|
India - News
Editorial
Opinion
Overview
Infrastructure
Demographics
Entertainment
Site
Map
Search site
Subscribe
Karmayogi
|
|
15 December 2006 -
News Updates
Linking to rural India - TIME magazine
Make yourself at home in Kerala - Seattle Times
Best Asian books of 2006 - TIME magazine
Man of Mettle - TIME magazine
Linking to rural India
3 December 2006, TIME magazine, By Simon Robinson
It's
one of the perennial problems of marketing in India: How do you reach the
700 million people living in rural areas who, though poor, would still add
up to a big chunk of change if they only knew about your products? That's
something Satyan Mishra, 33, has spent a lot of time thinking about. Mishra
is the founder and CEO of Drishtee, a six-year-old company dedicated to
making services and goods found in cities available to country folk.
In Drishtee's early
years, the company focused on connecting government departments to villages.
Using small kiosks outfitted with a computer hooked up to an intranet, it
allowed rural dwellers to apply for a driver's license or request a copy of
a birth certificate online. The company charged a small fee -25 rupees, or
55¢, to apply for a driver's license, say--but the applicant saved 10 times
that amount by reducing the number of visits to a government office in an
often distant regional center. The system worked well at first. "But we
discovered that there was a lot of pent-up demand and that after some time
that demand went right down," says Mishra.
So Drishtee has been
expanding demand by selling insurance policies, subscriptions to websites
that match would-be grooms with prospective brides, classified advertising,
an online health-advice service and even passport photos printed as you
wait. The company has 1,019 kiosks in nine states and is aiming to open an
additional 3,000 in the next two years. Each kiosk is run by an entrepreneur
from the village, typically a man in his mid-20s. The cost of a kiosk
package--computer, digital camera, Internet connection over a cell-phone
line, and printer--is $1,500, which is paid back over a few years. Each
entrepreneur also pays a fixed monthly fee of $11. For that, there is help
if anything goes wrong with the hardware, special rural-focused online
packages that Drishtee develops (like the matchmaking service) and regular
visits from insurance-company reps. Drishtee and each village entrepreneur
get a small cut for every new policy sold. Drishtee is also looking at
cell-phone kiosks--essentially cell phones that will offer about half the
services currently provided by a fixed kiosk.
The company is one of a
few that have shown bigger firms that there is a market outside the cities.
Indian banks and retailers are developing innovative systems to reach the
provincials. The Indian government likes Drishtee's delivery model and is
looking at creating its own version with at least 100,000 centers across the
country. Mishra, who has advised the government on how to set up such a
system, says competition will be welcome. He believes Drishtee is perfectly
placed to specialize in supply-chain management for companies hoping to
reach the same market. "It's all about empowerment and giving people the
tools to uplift themselves so they can compete with the outside world," says
Mishra. "And we think there's a profitable market in that."
Top of the page
Make
yourself at home in Kerala
8 December 2006 , Seattle Times, By Carol Pucci
Kerala, one of India's
most progressive states, skirts the tropical Malabar coast of the Arabian
sea in southwestern India. With a population of 30 million, it's considered
a role model for developing countries, with a 90 percent literacy rate, a
diversity of religions and high-quality health care.
Home stays are an
alternative to resorts and hotels, but that doesn't mean accommodations are
primitive. Many are historical homes and villas where the owners have
remodeled guest rooms using traditional furnishings and installed private,
Western-style bathrooms.
See
www.homestayskerala.com or www.keralagramam.com for a list of historical
homes and villas with families that maintain cultural traditions.
Travelers posting reviews
online gave good marks to Gramam Homestay near the old trading town of Fort
Kochi. The owner, Jos Byju, also provides trip-planning advice. After
exchanging a few e-mails, I asked him to help me set up a seven-day stay,
part of a three-week independent trip to India in October. He booked three
other home stays in Kerala, an overnight houseboat cruise through the
backwaters, and a car and driver for the week. Total cost for two people,
including most meals, was $1,150. Any of the home stays can be booked
separately.
Learning firsthand about
local traditions such as toddy tapping is one of the bonuses of forgoing a
hotel or a resort for a village home stay in Kerala, a tropical state that
stretches along India's southwestern coast.
For visitors who can do without air conditioning and room
service, home stays offer the chance to spend time with local families and
explore village life, from the sleepy island towns along a network of lakes
and lagoons called the backwaters, to mountain hill stations overlooking tea
and spice plantations.
India brims with mysteries
that baffle the Western mind. I'd been saving some questions for Santhosh,
34, our host for the last night we spent in Kerala near the town of Kalady,
a pilgrimage center and the birth place of Sri Adi Sankara, a philosopher
who led a Hindu revival in India and influenced the spread of post-Buddhist
Hinduism.
The Thannikkatt family —
Santhosh; his wife, Sreeja; and their two daughters, Kunjava, 3, and Saalini,
1 — are Brahmin Hindus, members of the highest caste in the Indian system of
class divisions. They live with his parents in a 150-year-old
wood-and-stucco home, surrounded by ginger and rubber farms. Sharing Indian culture
with foreign visitors is their passion. With Santhosh, we visited a yoga
center, a Hindu temple, the village market and an elephant training camp.
India is changing, but
most couples still opt for arranged marriages, Santhosh explained as we
talked one afternoon on his porch under a ceiling fan. "How can you tell in
a five- or 10-minute meeting that this is the person with whom you want to
spend the rest of your life?" I wondered. "Love" marriages became
fashionable in the '80s. But a high divorce rate convinced many young people
to go back to the old way of allowing their parents to hire matchmakers.
The family, like many
Hindus, maintains a vegetarian diet and avoids alcohol. Sreeja served meals
in her open-air kitchen on metal plates filled with mounds of rice, cooked
vegetables, curries, pickled mango and chutneys. Most people eat with their
right hand, and she encouraged us to try. Indians mix their food on their
plate with their thumb and first two fingers, then roll it into a ball or
use bread to dab it up. I made a bigger mess than the couple's 3-year-old,
but sitting here, laughing with the family as I scooped up dinner with my
fingers, I felt right at home.
Top of the page
Best Asian books of 2006
16
December 2006, TIME magazine
Looking for holiday diversions? Our writers bring you this highly eclectic
selection of their favorite Asian books of the past year—from a French
Buddhist monk's insights into happiness to the finest studies of
contemporary China to a 900-page novel about cops and gangsters in Bombay.
Sacred Games by Vikram
Chandra
Sartaj Singh, the hero of
Vikram Chandra's 900-page novel, is a different kind of Bombay policeman.
Not so different that he won't take a bribe—an entirely honest cop in
Chandra's Bombay would be a freak of nature—but different enough to feel
uneasy when doing so. Good things happen in Bombay to those who are
different, and one day Singh gets the break of a lifetime: a tip-off about
the location of Ganesh Gaitonde, India's most-wanted gangster. By the time
Singh gets to him, though, Gaitonde is dead, apparently by his own hand. Now
Singh has to find out why—a quest that leads him into a murky labyrinth of
pimps, Pakistani agents, Bollywood starlets, new-age gurus and would-be
nuclear terrorists.
Like the city it's set in,
Chandra's epic is sometimes slow moving and occasionally overambitious; but
like Bombay, its flaws are outweighed by its virtues. Chief among these is
the way Chandra takes you inside the world of a Bombay cop. After reading
the book, you'll swear you know precisely how to count the money in a
glance, and where to find the smart fellow who will shift the loot to a
Swiss bank account. Rarely entirely honest or entirely rotten, Chandra's
Bombay exists in a penumbra of moral ambiguity—which is why Sacred Games is
one of the best novels about India in a long time.
Made
for Maharajas: A Design Diary of Princely India, by Amin Jaffer
The love affair between
Indian royals and European artisans began in 1573 when the great Mughal
ruler Akbar met his first gift-bearing European, and demanded from then on
that his courtiers bring him more "wonderful things" from the West. The
relationship reached its climax at the height of the British Raj (1857-1947)
when India's princes, increasingly marginalized from political life,
indulged instead in lavish escapism—building and furnishing opulent palaces
influenced by the fashions of European élites. There is no richer testament
to the period than Made for Maharajas by Amin Jaffer, who works as a curator
at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Chronicling more than three
centuries of made-to-order luxury, Jaffer draws from the archives of
Baccarat, Cartier, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and other design houses that
crafted some of their most splendid pieces for the maharajas.
It was, of course, a
love affair fated to end. Britain lost India, and Indian royals lost their
lands, titles and allowances to a newly independent, democratic state.
Jewel-encrusted lipstick cases and cigarette lighters were sold off to pay
debts, while stunning palaces crumbled for lack of upkeep. But Jaffer's
sumptuously illustrated love letter to the era remains, a jewel fit for the
coffee table of any modern-day maharaja.
Top of the page
A Man
of Mettle
16 December 2006, TIME magazine, By Peter Gumbel
He didn't become one of
the world's richest men, and by far its biggest steel baron, by shying away
from controversy. Even so, the Indian-born businessman Lakshmi Mittal says
he was taken aback by the fury that greeted his announcement in late January
that he was bidding to buy European steelmaker Arcelor, formed in 2002 out
of what was left of the French, Luxembourgian, Belgian and Spanish steel
industries. "We really didn't expect such a violent reaction," Mittal told
Time. "A lot of people were obviously not
happy at all."
In Luxembourg, where
Arcelor is based, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker called for "a reaction
that is at least as hostile" as the bid, and parliament considered a new
merger law that would block the deal. In Paris, Finance Minister Thierry
Breton lambasted Mittal's decision to make an unsolicited bid, accusing him
of having "a grammar problem," while President Jacques Chirac searched for
ways to stop the takeover. One former French Prime Minister, Michel Rocard,
wrote an angry screed entitled "Europe Should Say No," that advocated the
introduction of a blanket ban on acquisitions by non-Europeans. At Arcelor
itself, chief executive Guy Dollé slammed Mittal Steel as "a company of
Indians" that was offering "monkey money" for his firm, which he described
as "perfume" compared to the "eau de cologne" of his rival.
Colette Neuville, a French
shareholder activist, says of Mittal's bid: "It was a shock to discover that
there are companies in places we used to refer to as the Third World that
have become equal partners, or more than equal partners. Nobody had quite
imagined that." They won't make that mistake again. For delivering such a
lesson, and for doing it with good humor in spite of sometimes odious
personal attacks, Lakshmi Mittal is Time's
International Newsmaker of the Year. "Whether I'm Indian or the citizen of
another country is irrelevant in this global environment," he says.
In truth, Mittal is almost
as European as he is Asian. He was born and grew up in a modest but
well-connected family in Sadulpur, in the northwestern Indian state of
Rajasthan, but his business empire has been constructed entirely outside
India. Mittal began making his fortune a decade ago after breaking away from
his father's Calcutta-based steel business and building his own firm, buying
up steel plants in countries ranging from Algeria to Kazakhstan, Ukraine and
the U.S. His timing was brilliant: worldwide demand for steel has been
soaring because of massive demand from China and other fast-growing
economies, and with it so has Mittal's net worth. By 2005, his personal
fortune was estimated to be $25 billion — more than twice the size of
Luxembourg's annual budget. Before the takeover, Mittal Steel was based in
the Netherlands (as a result of the merger, the headquarters is moving to
Luxembourg), and quoted on the London Stock Exchange. Mittal lives in
London, in a 12-bedroom mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens for which he
paid a cool $128 million, and in 2004 he threw a $50 million party for the
wedding of his daughter Vanisha at the Versailles royal palace and another
chateau.
"Lakshmi Mittal has done
an extraordinarily good job for us," says Venugopal Dhoot, chairman of
Videocon, whose businesses run from consumer electronics such as televisions
to oil and gas production. "The world had questions about the ability of
Indians running a global company. He's shown them."
And Patrick Ollier, the
head of the finance committee, said that the French Parliament "has had the
opportunity to get to know a great European captain of industry." As it
happens, though that may have been intended as a compliment, it is
inaccurate. It would be just as wrong to say that Mittal is a great Asian
captain of industry. For he is of course both — and neither. Mittal is an
exemplar of a new type of business leader. "Your identity is your company,"
says Mittal. "I have a global company, so I have a global identity." In
2007, expect more to make the same argument.
Top of the page |
|
31 Dec '06
15 Dec '06
30 Nov '06
15 Nov '06
5 Nov '06
News Updates
31 Oct '06
30 Oct '06
15 Oct '06
30 Sep '06
18 Sep '06
15 Sep '06
31 Aug '06
15 Aug '06
31 Jul'06
15 Jul'06
30 Jun'06
26 Jun '06
15 Jun '06
31 May '06
15 May '06
30 Apr '06
15 Apr '06
31 Mar '06
15 Mar '06
28 Feb '06
31 Jan '06
15 Jan '06
|
