented the dual SIM user on parameters like form factors and usage patterns and addressed the pain points of owning multiple SIMs."
For instance, the devices have nudged the second SIM slot on the side of their phones so that users don't take out the battery each time they swap SIMs. They also remember settings of up to five SIMs which spares users the hassles of re-configuring the phone each time.

Jaideep Ghosh, executive director, KPMG India, a consultant, says Nokia's job was made easier as the launches coincided with the period Indian handset manufacturers started struggling: "Most local brands did not invest in the market or build robust supply chains. The import-cheap Chinese-and-sell model is not sustainable for long without any back end. These brands will inevitably suffer when MNCs like Nokia enter their domain. Many of them are now stuck with a lot of inventory as they are also facing credit issues with the distribution network."

Nokia has played on its strengths: great build quality, innovations like a touch-and-type dual SIM phone and support from an FMCG-like distribution network. But some analysts say the low-end is a low-hanging fruit for Nokia. In India and other emerging economies, the brand is synonymous with durability and value-for-money. Smartphones, the real money spinners, is another matter. "Lumia won't have it so easy. Its task is cut out," says Bajaj.

NOT-SO-LUMINOUS FUTURE

It is the segment which clobbered Nokia in the West: smartphones. And though there is cheer at the quick launch of the Lumia range, the numbers of Nokia's profitability must dampen Elop's spirit.

According to Asymco.com, Symbian's share in smartphone platforms fell to 16% in the quarter ending June, from a high of 47% in the same period of 2008. In this quarter, Nokia was one of the four vendors to make losses whereas Apple grabbed two-thirds of the operating profit. Nokia's third quarter performance is better: the company is profitable again. But at $180 million, the profit is about 2% of the top eight brands.

What should worry Nokia more is that Windows Phone 7 remains a no show. The operating service it is betting its existence on has scraped up only 2-5% of the market. This despite all the biggies, HTC, Samsung and LG, launching an assortment of handsets with Windows.

"First, Nokia must convince existing and new smartphone users to consider the Windows Phone OS. Then comes the even more difficult task: to convince users to try it out," says Bajaj.

Few doubt Nokia's hardware capabilities. It has long been famous as an engineering-driven organisation. But the choice of software drives a smartphone. Consumers want more apps, simpler user interface, multitasking capabilities and higher speed on their smartphone. Everything that the Android offers, at very reasonable prices. Does Lumia offer any reason for users to move away from the super-hit Android or the super-niche iOS?

TOO MANY WINDOWS

Nokia's biggest threat maybe the iPhone and Android-powered devices, but there is a battle heating up in its backyard. New-found partner Microsoft is not committed to Nokia alone. Windows Phone 7 or Windows Mango is the operating system for Samsung ,HTC, LG, Dell and Acer. So what is special about Nokia's Windows?

If you go by the Lumia, not much. You can draw similarities between Lumia, HTC Titan and Samsung Focus S. But there are some 'Nokia only' apps and designs too.

"Given the limited time which Nokia has had to design, build and release the phones, it has suitably differentiated the Lumia devices from other Windows Phones. On the hardware front, the Lumia 800 has a unique and identifiable industrial designs on any smartphone and the 710 is the only Windows Phone to feature changeable covers. From a software perspective, there are applications and services which are unique to Nokia, such as Nokia Music, Maps and Drive, and they are expected to build their differentiated offering in 2012," says Nick Dillon, an analyst with UK-based telecom consultancy Ovum.

Nokia has other plans up its sleeve. For instance, a few months ago, it killed the Ovi brand in favour of the Nokia Store. Ovi Contacts is the latest to be booted out. Experts claim that Nokia is planning to extend the visibility of its services through the Windows OS on other phones. Imagine seeing Nokia Maps on a Samsung Windows phone.

This is speculation. What's sure is that 2012 is critical for Nokia: Operation Rolling Thunder, codename for launching phones across price points in the US, will be in full show. Rumours are that the Lumia 900 will debut by March and a Windows 8 tablet in summer. Nokia's future will be clearer then.

Nokia report card: Year One of Stephen Elop

BEFORE 2010... Nokia misreads Dual SIM as a market fad. Does not launch any phone in the segment Indian companies cash in on demand. Brands like Micromax, Spice and Karbonn lead the way Nokia's low-end consumer base shrinks

COMEBACK STRATEGY

Nokia enters the market about 3 years late with two models: C1 and C2

C1(about Rs 2,000 ) is a vanilla phone aimed to challenge cheap Indian brands

C2 loaded with Ovi Mail and Ovi Life Tools. Boasts hot swappable feature: the phone can switch SIMs when it is on

Nokia brand credibility draws consumers from local brands as all dual SIM phones priced to compete with them

At low price, the phones loaded with more features. For example, the C2-03 saves settings of 5 SIMs

Attention to small details, second SIM slot on the side and not under the battery -enhances user experience

Real challengers in mid-segment emerge: Android-based dual SIM phones

Source : ET

I really like the message sent to Americans.. can they Imagine what they/their government does in the rest of the world?

2011-12-16T00:23:00.000+05:30

I really like the message sent to Americans..
can they Imagine what they/their government does in the rest of the world?

Imagine!: speech written & given by Ron Paul

CREDITS:
Obviously Ron Paul for the speech
Voice & Music: Jeremy Hoop
Video animation: Nicholas Bozman & MysteryBox.

Original text:
Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests."

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.

Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.

Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.

The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe-straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment towards us.

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn't stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.

Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

Virus in Govt. Page .... where i can complain ??? help?? my mail Delivery failed.

2011-12-14T15:16:00.000+05:30

Forwarded conversation

Subject: Regarding virus in your web page

------------------------

From: Sundeep Kumar <sundeep.kumar98@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:15 PM
To: laborweb@nic.in

Dear Sir/Mam
Today i was going through your website and i found virus on your web page. here by i am posting the title and photo of it.
regards
title : National Vocational Training Information Service

Sundeep

----------
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-daemon@googlemail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:15 PM
To: sundeep.kumar98@gmail.com

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: laborweb@nic.in

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected. (state 14).

----- Original message -----

MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.220.227.73 with SMTP id iz9mr2092034vcb.62.1323794734245; Tue,
13 Dec 2011 08:45:34 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.220.16.200 with HTTP; Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:45:34 -0800 (PST)
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:15:34 +0530
Subject: Regarding virus in your web page
From: Sundeep Kumar <sundeep.kumar98@gmail.com>
To: laborweb@nic.in
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=14dae9cdc0ede3e77604b3fbfaf9

Service<http://labour.gov.in/database/nvtis.htm>

Food security bill... Another joke...

2011-12-14T00:37:00.000+05:30

How deluded we are when we think that when an important piece of legislation is introduced, policymakers carefully scrutinise it for some room for improvement. Indian democracy is good at passing progressive-sounding legislation that becomes unpopular later for poor implementation and a consequent feeling of letdown and therefore resentment.
Often the problems of poor implementation that surface later stem from small mistakes in design that could have been corrected at very little cost. One would think that our seasoned politicians would see how politically counterproductive such negligence is, but, alas, there is no evidence of such wisdom. Witness the way the National Food Security Bill(Full Bill) is sleepwalking through its last phase. We are afraid that despite its immense promise to help the poor, it might end up in a quagmire unless the cabinet subjects it to a careful scrutiny.

This Bill is Congress President Sonia Gandhi‘s dream bill.. Here is This Bill in Short...

Food security bill

• It will cover 63.5 percent of the total population including 75 percent of the total rural population. Of this number, 46 percent would be priority households. In urban areas of the 50 percent of total population, 28 percent would be priority households.

• Priority households would be given 7 kg per person or 35 kg per family of government held grains. Subsidised rates would apply to 1 kg of millets, 2 kg wheat and 3 kg rice.

• The bill provides for cash benefits to meet nutritional requirements of pregnant women and lactating mothers and children up to 14 years.

• The bill is likely to cost Rs 1 lakh crore annually in subsidies.

• Pranab Mukherjee, Sharad Pawar and Montek Singh Ahluwalia have objected to this bill in a cabinet note. The PM had set up an EGOM on this. But since this is Congress President Sonia Gandhi‘s dream bill, the govt had to finally give in to her demands.

Also following is in the Bill..

As the NAC draft suggested, the eldest woman over 18 years of age in each family will be regarded as head of the households and the ration card will be in her name.

The grievance redressal mechanism will be three-tiered, as proposed in the draft bill.

In delivery of foodgrains, a significant role for local bodies like panchayats is envisaged.

The Cabinet note points out that annual requirement of foodgrains to ensure food security will be 60.74 million tonnes. The outlay will be Rs 27,663 crore more than is currently being spent on the Public Distribution System.

Besides, the ministry of women and child development has asked for Rs 35,000 crore for the ICDS programme which is part of the food security schemes.

Rs 8,920 crore is the estimated amount required for feeding destitute, homeless and disaster-affected persons.

Rs 13,500 crore will be spent on pregnant and lactating women. Administrative expenses will cross Rs 1,000 crore.

The cost of handling and transportation of food grains would work out to Rs 8,300 crore per annum.

Now here are few question which i want to ask...

1. Why Govt. is ready to invest 1lack crore when it is not able to match its fiscal Deficit ?

2. The Cost of production is going to increase in future and the Govt. prices is going to remain same? how much will the increase? it may become a burden on Govt. of India.

3. Instead of government giving fish cant it teach how to catch a fish? in other words why cant govt invest in giving vocational training or developing some skills to earn livelihood? because in short run Subsidy help but it become a burden in long run and for that vocation skill or skill development is best answer.

4. There are other welfare schemes such as MNREGA, and other which success level is not so motivating then how can we assure that this will work?

5. Inflation??? As per RBI this move will lead to increase in inflation? When RBI taking so much efforts to curb inflation and its not the responsibility of Govt to help RBI?

6.Can this Bill will be implemented successfully? without corruption ?

At the end i just want to say that to remove poverty from India, the bill is not efficient. in my view this is just a trick to maximize vote bank. If govt want to eradicate poverty it must spend in vocational training because in long run and if this sum is invested in technical education this will create pool of skilled workforce which will provide competitive advantage to country. If Govt is serious then go with this bill to provide food to poor but please thing about giving vocational training because in long run it can be more effective.

Technological beasts like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube & Google impossible to control

2011-12-11T13:07:00.001+05:30

They were places that let you be: to chat with buddies, exchange photos and plan parties. The rules of engagement were loos, voyeurism passed off as curiosity, vanity as sharing and gibes as friendly banter.

Becoming the voice of a generation was never the agenda. Neither was toppling governments or inciting riots. But technological beasts are impossible to tame. And social networking sites (SNWs), made up of millions of lives, have morphed into the most unpredictable monster yet.

What started as online hangouts, have become a melting pot of opinions and ideas. Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Google+, enjoy power of the collective, bolstered by technology that allows real-time interaction and blurs physical distances. The effect has shaken up the world: Wall Street to West Asia.

Little wonder parts of the Indian establishment also seem worried. They don't know what to make of a few thousand people who publicly "hate" a political leader, trash a public policy in tweets or support the conventionally profane.

But the government ought to have been smarter than to call the biggest social media intermediaries, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, into a closed door meeting and force stricter rules. The news leaked, and the beast became angry. Social network users have gone into a frenzy to protect their rights.

Kapil Sibal, communications minister, held a press conference to highlight the kind of user-content that the government opposes. He clarified the government wants pre-screening not censoring. But SNW followers have paid no heed. For any external control taints the idea of an online hangout.

But one can't wish away perverseness. And Sibal is not completely wrong, there is plenty of it on SNWs. The question is, who should take it down? Users, hosts or the government?

Extra Rules Not Required

The country has not been running without cyber laws. So why invent new ones for the social media? "Rules are already in place, the Information Technology Act, 2000 and Information Technology Rules, 2011, which allow anyone, including the government, to take a legal recourse," says Pawan Duggal, advocate in the Supreme Court of India and a cyber law expert.

Section 2(1) of IT Act defines an "intermediary" as any person who on behalf of another person receives, stores or transmits a message or provides any service with respect to that message. By this definition, an intermediary is just a messenger. SNWs, internet service providers and web hosts fall in this category.

Changes and additions to the IT laws have already made their job tough. SNWs are responsible for taking down all potentially problematic content as and when requested. There is a time limit too: 36 hours to respond to such a request. If an SNW refuses to do so, it can be dragged to the court as a co-accused.

Duggal says that web hosts can be prosecuted if they create unlawful content, incite and encourage unlawful activities, or fail to remove illegal content despite it being brought to their notice. So why does the government suddenly want more rules for them?

Asking for the Moon

No one's denying the need for regulation. And SNWs have good regulators: millions of users. If even one finds a post offensive, he or she can report abuse. The nomenclature may be different, but every host of user-generated content has this option.

The problem is there's no scale to measure what offends sensibilities. There's a list of items that are considered illegal but they are not defined. For instance, "harmful to minors", makes the cut, but what qualifies as harmful is unclear. Even pornography is not defined by Indian laws.

This is why the government may not be wrong to be on tenterhooks. But its solution to the problem is untenable: both conceptually and technologically. "A pre-screening mechanism is not impossible. Tools and algorithms to monitor social media content are constantly evolving. But considering the scale of FB, YouTube, Twitter, etc, it will definitely affect real-time interaction," says Shree Parthasarathy, senior director, enterprise risk services, Deloitte, a consultancy.

Numbers corroborate the view. In India itself, there are almost 43 million users on Facebook, 3.6 million on Google Plus and 3.5 million on Twitter. Worldwide, YouTube uploads more than 48 hours of video every minute. Imagine an army of employees monitoring each post by referring to a catalogue of words considered unacceptable and a repository of images that are deemed inappropriate or offensive.

"The question is not whether it's possible but whether it's appropriate. Such a move will require extensive investment in infrastructure," says Parthasarathy.

Advith Dhuddu, founder of AliveNow.in, a social media firm based in Bangalore, says: "Technology doesn't understand sentiments or sarcasm. It won't distinguish between a porn clip or a video on sex education." Further, even if India decides to monitor content within the subcontinent, it cannot control what's created outside of the country.

Anti-intermediary Legacy

India has never been a favourite among web hosts. IT laws here have always been stricter than in the West and despite amendments, the burden of responsibility on intermediaries is high. "If pre-screening kicks in, web hosts will not be able to claim they did not know about any contentious material on their sites as they will have a seal of approval. This will undermine the sites' legal immunity, a big worry for web hosts," says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).
Outside India, there's differential treatment for different kinds of intermediaries, the principles of natural justice are implemented and there are options for counter notices and notifications. For instance, in Brazil, as per a draft bill, if someone sends three fraudulent take-down notices, he will not be allowed to send a take-down notice again for a year.

Before 2008, things in India were worse. Intermediaries were liable for their user's content. This led to the arrest of Bazee.com chief, Avnish Bajaj, in connection with the sale of the infamous DPS Noida MMS clip CD on the website.
Post the Bazee.com fiasco, IT laws have been amended. But according to Abraham, "There is still no principle of natural justice, no differentiation between different types of intermediaries and no penalty for abusing."

No wonder social media is over cautious. An unpublished report by the CIS claims intermediaries err on the side of caution and "overcomply" when take-down notices are sent. The researcher sent fraudulent notices to seven intermediaries, including prominent search engines and hosts, identifying specific user-generated material as offensive.

"Of the seven intermediaries to which take-down notices were sent, six over-complied...Not all intermediaries have sufficient legal competence or resources to deliberate on the legality of an expression, as a result of which, intermediaries have a tendency to err on the side of caution," says the report.

No Muzzle, Just Checks

The bottom line is: government control will take the fun away from SNWs. Imagine an invisible monitoring authority checking out pictures of a party before your friends and family can. It is creepy. It also hints at repression, of the kind China specialises in. No thank you, we are not competing in this department.

Some people believe the government doesn't intend to censor SNWs, it just goofed up on the communication. "Sibal is right in saying that obscenity in real and cyber space is the same. He bungles when he puts an insult to the Prophet, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh in the same bracket. Had he put the debate in a different form, citizens might have appreciated that he's desperately trying to do a good job," says sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan.

If that's true, government officials can start a page: "I like social networks". That is a language we all understand.

Post your post

What usually happens when you post something on websites hosting user-generated content, including social networking websites (SNWs).

You Post: Status updates, a link, a video, comment or interact on news sites.

Most SNWs don't Filter: There are no real-time filters. Thus, content is uploaded immediately.

While Some Do: Some websites use profanity and image filter softwares to weed out offensive content.

Others Moderate Completely: In some websites, entire user content is moderated by site owners.

Post-facto Measures: Most sites have post-facto measures like clicking 'Report' on Facebook and 'Flag' on YouTube.

Scanning Content: Post request, websites check the content and if illegal, or against their policy, remove it within 36 hours.

Scope of Liability: If they refuse to comply, websites can be tried as co-accused if the complainant decides to file a case.

Source : ET

Outside Edge Lower bureaucracy must be covered under Lokpal

2011-12-09T21:08:00.001+05:30

There has been some discussion lately about excluding the lower bureaucracy from the Lokpal. One of the main reasons being bandied about is that the Lokpal will be overloaded should it include the lower bureaucracy, and it will fail as a result of this overload. There are two sides to this issue -- the politics and the feasibility.

Let us first look at the politics behind this move. The government, or for that matter, most political parties, are keen on excluding the lower bureaucracy because corruption at this level feeds the rank and file of the political parties. For example, more than 80% of Rs 40,000 crore of the PDS subsidy is siphoned off, all of it through ration shops and food officers. The Rs 35,000 crore food grain scam in UP over many years, which is currently being probed by the CBI, took place at the lowest rung of the bureaucracy involving several hundred employees. This is a phenomenon that cuts across party lines and sadly comes at the expense of the poorest of our poor people. Including the lower bureaucracy under the Lokpal could potentially cut off the life-supply of our country’s political establishment. Not surprisingly, a consensus around excluding the lower bureaucracy is bound to emerge among our political parties.

As far as the feasibility is concerned, at the surface, it might seem like a legitimate argument. But the government appears to be very keen on including NGOs under the ambit of the Lokpal. There are close to sixty-five thousand employees in the lower bureaucracy while there are close to 50 lakh NGOs in our country! On the one hand, our government does not want to include the lower bureaucracy because it is a seemingly mammoth task. On the other, they want to tackle corruption among NGOs! The issue comes back to politics. Covering NGOs implies that the government has a free hand to harass anyone and everyone who has an NGO (Kiran Bedi being a current victim). If NGOs are covered, it means that if you and a handful of cricket lovers collect some dues and form a club to play “gulley cricket” but have bad things to say about those in power, you could be under the radar too! Clearly, feasibility is an excuse to camouflage the need of political parties to protect the corrupt practices in the lower bureaucracy and to target NGOs that don’t suit their purpose.

When it comes to feasibility, let’s not jump to conclusions. India has produced some of the best brains in technology. Our engineers have been an integral part of some of the most advanced technological developments in the world. Moreover, times have changed. Advances in technology have made it possible for strangers from across the globe to collaborate effectively in real-time without ever meeting in person. Traditional governmental tasks could use a significant overhaul with the use of the Internet. From a technology perspective, many things that seemed impossible in the past are doable today given time, money and the required technological know-how. Didn’t we as a country launch the gargantuan UID project to tackle identity for 120 crore people? Why should we avoid setting up a system to curb corruption among sixty-five thousand employees of our lower bureaucracy?

Let me give you a simple yet poignant example to further illustrate this point. You might be aware that many of our most passionate and committed RTI activists have been eliminated by vested interests over the last few years. A young man still studying in his third year in IIT decided that he could apply technology to at least partially solve this problem. So, along with a couple of other like-minded technologists from around the globe, he set up a website named RTI Anonymous (http://www.getup4change.org). This website provides a simple service for anyone who might be interested in filing RTI applications without having to fear for their lives. After you provide the details of your RTI filing on this website, these young men file the RTI application on your behalf. They have no axe to grind. They are simply acting as facilitators for a very useful service. Once the response is received, they simply pass on the information back to you. Undoubtedly, this is a simple, yet invaluable service that can benefit many. It was easy enough to implement and manage that this team could do it from anywhere, as long as they had Internet access.

My intent of narrating this is not to trivialize the feasibility issue but to highlight the importance of leveraging technology and unleashing the creativity of our best and brightest. There is little doubt that we, as a country, have more than the necessary human capital to take on the biggest challenges. If we can allocate the resources and put our best minds behind it, tackling corruption in the lower bureaucracy is not insurmountable.

Let us not shy away from problems simply because they are hard. The reality is that we have a serious problem of excessive corruption in government, and we desperately need solutions to tackle corruption at every possible level. Excluding the lower bureaucracy from the ambit of Lokpal is like trying to cook “sambar” without “toor dal” or “rajmah” without kidney beans. Suggesting that media, corporations, etc., should also be under the Lokpal is a distraction from the fundamental problem at hand. The primary focus of version 1.0 of our Lokpal bill should be on tackling corruption in government, and government alone.

Pran Kurup
Wednesday October 26, 2011, 02:52 PM

National telecom Vision/Policy/Mission: Lies, lies and lies

2011-12-09T20:56:00.001+05:30

The voluble minister for communication, Kapil Sibal, unleashed the new National Telecom Policy, 2011 on us and left me with no option, really.

The policy document, once again a list of pious platitudes, how great we are or should be and how we will strive to earn our rightful place and so on. There is very little by way of when and how and a closer look reveals that a lot of it is nothing but what we have been hearing for at least a decade. Since I am focussing on indigenous telecom technology, let me draw your attention to the mission statements.

There are 5 'mission statements' in the new policy, and the one at No 3 wants to "Make India a hub of telecom equipment manufacturing and provisioning of converged communication services." Noble mission indeed, but wait.

Now please rewind and look at the 'vision statement' from the national Telecom policy 1999, i.e. a good 12 (TWELVE) years ago.

The vision statement then said we need to "strengthen research and development efforts in the country and provide an impetus to build world-class manufacturing capabilities" and "with a view to promoting indigenous telecom equipment manufacture for both domestic use and export, the Government would provide the necessary support and encouragement to the sector, including suitable incentives to the service providers utilizing indigenous equipment." See what I mean?

For all you know, the person drafting the latest policy may have simply cut and pasted from the policy of 1999 and changed the language. Job done, boss happy, gullible satisfied. Little wonder, the contribution of Indian made telecom equipment in the total consumed in the country is a piffling 2-3 per cent.

In 2007-08, the total equipment demand was for Rs 58781 crore. The indigenous contribution to that was Rs 1000 crore. In 2008-09, the figure was Rs 60,294 crore and Rs 1200 crore and in 2009-10, it was Rs 54765 crore and Rs 1400 crore. For the nation with the highest telecom growth in the world, it is a matter of shame.

It is not that the government is not aware of this. During two successive India Telecom addresses, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has raised this issue. In 2008, he had said "I assure you that the Government will develop a forward looking policy regime that will encourage investment in manufacturing in telecom sector. While we can be satisfied with the growth in tele-density, I am concerned about our capabilities in telecom R&D & manufacturing. Can we have a sector where we are world class in telecom network but do not have an adequate manufacturing presence?" Again a very noble thought.

Surprise surprise, he seemed to realise the next year (2009) that not much had happened after his statement the year before when he said that "Slow growth in the telecom manufacturing sector in India is an area of some concern for us." But lip service has no sanctity, and so is the case with the PM's statements. So we languish.

In fact, even the telecom watchdog realizes it and said as recently as April this year in its recommendations on encouraging equipment manufacturing in India that "Although the New Telecom Policy of 1999(NTP '99) contained stipulations regarding promotion of domestic products, promotion of exports and utilization of indigenous equipment, no plans or schemes for implementation of these aspects of the policy have come to light."

In fact, this culture of lip service and taking the gullible citizens for a ride continues unabated and has gotten worse. Remember how we are told that some of the biggies in the world of handset manufacturing are now making some top-end phones in India? If it makes you feel good, do look at the 'made in India' product carefully. Please find below two pictures of Motorola's popular smart phone called Defy.

The first picture is of the box, where it clearly says "Manufactured by M/s Motorola Mobility Chennai Pvt Ltd. Etc.

Now take the phone out of the box, open the back cover and pull out the battery, and see what it says.

By :Rajesh Kalra
Tuesday October 11, 2011, 09:07 PM

EU summitt : What's in the new deal to save the euro?

2011-12-09T20:41:00.001+05:30

Twenty-three European Union states agreed Friday to set up a new treaty, giving up crucial powers over their own budgets in an attempt to overcome a crippling debt crisis.

Q: Who's in it?

A: All 17 countries that use the euro, plus Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. Those six states are likely to eventually adopt the common currency, so it makes sense for them to subscribe to the rules now.

Q: Who's not in it?

A: The U.K. and Hungary gave a clear ``no,'' while Sweden and the Czech Republic left the door open to sign up at some point.

Q: Why did Europe need a new treaty?

A: For the past two years, the countries that share the euro have been rocked by a debt crisis that has recently threatened the survival of the common currency itself. Germany and France in particular argued that only tough rules enshrined in a treaty would convince markets that all countries will be able to repay their debts and a similar crisis will never happen again.

Q: How will that be achieved?

A: Debt brakes in national constitutions: All 23 countries commit to keep their deficits below 0.5 percent of economic output. That cap can only be broken in exceptional circumstances or to counteract a recession. The European Court of Justice will make sure all states' debt brakes are effective.

More automatic penalties for deficit sinners: It will be more difficult for countries to stop one of their partners from being punished for breaking the EU's debt and deficit rules. In the past, governments often protected their partners from being sanctioned.

All states have to tell their partners in advance how much debt they plan to take on through bond sales.

Q: What else did they decide?

A: The eurozone, together with other willing EU states, will give as much as (euro) 200 billion to the International Monetary Fund, so that the IMF can help beef up the eurozone's firewalls.

The eurozone's new, permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, will take over from the current rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, one year ahead of schedule, in July 2012. Unlike the EFSF, a hastily set up private company owned by all eurozone states, the ESM is a permanent organization run by governments. It also has paid-in capital, similar to a bank, and is therefore more credible on financial markets.

Decision-making in the ESM was simplified in emergency situations, giving a majority of 85 percent of capital holders the power to decide on giving a struggling country a bailout. That is meant to stop small countries from blocking or slowing down urgent rescues, as has happened in the past.

The eurozone scaled back the rules to force banks and other private investors to take losses when a country gets a bailout from the ESM. The previous push to inflict losses on bondholders has been blamed for exacerbating the crisis.

Q: What did they fail to agree on?

A) Eurozone leaders did not decide to boost the overall firepower of their own bailout funds, which is currently limited to (euro) 500 billion. They promised to reconsider that cap in March, shortly before the ESM comes into force.

They did not give a clear signal that the European Central Bank will take on a bigger role in fighting the crisis by buying up bonds from struggling countries on a massive scale to keep their funding costs in check.

They did not agree to more intrusive powers for the European Commission over the fiscal policies of wayward states, as had been demanded by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and some nations. Instead, they promised to ``examine swiftly'' much more lenient proposals from the Commission.

They did not allow the bailout funds to directly recapitalize failing banks. That could have prevented countries from taking on more debt when they have to bail out lenders.

Q: Will it work?

A: Initial market reaction to the deal was lukewarm and many of the details of the new treaty and how the firewalls will function remain to be worked out. After many summits that claimed to have ended the crisis, investors and analysts have become cautious in their assessment of yet another grand declaration. Much will depend on whether the stricter fiscal rules can persuade the ECB to unleash massive funds to buy up eurozone bad debt.

3D advertising: Pixion, Prime Focus and others working to cash in on the tech's popularity.

2011-12-09T20:14:00.001+05:30

Hollywood has mastered it. Bollywood swears by it. Now it's the turn of advertisers to take to 3D and add a new dimension to marketing.

So, if you watch Don 2 in 3D later this month, there are chances that besides the don, Zoozoos and Axe girls too may appear within touching distance. That's because several marketers are working on 3D commercials to cash in on the technology's increasing popularity.

"Today, you name any brand that is advertising on TV and it's asking for an additional 3D version for their commercial," says Bhaarath Sundar, visual effects CEO and advertising partner at Prime Focus India.

An advertising official says Hindustan Unilever, GlaxoSmithkline, Vodafone and Tata Motors are all working on 3D commercials to be released shortly, but none of the companies confirmed this.

Post-production companies such as Pixion, Maya Digital and Prime Focus said they are busy producing 3D commercials for Indian companies for release early next year, but refused to name any of their clients.

Rajesh Mishra, CEO (Indian operations) of digital film distribution company UFO Moviez, said 3D advertising will become big in the country within 6-8 months. "Producing 3D content is expensive but brands can afford it because commercials are shorter in duration, lasting anywhere between 10 seconds to one minute," he said.

The main driver for this rush for a third dimension is the popularity of 3D films. While at least one 3D film from Hollywood is hitting the screen every month, Indian filmmakers too are joining the rush with about 10 local language 3D films in various stages of production or post-production.

Merzin Tavaria, co-founder and chief creative director at Prime Focus, says, "As numbers of 3D films grow, so shall 3D advertising." His firm has refurbished its facility at Khar in Mumbai to handle the growing 3D needs of the advertising sector.

Of all the commercials shown during the screening of Ra.One the one that stood out the most was the 3D commercial for Google Chrome.

Harish Shriyan, managing partner of OMD India, a media buying arm of Omnicom Group, says greater recall value and greater connect are among the advantages of 3D advertising.

James Stewart, a 3D filmmaking pioneer and founder of Canada-based Geneva Film Co, recently quoted multiple studies by ESPN, Xpand and Texas Instrument to say 3D ads delivered 92% recall among viewers and viewer retention was on an average 15% higher than normal ads.

But there is one overwhelming disadvantage: Cost. Post-production prices, or the cost of converting 2-D film into 3D, to create a regular 30-second commercial could be anywhere between 6-12 lakh. This would mean 50%-80% additional cost on a normal advertisement.

That kind of extra expense only for exposure to cinema halls showing 3D films could make several marketers turn their backs on the idea at a precarious time when the economy is slowing.

"I'm certain that a lot of people start with the idea of exploring 3D advertising for brands, but the idea is usually abandoned in the first few meetings with clients and production houses. The cost is substantially more than 2D," says Sajan Raj Kurup, founder and creative chairman of Creativeland Asia, which recently created a 3D campaign for Audi A8 luxury sedan. "The question to be asked is does the idea really warrant the extra dimension, and is the extra cost justified," he says.

Durables brands Whirlpool and Panasonic aired 3D commercials during the live 3D screening of the Indian Premier League twenty20 cricket tournament in April. "We were the first company to make a 3D ad in India," says Shantanu Dasgupta, VP, corporate affairs at Whirlpool India. He, however, says the company is not planning more 3D commercials because it's focusing on TV as a mass medium. "You really cannot have a 3D ad on TV, at least today."

Experts expect most marketers to stay lukewarm about 3D commercials until 3D television catches up. But it may take years in a country where HDTV, a natural precursor of 3D television, is in a fledgling stage with only a few high-definition channels in the country.

"There is still a lot of time for TV getting captured by 3D advertising," says Josy Paul, chairman and national creative director of advertising agency BBDO India. He says 3D advertising starts from outdoor before graduating to in-camera.

Source ET

December 9 European Union Summit: Solution to the eurozone crisis or a fudge?

2011-12-08T17:01:00.001+05:30

The 27 countries of the EU will hold a summit on December 9 in what has been called the last chance to solve the eurozone financial crisis. However, in politics, 'last chances' are rarely final. The eurozone has already gone through at least four rescue packages, initially hailed as final solutions but later exposed as unsustainable fudges.

History may repeat itself at the December 9 summit. It could produce another package that enthuses optimists temporarily. Yet, this optimism could soon be eroded by continuing doubts on the ability of European politicians to deliver some sort of plausible fiscal union.

Angela Merkel of Germany visualises institutionalised austerity as the foundation of the new fiscal agreement, with strict fiscal rules enforced by an independent institution such as the European Court of Justice.

Any such institution charged with implementing sanctions would need a formal mandate to override national finance ministers. But this would imply a politically impossible surrender of sovereignty by other members. The contradiction may be papered over by noble expressions of intent at the summit, but will not go away.

Institutionalised austerity looks certain to sink Europe into serious recession in 2012, and it may well drag down the world economy along with it. This is a pity: economic news from the US is increasingly positive, and that country seems on the verge of finally coming out of its four-year stagnation.

The unemployment rate is down, the Thanksgiving season witnessed record increases in retail sales, and both GDP and industrial production have picked up. But the fallout from Europe could nip this recovery in the bud.

There is one solution. If only the European Central Bank (ECB) agrees to print money in unlimited quantities to support the bonds of eurozone states - something Ben Bernanke would do without a second thought in the US - then the euro crisis would end. This would cause inflation, but would guarantee that all sovereign debt would be repaid in full.

Alas, the ECB has a single mandate to produce price stability, unlike the US Fed which is also mandated to produce full employment and economic growth along with price stability.

The ECB apart, Merkel will not countenance an ECB that simply prints money and lets errant states like Greece off the hook. Indeed, unlimited ECB support for country bonds would probably violatethe EU treaty and provisions of the German constitutional court.

One proposed fudge is for the ECB to lend money to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which would then give big loans with stiff conditionality to individual states. Whether this dodge will pass legal scrutiny is uncertain. Besides, the transmission of cash to the deficit countries via the bureaucratic IMF will be slow and limited, and so may not suffice to prevent a snowballing bank crisis that hits the sovereign bond markets too.

The problem began with the creation of a monetary union between 17 of the 27 EU members, who gave up their national currencies and adopted the euro. Even at the time, economists like Martin Feldstein warned that a monetary union without a fiscal union would fail.

The US, for instance, has 50 states in a common monetary and fiscal union. They all use the same currency, so if some states turn uncompetitive, they cannot devalue to get out of their structural disadvantage.

But being part of a fiscal union, taxes from the competitive states will automatically meet additional welfare spending in the uncompetitive states, and nobody views this as unfair.

However, the eurozone is not a single nation: it represents countries that have adopted a common currency and central bank, but do not have a fiscal union. Money does not automatically flow from countries with surpluses to those with fiscal deficits. So, while the eurozone as a whole has a very manageable fiscal deficit of around 4% of GDP, the prudent northern members run surpluses while the southern members have large deficits.

For maybe a decade, Greece and Portugal have been uncompetitive in relation to Germany or Holland, yet all have the same currency, and the weaker members cannot devalue to regain competitiveness. Instead, the only course is 'internal devaluation' through continuing cuts in real wages and welfare benefits, which are utterly corrosive and almost certainly unsustainable in a democracy.

This buttresses the case for breaking up the eurozone. Either a few laggards like Greece can exit, or the zone can split into two currency zones, one for stronger northern countries and another for weaker southern ones.

However, European politicians absolutely refuse at this stage to look at a eurozone split or collapse. They believe that the exit of a single member would lead to contagion and the exit of one country after another. So, they have resolved to hold firm.

Yet, this leaves unaddressed the problem of how to keep highly competitive countries like Germany and Holland inthe same currency union as uncompetitive ones like Greece and Portugal.

Talk of staying together will have to be backed by an agreement on the terms under which surplus states will always agree to bail out deficit ones. However, voters in the north are against constant bailouts, and voters in the south resent what they see as northern arrogance and bullying. Many types of fudge are possible to overcome the problem temporarily, but no lasting solution is in sight.

Source : Swaminathan S A Aiyar(ET)

Is Congress really providing inclusive growth?

2011-12-06T00:36:00.001+05:30

The Congress claims inclusive growth as its goal. It has thrust a huge redistribution agenda on the government, making it spend heavily on rural employment, healthcare and education, apart from assorted subsidies. Yet, when inclusive growth actually turns out to have happened, the party couldn't care less.

Instead of cheering and clapping and tom-tomming this achievement, the Congress is content to let the good news rest in terse, official press releases. Does the Congress really care about growth and inclusion? The index of human development (HDI) for the country has gone up 21% between 1999-2000 and 2007-08. About 60% more women give birth in hospitals today than in 2005, making for sharp reduction in maternal mortality.

While the infant mortality rate for scheduled tribes has improved for the country as a whole, it has deteriorated a massive 43% in Gujarat. True, these are statistics, which many people rank lower than lies. Yet, these cold numbers tell the story of change in the lives of real people , one that spells the difference between hope and despair , between progress and stagnation, indeed, between life and death.

Shouldn't this change exercise, engage our political parties, at least the ones that claim to stand for the common man? India Human Development Report 2011 has been brought out by the Planning Commission-affiliated Institute of Applied Manpower Research. It presents a wealth of data on a variety of parameters that determine social welfare. The Human Development Index it employs weaves in three things: income, educational attainment and health. The data cover the period from the late 1990s to mid-to-late 2000s.

The maximum improvement has been in education, a gain of 28%. Income has gone up by about 21%. Which leaves improvement in healthcare to trail that in the overall index by a significant margin. In 2005, the government launched a scheme to give cash incentives to women who give birth in a hospital, rather than at home. The scheme, called Janani Suraksha Yojana, has raised the number of institutional deliveries from 108.4 lakh in 2005 to 168 lakh in 2010-11 , The Times of India reported recently , citing health ministry figures.

This has helped bring down the maternal mortality rate (MMR) to the low 200s. MMR is the number of instances of the mother dying per 1,00,000 live births. It is as low as 7 for a country like Norway , which ranks number one in human development at a global level. The infant mortality rate, the number of children per 1,000 live births who fail to live beyond their first year, is another important measure of a society's well-being.

Overall levels of income, nutrition , health, education, women's empowerment, infrastructure and governance determine IMR . While it is as low as 11 and 12 for Goa and Kerala (still a far cry from the level of around 3 achieved by Singapore, Finland, Iceland, etc), it continues to be as high as 63 for Uttar Pradesh and 50 for India as a whole. One very stark message of the HDI report is that economic prosperity alone does not translate into popular welfare . Gujarat's is an example the report highlights.

While Gujarat has been one of the most telling economic success stories among Indian states , its human development indices are weak. The state has a large tribal population, 16.5%, and their lot would appear to be pathetic, dragging the overall average for the state down. Between 1998-99 and 2005-06 , IMR for India as a whole declined from 68 to 50. The decline for scheduled tribes pan-India was from 84.2 to 62.1. In Gujarat, alone among all the states, IMR for scheduled tribes deteriorated over this period, and that too, by a massive 43%, rising, as it did, from 60.3 to 86. Since the poor social development of India's tribal groups is closely correlated with growth of Maoist insurgency , shouldn't these numbers interest the Congress and other political parties that profess concern for national security?

Shouldn't Gujarat's numbers offer political fodder to the Congress? Are the party's strategists alive to the goodwill implementation of the Forest Rights Act could yield the party in tribal areas? In reality, there is no great mystery as to why the actual, achieved results of inclusive growth policies fail to excite ruling party leaders and workers. It has to do with the intent of political power.

If you seek power to change society for the better, indicators of social change would matter to you a whole lot. If you seek power to enhance your own lot, what do you care for social indicators? In that case, why launch so many welfare schemes? For the Congress president and her NGO-type advisers, these schemes are meant to do good. For the average politico of any party, welfare and development schemes are funding streams to be dipped into to accumulate political war chests and personal fortunes. This has to change, for HDI reports to produce excitement among politicians, instead of yawns.

source: ET

Welcome To World Of Knowledge ..

The Way We Sit & What It Mean

Sitting comes easy to us. But the etiquette of sitting down, maybe not. Here’s how to take a seat — at work or on a date

Dosa Plaza: How Prem Ganapathy built Rs 30 crore empire with seed capital of just Rs 1000(one of best Entrepreneurship Story. Must read )

Marketing must be perceived as an investment, rather than an expense

Respect the Mob: How To Manage Customers?

As customers get increasingly connected, brands will have to treat them with greater care

How This Worked Di?

How This Worked Di?

Facebook and K o l a v e r i D i have one big thing in common — no one knows why they succeeded

12 most likely and crucial science & technology breakthroughs for 2012

12 WHIMSICAL NEW YEAR WISHES

We want cross-border infiltration, we don’t want ‘B’, we want Anna back at his home, we have a wish on petrol/beer relative price…

happy new year to all :)

JUST A STORY BUT REALLY WORTHY *MUST READ*

10 Things You Should Not Say to Your Boss

11 Global Trends That Defined 2011

It was a year when tyrants ceded power, economies teetered on the edge of collapse, the world’s most wanted terrorist was killed and a tech icon departed. Here’s looking back at the key events of 2011

2011 Biggest Winners & Losers

All about banning 3G roaming pacts

Mobile companies like Vodafone, Bharti Airtel slam government for banning 3G roaming pacts

Just 10% beneficiaries of NREGA are poor, if you believe statistics

Can Nokia win market share in iPhone era with its first Windows Phones Lumia 800 & 710?

Like its fall, Nokia's rise to glory would make a epic story. Will its first window phones- the Lumia 800 and 710 - launched this week and the company's comeback in the dual segment , be its beginning?

I really like the message sent to Americans.. can they Imagine what they/their government does in the rest of the world?

Virus in Govt. Page .... where i can complain ??? help?? my mail Delivery failed.

Food security bill... Another joke...

Technological beasts like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube & Google impossible to control

Outside Edge Lower bureaucracy must be covered under Lokpal

National telecom Vision/Policy/Mission: Lies, lies and lies

EU summitt : What's in the new deal to save the euro?

3D advertising: Pixion, Prime Focus and others working to cash in on the tech's popularity.

December 9 European Union Summit: Solution to the eurozone crisis or a fudge?

Is Congress really providing inclusive growth?

JUST A STORY BUT REALLY WORTHY MUST READ