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Karmayogi
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E-Tutoring Broadens Bounds of Outsourcing
22 October 2005, The Associated Press, By Martha Irvine
A few stars are still twinkling in the inky
pre-dawn sky when Koyampurath Namitha arrives for work in a quiet suburb of
this south Indian city. It's barely
4:30 a.m.
when she grabs a cup of coffee and joins more than two dozen colleagues,
each settling into a cubicle with a computer and earphones. More than 7,000
miles away, in Glenview, Ill., outside Chicago, it's the evening of the
previous day and 14-year-old Princeton John sits at his computer, barefoot
and ready for his hour-long geometry lesson. The high school freshman puts
on a headset with a microphone and clicks on computer software that will
link him through the Internet to his tutor, Namitha, many time zones away.
It's called e-tutoring - yet another example of
how modern communications, and an abundance of educated, low-wage Asians,
are broadening the boundaries of outsourcing and working their way into the
minutiae of American life, from replacing your lost credit card through
reading your CAT scan to helping you revive your crashed computer.
Princeton is
one of thousands of
U.S.
high school students turning to tutors in India.
India has
very good teachers, especially in math and science. Also, these subjects are
culture-free so it is comparatively easy for Indian teachers to teach them.
Annual export revenue from offshore outsourcing last fiscal year totaled
$17.2 billion. But about a dozen Indian software firms are banking that
online tutoring will flourish in
America,
where falling standards are causing concern. The first e-tutoring businesses
started less than three years ago, and already thousands of Indian teachers
coach U.S. students in math, science or English for about $15-$20 an hour, a
fraction of the $40-$100 that private tutoring costs in the United States.
The Indian firms have benefited from the
growing
U.S.
government-financed tutoring industry _ which had revenues last year of
nearly $2 billion. That growth is partly due to the No Child Left Behind
law, which requires schools to test students in math and reading every year
from third grade through eighth grade.
While the outsourced tutoring companies are
competition for their U.S.-based counterparts, the National Education
Association - a professional organization that represents millions of
American teachers - "enthusiastically supports the continued and expanded
use of distance education," according to a statement and its guidelines for
promoting quality teaching in class and online.
But despite the glitches caused by distance,
Princeton's mother, Bessy Piusten, is pleased with the results, saying her
children have been getting all A's and B's since they started online
tutoring about two years ago. Daughter Priscilla, who takes online algebra
lessons, wants to be a neonatal physician.
Princeton
wants to be a pharmacist. Their mother is a respiratory therapist at a
Chicago hospital, and her husband is a radiology technician.
At the end of the session, Namitha assigns
Princeton problems for their next meeting. "Homework! C'mon!" Princeton
protests. "Fine, fine. But without homework, life would be wonderful," he
says.
Top of the page
Can
RANBAXY transform Indian
Pharma?
20 October 2005,
Fortune magazine,
By David Ewing Duncan
India's factories and chemists are world-class
(India boasts more FDA-approved labs and plants than any other country
outside the U.S.), and while much of the industry's output sells in India
and other developing countries, Indian pharmas are increasingly exporting to
the West.
Focusing on a cluster of red blood cells, Vijay
Batra, chief of development for Ranbaxy Laboratories in
Bangkok,
India's largest drug company, saw almost no malaria parasites where 48 hours
earlier there had been hordes of them. The microscopic massacre had been
caused by a synthetic variant of sweet wormwood, or artemisinin. When the
parasites invade, the drug attacks them and they die.
Ranbaxy's synthetic
cousin of artemisinin, which is more potent and less expensive to produce
than the natural compound, offers hope to malaria patients, some one million
of whom die every year. It could also transform the Indian pharmaceutical
industry. If all goes well, says Ranbaxy CEO Brian Tempest, the drug,
Rbx11160, currently in Phase 2 trials, could be approved by 2008—which makes
his company a front-runner in a race among India's drugmakers to bring a
novel compound to market.
Top of the page
Split
Personality
17 October
2005, Forbes magazine,
by
Robyn
Meredith
To exploit explosive new growth in
Asia,
consumer electronics giant Philips uses very different business plans for
China and India.
In India, less than 15%of
Philips' $570 million in sales come from big chain outlets, unlike China.
Most Philips products are sold from 35,000 small, family-owned stores in
urban areas. To reach customers in rural areas, where 72% of the population
lives, Philips has 300 distributors whose yellow vans trundle over dirt
roads selling hand-cranked radios for $3.25 and 14-inch "starter" TVs for
$125.
In
China, Philips has 35
factories and offices with 20,000 employees and another 30,000 Chinese
workers employed by contract manufacturers and minority-owned joint
ventures. By contrast the company's Indian investment is largely in
white-collar workers--software engineers who make a quarter of what they'd
earn in Silicon Valley. Philips has 1,500 engineers in Bangalore--a quarter
of all its engineers worldwide--to write the software for all of Philips'
DVD players, most of its digital TVs and some of its X-ray and magnetic
resonance imaging machines. Another 250 accountants and financial analysts
work out of offices in Chennai and Kolkata doing back-office support for
worldwide operations.
In deploying very
different strategies for these two huge Asian markets, Philips Chief
Executive Gerard Kleisterlee, 59, is betting the company can capture "the
couple of hundred million" middle-income people who will be "the consumers
of tomorrow."
A Philips nod to low tech
in India is lightbulb production. It has two factories, the largest in a
town called Mohali.
The factory is closer to
China than to Bangalore and looks nearly the same as the Philips lightbulb
factory outside Shanghai. The big difference at first glance is that the
conformist Chinese wear uniforms while the Indians dress as they please,
turbans and all.
Yet the Indian factory is
more efficient, churning out 460 incandescent bulbs per man-hour with a
waste rate of 2.2% versus 388 bulbs per man-hour with a waste rate of 5% at
the Chinese factory.
Philips doesn't bother with rural customers in
China yet - but if the
India projects work, it could be rolled out across the developing world. In
this and other areas India is Philips' test bed for products aimed at the
poor. That's because it finds Indian employees more creative than Chinese
at
dreaming up new products, and are more concerned about the plight of the
poor.
Like almost every foreign
company doing business in China, Philips has had its share of intellectual
property protection headaches. Finally, three years ago, Philips and the
pirates reached agreement and Chinese companies began to pay up. Not bad for
a company that got its start in 1891 by "borrowing" Thomas Edison's design
for the lightbulb and churning out lights for Europe. "That was way back
when we were the Chinese of Europe," Kleisterlee jokes.
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