Rajiv Gandhi's 20th death anniversary day

Today is the 20th death anniversary of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and people still remember India's youngest Prime Minister, who dreamt of the 21st century India. On May 21, 1991, in Sriperambudur at 10 o'clock in the night, Journalist R Bhagwan Singh was discussing the Lok Sabha polls with fellow journalists in the media enclosure. He could see former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi walking towards the podium. Thousands of supporters, mainly women, were pushing each other for a glimpse of the man who, it seemed, was all set to return as the prime minister. But seconds before Rajiv was about to mount the podium, a huge explosion took place. Initially, people thought it was a cracker blast.

Deccan Chronicle Consulting Editor R Bhagwan Singh said, "I remember telling my friends how can these Congressmen be so stupid and have a powerful cracker next to the dais. But then, within moments we saw people screaming, running around, some black, some burnt. We got up and ran and we saw on the right side of the carpet. Rajiv was on his face, head turned down and then we saw Moopanar and Jayanti Natrajan and Karate Thyagarajan who were bending and trying to turn and see whether it was him." "They turned to see and there was no face! The entire thing had blown up. It was a gruesome and horrible death for a leader who wanted to find a solution for the Tamils in Sri Lanka."

Amid the chaos and confusion, local Congress leaders rushed to identify the shattered pieces of Rajiv's body. R Bhagwan Singh says, "You are meeting me 20 years later and I'm describing the incident like it happened yesterday. Do u think I have forgotten? It hurts me deeply! Because I have covered the Sri Lanka issue, I have been there and seen people disintegrate and die. Through all the mess, the assassination keeps coming back to my mind." For Communist leader D Pandian, it was just another hectic campaign day. He was looking forward to putting his feet up after many days on the election trail. He was there to translate Rajiv's speech into Tamil. But, fate decided otherwise. "I was shouting where is Rajiv. I could not see him anywhere. I was surrounded by dozens of dead bodies," recalls Pandian. Most eye witnesses who CNN-IBN contacted, did not want to talk about that tragic night. It troubles them even today - 20 years on.

Indian pilots receive only 40% of budget

While the civil aviation ministry on Thursday said that the 1,600 pilots of Air India are paid Rs800 crore as salaries every month, the Indian Commercial Pilots' Association (ICPA) said that only 40% of the amount goes to the Indian pilots. They also said that the aviation ministry has been sitting on their demands to bring in parity in the wages of Indian Airlines and AI pilots and till date there have been 20 committees and consultancies appointed, yet nothing has worked out and a lot of money has been wasted in the process.

Reacting to aviation minister Ravi Vayalar's comments that the AI pilots salaries constitute a huge chunk of expenditure, the ICPA said that what is paid to them is considerably less than what is paid to AI pilots.“Of the Rs 800 crore, 60-70% goes to AI pilots as they have a fixed salary component where the company has to pay them for 80 hours of flying.While we are paid on hourly basis and with our under-utilisation, our salaries have gone down to 40% of theamount,” said an ICPA member.

The ICPA also questioned the manner in which the merger of the two companies was handled. “They spent more than Rs300 crore to manage the merger, but nothing came out of it,” said an ICPA member. “They hired global consultants Accenture for Rs200 crore to oversee the integration process of AI and IA.Then they hired financial advisory firm Deloitte for Rs90 crore to seek recommendations over lessening the wage bill and fuel cost and still the company is making losses,” said Captain Rishabh Kapoor, general secretary, ICPA. AI’s annual wage bill is Rs3,100 crore while fuel bill is Rs 4,000 crore.

Relevante Extends its India-based Leadership Team

Relevante India, a leading provider of accounting and technology solutions, announced the expansion of its India based leadership team with the appointment of five managers to the leadership team - Relevante.com. Relevante India, announced the expansion of its India based leadership team with the appointment of five managers to the leadership team. The company’s operations in India support its US operations as well as a growing portfolio of India based clients.

“We are very pleased with the growth of our India based operations and believe this expanded leadership team is strategically important for our continued success in both the US and India,” said William Brassington, Relevante's CEO. “This group of leaders has a track record of success and will be instrumental in the implementation of our growth plans for 2011 and beyond,” added Phanish Adivi, Director of Relevante India. The five appointments to Relevante India’s leadership team are as follows:

Rajnikanth Korapati will serve as Manager of Online Marketing with responsibility for overseeing the company’s website, social media, and eMarketing programs. He has been employed with Relevante of over five years and has more than six years experience in similar roles. He has a MBA in InformationSystems.

Tulasi Kumari will serve as Manager of Recruiting with responsibility for overseeing Relevante India’s Finance and Accounting recruiting operations. Relevante India will continue to provide permanent placement staffing solutions to accounting and finance departments of global companies with operations in India. Ms. Kumari has been employed by Relevante for over three years and has over five years of recruiting experience. She holds a MBA in Human Resources.

Jayasena Molugu will serve as Manager of Administration with responsibility for the company’s management reporting, content management, and performance management systems. Mr. Molugu has been employed with Relevante for over five years and has over eight years of experience in similar roles. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce. Narendra Naidu will serve as Manager of Recruiting with responsibility for overseeing the India based recruiters that support US clients. He has been employed with Relevante for less than a year and has over four years of recruiting experience. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce.

Sahadeva Reddy will serve as Manager of Business Development with responsibility for overseeing Relevante India’s Finance and Accounting business development operations. He has been employed with Relevante for one year and has over eight years of sales experience. He holds a MBA in Human Resources.

Census shows Indian population expanded by 181 million

India now has a population of 1.21 billion according to the latest Census figures released by the Home Secretary and the Registrar General of India on Thursday. This is an increase of 181 million people since the last Census - nearly equivalent to the population of Brazil.

India's population is now bigger than the combined population of USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Bangladesh, says the Census report. Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state and the combined population of UP and Maharashtra is bigger than USA. Of the total population, 623.7 million are males and 586.5 million are females.

However, the population grew at a rate of 17.64 percent which is the sharpest reduction in growth rate ever. While Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Puducherry has the highest population growth rate of about 55 percent, Nagaland has the lowest. The density of population is highest in Delhi, followed by Chandigarh.

The 2011 Census report also shows that India now has a child sex ratio of 914 female against 1,000 male - the lowest since Independence. This is the 15th Census conducted since 1872. It was carried out in two phases, covering 640 districts and 5924 sub-districts. The cost of the counting exercise is 22,000 million.

Census reveals India's tiger numbers raise for first time in a decade

The number of tigers in India has risen for the first time in a decade, according to a new official census published in Delhi. Campaigners and officials have hailed the news as proving that the big cat – which has suffered a 97% population decline in the past century – can still be saved. In India, many tigers continue to be killed by poachers or die as a result of pressure on their natural habitats from the rapidly growing human population or environmental damaging caused by a lack of governance and the booming economy. There are around 3,000 wild tigers in the world, of which around half live in India.

The census, being published tomorrow, is believed to put the total number of wild tigers in India at around 1,550 – 10% more than in 2008. However, this may prove controversial because it has included the vast jungle and swamp areas of the Sunderbans, an estuary zone on the Bay of Bengal that had previously proved to difficult to properly survey. Conservationists are also uncertain about the accuracy of the latest figures, claiming the methods used allowed the same tiger to be counted several times. "A 10% increase is good news and very significant – but you can always fudge the figures if you want to, whatever counting method you use," MK Ranjitsinh, the chairman of the Wildlife Trust of India and one of India's best-known tiger campaigners, said.

In the 1970s, the Indian tiger population dropped to near 1,000. A major effort to establish reserves and increase protection of the animals resulted in numbers trebling by the end of the 1990s. Indian tigers are a major draw for tourists, and attempts are currently being made to repopulate national parks that have seen all their tigers die, many through poaching to supply the growing demand for traditional medicines in China. But problems remain. Many villages are still either within reserves or close to them, and local people are frequently attacked while collecting wood or walking to their fields.

Earlier this year, a tiger was shot dead near the Corbett National Park, in north-western India, after a series of fatal attacks on villagers. But it now appears the authorities may have targeted the wrong animal after a 45-year-old man was killed by a tiger two weeks ago. "The human population continues to grow and that means reduction of prey, threats to the isolation of the tiger habitat and increasing danger of direct human-tiger conflict. We may have won a battle, but you have to win the war," Ranjitsinh said.

The hike and dive of the West

Niall Ferguson, the conservative British historian now at Harvard, who has written extensively on the British empire, sets out to provide answers in his latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Allen Lane/Penguin, Special Indian Price: Rs 699) to what he says “is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve: the rise of the West as the preeminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the millennium after Christ”. In seeking his answers to the riddle – and that why Britain was the first from the traps – Ferguson says the West had “six killer applications”: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic. He suggests indirectly that the West should be flattered that the rise of the “rest” is due to adoption by them of these applications.

With this book, Ferguson joins the recent band of historians and social scientists who have propounded two broad schools of thought on why the West was the first to take off. Proponents of the Long Term theory such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made the West and the East inalterably different, and determined that the Industrial Revolution would happen in the West and pushed further ahead than the East.

But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so the development couldn’t have been inevitable. So the proponents of the Short Term argue that the Western rule was an aberration that is now coming to an end with the rise of Japan, China and India. But the fact remains that the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, so it can’t be put down to a temporary aberration. We need to look at the scene differently, by providing a new theory based on a social scientist’s comparative methods that would make sense of the past, present and future.

Before we examine Ferguson’s “six killer apps”, what is important to bear in mind is that the facts of history never come to us “pure”, so they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history like Ferguson’s, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it. Therein lies the rub. Put it another way, the philosophy of history is concerned neither with “the past by itself nor with the historian’s thought about it by itself but with two things in their mutual relations”. This dictum reflects the two current meanings of “history”: the enquiry conducted by the historian and the series of past events into which he enquires. So the past that the historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which is in some sense still living with the present.

Of the six factors Ferguson has listed, it was science, medicine and the work ethic that were must crucial. Ferguson starts with the successes of European civilisation. In 1500, Europe controlled only 10 per cent of the world’s territories and generated around 40 per cent of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of the empire, the West controlled 60 per cent of the world’s territories and generated 80 per cent of the wealth.

This “stunning fact” is often lost on historians, but our concern is whether it was all because of the six ingredients. Science and its crucial applications held the key but this was because of the ideological contribution of the Renaissance, the notion of humanism that pervaded every aspect of life that was based primarily on a rejection of the domination of the Church. Without the Reformation that separated the Church from the affairs of the State, the Renaissance that led to the free inquiry of Thomas Hooke and Isaac Newton in the 17th century could not have taken place.

Whatever, it was the scientific enquiry that led the way for the West, as it was the lack of it that arrested the “rest” from continuing its early momentum. This is especially true of the Arab world that had notable successes in mathematical and medical sciences but was soon left behind.

But what of the other three factors? How did consumerism and competition contribute to the growth of western power? Many would argue that rampant consumerism, instead of austerity, contributed to the decline of the West. And what now? Will the West be able to face up to the challenges posed by China and India? Ferguson dodges a straight answer except by saying that civilisation is a highly complex system that has “a tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability”. This isn’t saying anything at all. But read it all the same for the sweeping generalisations on the turning points of history.

Indian city best in tobacco

Chandigarh, which has been declared the best Indian city in terms of tobacco control by an international study, is preparing to further tighten laws around tobacco usage. At a meeting of the Chandigarh tobacco control cell, it was decided that enforcement of tobacco control legislation would be made stricter and the draft tobacco vendors licensing rules would be notified soon despite opposition from tobacco companies.

The global adult tobacco report - prepared by the WHO and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) - says the figure of tobacco users in Chandigarh has come down to 14 percent compared to the national average of 35 percent. 'Tobacco kills nearly a million people in India every year and no opposition from any lobby would be allowed to interfere in decisions taken in the interest of the public, especially when it is going to save the lives of thousands of people,' Chandigarh's home-cum-health secretary Ram Niwas said here.

The report, made in collaboration with the union health ministry, pointed out that the number of females consuming tobacco is also one of the lowest in India with less than 1.7 percent women consuming any form of tobacco product compared to 20.3 percent across the country. 'Chandigarh has also emerged as the best city in terms of exposure to second hand smoke,' the report stated. 'Less than 11 percent people have any kind of exposure to second hand smoke anywhere in the city, compared to the national average of 29 percent,' it added.

The highest incidence of second-hand smoke was found in the northeastern state of Meghalaya, where over 54 percent are exposed to it. 'No city in India can match up to the progress made by Chandigarh on the tobacco control front in the last four to five years,' social activist Hemant Goswami, whose Burning Brain Society (BBS) has been at the forefront of efforts to make Chandigarh 'smoke-free' and control tobacco use, told IANS. 'Chandigarh has emerged the best even though we can do more on this,' he said.

Among the tobacco chewing population, Chandigarh had a low percentage of only 3.3 percent compared to the national average of 20.6 percent. Nearly one-third (34 percent) of the city's population is that of migrants from other states. Niwas said BBS had helped the Chandigarh administration achieve the high standards of excellence in tobacco control. Chandigarh was officially declared a smoke-free city July 15, 2007, adding to its earlier tag of being the country's 'greenest' and 'cleanest' city. The 114 sq km city - the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana - has been trying to curb smoking in public areas since then. The idea to make the city a 'smoke-free' zone was mooted first by the BBS and adopted by the administration.

Rajat Gupta exits as Indian School of Business chairman on monday

Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director, who is accused by US authorities of leaking confidential boardroom information, on Monday resigned as chairman of the executive board of Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB), one of India’s premier B-schools.

With this, India-born Gupta, who is the first non-American managing director of McKinsey, has either quit or taken leave of absence from the boards of all the companies and organisations he guided as a director or chairman.

“Rajat Gupta has requested the ISB executive board to relieve him of his board responsibilities till his pending matter with the US SEC is resolved. This, and the appointment of the new chairman, will be tabled at the upcoming Board meeting on April 2, 2011,” ISB said in a statement today.

Gupta, who is the co-founder of ISB, will not attend the upcoming board meeting scheduled for April 2. Corporate observers say Gupta led from the front in making ISB one of the world’s leading business schools. The executive board of the ISB that Gupta led as chairman has top industrialists like Anil Ambani, Adi Godrej, Rahul Bajaj, LN Mittal and Deepak Parekh, among others, as members.

HSBC reveals RBI to raise rate by more 75 bps

The Reserve Bank of India’s latest move to hike interest rate by 25 basis points came in line with market expectations. There was a general sentiment in the market that a hike of 25 basis points was necessary to balance inflationary pressure.
However, according to HSBC, the RBI will raise interest rate by another 75 basis points this year in order to control inflation. HSBC feels that inflation is unlikely ease soon and it will go above the RBI’s comfort zone.

“Demand needs to slow down in a bid to ease inflationary pressure,” said HSBC. The bank also added that growth rate in FY12 is likely to slow down to 8%.

India, a very constructive force in the world

The United States has said that the relationship with India is one of the defining partnerships in the 21st Century, adding that New Delhi is going to be a constructive force and a responsible stakeholder in the world. When asked to describe the status quo of the India-U.S. relationship, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Robert O. Blake, said: "The United States considers India to be probably one of the defining partnerships for us in the 21st Century. President Obama had a very successful three-day visit to India in November of 2010 in which he announced for the first time U.S. support for India's candidacy as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council."

"That I think reflects our sense that India is first of all going to be a very important partner for the United States going forward, but also is a very constructive force in the world." "Increasingly India wants to be a responsible stakeholder, wants to help on all of the major issues confronting the world. Things like nonproliferation, climate change, and we're very pleased that India is working closely with us in such areas as Afghanistan, helping to address poverty in Africa, and issues such as that," he added. Blake further said that one of Obama administration's highest objectives is to try to increase integration between Central Asia and South Asia

"Again, we think India's going to be one of our defining partnerships in the 21st Century. In terms of how that reflects on China, we support growing relations between India and China and we have reassured our friends in China that growing relations between the United States and India will not come at China's expense, and that we want to see the growth of our relations with China, our relations with India, and India's relations with China," the Assistant Secretary of State said.

"We've been very encouraged by the progress that has been made on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline, for example, which we think can be a very valuable opportunity to increase energy links between these two important regions. But we think there could be other infrastructure efforts that build on the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement, for example, that would allow for greater trade between South Asia and Central Asia. So there's a lot to be done, and we think that China can play such an important role in helping to spur this effort at greater integration," he added. (ANI)

GE Healthcare to endow another $50 million in India

GE Healthcare, the $17-billion healthcare unit of GE, will be investing $50 million in India over the next three years to develop a portfolio of lowcost diagnostic imaging products. The healthcare major expects to roll out 9-10 indigenously designed diagnostic equipment annually that includes CT systems, molecular imaging systems, baby warmers and biological diagnostics for the Indian market.  "We are developing a portfolio for biological diagnostics in India," said John Dineen, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, who was in Bangalore on Thursday.

Biological diagnostics combines the power of functional scanning with biological tracers to help clinicians to detect and diagnose diseases earlier and evaluate treatment efficacy quickly. It includes pathology tests, DNA tests and blood-based scanning. GE Healthcare may hire another 1,000 engineers in India in the next few years to keep pace with its growth plans here. It currently has 1,200. "We are growing at a CAGR of 30% in India and will be able to sustain it though 2015," Dineen said. The company expects revenue of $400 million in 2011, up from $300 mn last year. Medical devices and solutions tailored for India has attracted a lot of global attention, including from players like Philips and Siemens.

GE wants to develop affordable cardiac care solutions, given that Indians are more susceptible to heart ailments compared to other populations. According to WHO estimates, close to 60% of cardiac patients worldwide will be from India by 2020. About 25% of deaths in the age group of 25-69 years are because of heart diseases.

In a bid to make cardiac care affordable, GE Healthcare on Thursday unveiled two products —- GE Healthcare MAC 600 and GE VIVID P3 ultrasound system – designed and developed by its India facility. MAC 600 is a lightweight portable ECG device with an option to save the results in Adobe Acrobat files using detachable memory cards. MAC 600 comes with the Cardiosoft ECG viewer and is fitted with battery-backed operations for up to 250 patients in one battery charge. It costs between Rs 60,000 and Rs 75,000, a price that's said to be 80% lower than similar FDA-cleared ECG solutions that are imported currently.

In 2008, GE had introduced the first such portable ECG machine called MAC 400 and followed it up the next year with MACi, that was priced at Rs 25,000, half the price of MAC 400. GE VIVID P3 is a cardiac imaging ultrasound system that provides for efficient data management and transfer of images. It is priced at Rs 11-12 lakh, 50% lower than other similar FDA-approved products, the company said. GE Healthcare has seven manufacturing units in India and is close to finalizing the eighth plant.

India Central Bank hikes Key Rates

India's central bank Thursday raised its key interest rates for the eighth time in 12 months, in an effort to battle rising prices of food and other essential items. The Reserve Bank of India increased its repurchase--or overnight lending--rate by 0.25 percentage point to 6.75%, and the reverse repurchase--or borrowing--rate by 0.25 percentage point to 5.75%.

It kept the cash reserve ratio, or the percentage of deposits that lenders must set aside with the central bank in cash, unchanged at 6%, and banks' statutory liquidity ratio at 24%. The rate increase is expected to "continue to rein in demand-side inflationary pressures while minimizing risks to growth, and manage inflationary expectations and contain the spillover of food and commodity prices into more generalized inflation," the RBI said in its mid-quarter monetary policy review.

It raised its forecast on inflation at the end of the fiscal year through March to 8% from the earlier 7%. Headline inflation was higher than expected in February, accelerating 8.31% from a year earlier to outpace January's provisional 8.23% rise. The central bank kept its growth estimate for the fiscal year at 8.5% with an upward bias.

Motorola believes Huge scope for digital radio in India

India's public safety system and network expansion is set to double every three years, especially, with the arming of police with digital radio sets, said a senior Motorola executive here. "We are experiencing strong demand for radio-based systems from India's police force as well as private sectors such as oil and gas industries, coal mines and industrial production centres," said Balbir Singh , vice president, sales and operations at Motorola Solutions Asia Pacific.

The growth is driven by rising security concern across the country, Singh said while projecting more than double-digit growth for Motorola's digital radio-based communication systems in India. These radio sets are more effective in allowing communication between various locations and command centres, helping the police manage any emergency, he said in Global Security Asia 2011 conference and exhibition being held in Singapore from March 15-17.

On the private sector, Coal India has recently selected Motorola systems to manage its mine operations, he said. "Moreover, Indian enterprises are very fast in adopting technologies and we believe the Indian market will leapfrog in taking on the best digital systems, leaving analogs aside," he said. "We have been leading the radio-based communication market in India for four decades and have now established a working relationship in supplying handsets to police.

We also provide training to the police on the effective use of handsets," he said. Besides the radios, Motorola has a wide range of communication sets in India, a market being served for more than 40 years, Singh said.
Going forward, Singh sees Indian Postal Services and Courier Services using computers for deliveries in rural areas.

"Rural India is a huge market where the postman will be using mobile computers to serve the people," he pointed out. According to Singh, Motorola's Indian operations were fully supported by India's software engineers who are involved in designing the software and setting up network for the radio sets. Motorola also operates its biggest research and development centre in Bangalore, software programmes from which are used for its systems globally, according to Singh.

Besides the domestic consumer market, the country eventually would emerge as a major exporter with corporate India collaborating and merging local and international technologies in products for the global markets, he said.

India's nuclear plans

India's plans to rapidly build more nuclear power plants are unlikely to change despite the crisis in Japan, as Asia's third-largest economy seeks to end blackouts, officials and experts said on Tuesday. India, which has a total installed power generation capacity of 164 gigawatts (GW), aims to raise it to 187 GW by the end of March 2012. Even this target is modest, given a 12 percent peak-hour power shortfall that crimps the country's near 9 percent economic growth.

The Indian government may well face calls to go slow on nuclear power after an explosion at a nuclear plant in Japan which was damaged by Friday's earthquake, but is unlikely to tweak its plans beyond re-evaluating and strengthening safety standards, possibly delaying project implementation. "Our requirement of adding electricity is very high. Over 40 percent of our people still don't have access to electricity," said Srikumar Banerjee, chief of India's atomic regulatory body.

Around 500 million people in India are without electricity. "(Apart from nuclear) none of the other types of energy, except solar, is a primary source of energy. We need to have solar and nuclear growing at a faster rate to sustain the increase in generation capacity." The crisis in Japan has hit the nuclear power industry worldwide, as governments worry about safety and investors have sold stocks.

Germany has suspended an agreement to extend the life of its nuclear power stations , Switzerland put on hold some approvals for nuclear power plants , and Taiwan's state-run Taipower said it was studying plans to cut nuclear power output . India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said its nuclear power programme was on track, with more stringent safety controls.

"The department of atomic energy and its agencies ... have been instructed to undertake an immediate technical review of all safety systems of our nuclear power plants particularly with a view to ensuring that they would be able to withstand the impact of large natural disasters such as tsunami and earthquakes," he told parliament on Monday.

India's nuclear power generation capacity is 4.7 GW, set to rise to 7.3 GW by the end of March 2012. By 2020, the country hopes to have over 20 GW of nuclear power generating capacity. To make this possible, the country has signed a landmark nuclear power deal with the United States and opened up its estimated $150 billion nuclear power market to private reactor builders such as GE and Areva .