Bihar could serve as a role model: NYT

PATNA, India: Bihar is changing and it is now being acknowledged by the international media. An article published in New York Times (NYT) has termed Bihar as a state which could serve as a model.

Recalling that for decades Bihar was “something between a punch line and cautionary tale, the exact opposite of the high tech, rapidly growing, rising global power India has sought to become,” the article said that previously “criminals could count on police protection, not prosecution. Highway men ruled the shredded roads and kidnapping was one of the most profitable businesses”.

“The name captured everything that was wrong with the old India — a combustible mix of crime, corruption and caste politics in a state crucible that stifled economic growth,” it said.

However, after the turnaround when it notched an 11 per cent average growth rate for the last five years, the news was greeted as a sign that even India’s most intractable corners of backwardness and misery were being transformed, the article says.

Bihar’s turnaround illustrates how a handful of seemingly small changes can yields big results in India’s most impoverished and badly governed regions. It stressed that state governments are responsible for everything from schools to hospitals to policing to maintaining most roads. “Bihar is a textbook case of how leadership determines development,” it says.

The article has uncharitable things to say about Lalu Prasad who ran the state for 15 years `from beneath a banyan tree’.

“Under Mr Prasad’s watch, criminal syndicates kidnapped, extorted and robbed with impunity, protected by political leaders or in some cases led by politicians,” it says, adding Lalu’s government did little to improve the daily lives of Biharis. It talks about dismal road conditions, schools crumbling as teachers did not turn up for work and health centres left unstaffed.

Reference Link
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Bihar-could-serve-as-a-role-model-NYT/articleshow/5786048.cms

Courtesy
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.

Share a car, firms tell staff

CHENNAI, India: Sriram has a cushy job with Infosys. His only pain point is commuting to the Mahindra City campus from Tiruvanmiyur. “Mornings aren’t a problem as everything works at fixed time times, and I take the office shuttle. But in the evening, I don’t know when I will wrap up. Invariably, I miss the evening shuttle back home,” he says.

Infosys encourages its employees to use car-pooling. “I post my requirement on the office intranet along with my estimated time of leaving office. Upon matching my requirement, I get my colleague’s contact number and we leave office together,” he says. Typically, a trip upto Tambaram from Mahindra City is Rs 30 per person, while upto Pallavaram the charges are Rs 40 and to Tiruvanmiyur it is Rs 50. “We find new friends, talk, crib, listen to music and reach home comfortably,” he says.

Car pooling is the shared use of a car by the driver and one or more passengers, usually for commuting. By virtue of pooling, the number of wheels on the road comes down, thereby reducing traffic on the roads. It is not just economical, but also helps in bringing people together.

High-speed mass transportation services are the need to solve Chennai’s commuting woes, but in the meantime, small initiatives like car pooling help people who aren’t resource strapped to move from point A to B without too much trouble.

Infosys is not the only company offering this on its intranet. Cognizant’s Lend a seat, gain a friend’ programme is widely popular.

“We have several hundred employees who are beneficiaries of our car pooling scheme. Cognizant acts as a facilitator of car pooling and does not track the charges,” says a Cognizant spokesperson.

As companies find that their employees are travelling longer distances to get to work, they step in to help make the ride a little smoother. Cognizant’s car-pooling portal records information about the kind of music commuters like to listen to, whether they eat in the car, and even whether they stop off at grocery stores to finish their shopping on the way back from work. “This helps the associates select a car pool that best matches their individual tastes and preferences,” the spokesperson adds.

The portal also has basic information such as the time and days of commute, do’s, don’ts and etiquette of car-pooling. There’s also a section where employees can their ideas to make the car pooling system more effective.

Pooling cars is not just an employee initiative. Sanmina SCI, which has a manufacturing plant in Oragadam, runs 15 cars for its management staff. “From the beginning of April, we’ve started running a tempo from MRC Nagar, in South Chennai, to our factory in Oragadam. We realised that quite a few of us live in and around the area. Rather than each of us taking out our cars, we decided to travel together. Laptops and wi-fi broadband connections will mean we don’t have to waste those two hours on the road we can work while we commute to and from the factory,” says Kumar Subramaniam, MD, Sanmina SCI.

No distance is far, if you are in the right company! Literally!

Reference Link
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Share-a-car-firms-tell-staff/articleshow/5785616.cms

Courtesy
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.

HC relief for Muslim woman seeking conjugal rights

MUMBAI, India: It may have taken a 26-year-old woman to pave the way for other Muslim women to voice and seek their conjugal rights.

Offering hope to scores of Muslim women separated or shunned by their husbands, the Bombay HC recently directed the family court to hear afresh the petition of a young woman seeking to restore her right to companionship and sexual relations within her marriage.

Zeenat Khan fought for almost a year in the family court at Bandra for her right to get back together with her husband of five years, only to have the door slammed on her face. The family court judge offered no reasoning or explanations, except that Mohammedan law does not allow a wife to make such an application.

Zeenat had married Ahmed, a Mahim resident, on December 30, 2005. Within a year, she had a baby boy. But she says Ahmed only visited her once at the hospital to ‘‘see the baby’s face’’ and then began demanding Rs 5 lakh but did not take her back home. His family too did not allow her to ‘‘enter the house.’’

She reported the ‘‘threats he gave to the police and in April 2009 finally approached the family court for a legal way out of her marital trouble. Zeenat moved the HC in February to challenge the ‘‘illegal and arbitrary order of the family court on the grounds that Islamic law scholars have written that a wife governed by Mohammedan law too is entitled to seek restitution of conjugal rights in court.’’ She relied on an authoritative book by Dr Tahir Mahmood, a former law commission member.

Reference Link
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/HC-relief-for-Muslim-woman-seeking-conjugal-rights/articleshow/5785814.cms

Courtesy
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.

India Inc to end '09-10 on strong note

COIMBATORE, India: With a good improvement in overall economic activity, Corporate India is expected to end fiscal 2010 on a strong note.

The net profit of Sensex companies would grow 26-32% year-on-year (y-o-y) to Rs 36,000-Rs 37,000 crore in the fourth quarter of 2009-10, according to estimates by leading brokerages. Net sales would also be robust and would increase 31-35% y-o-y to about Rs 2.5 lakh crore.

Companies in the 30-share Sensex are estimated to post the strongest revenue growth since the first quarter of fiscal 2009, according to analysts at IIFL. Only four sectors would have a less than 10% profit after tax (PAT) growth.

Telecom, pharma and utilities are likely to post a decline in profits while companies in the financial sector would record a measly 2% growth, they said. In all, 25 out of 30 sensex companies would report positive earnings growth, analysts at Motilal Oswal said.

Corporate firms, which were badly hit by the global economic meltdown, are slowly clawing their way back to the heady sales and earnings growth of over 20% after a gap of nearly two years. “Capacity utilisation is approaching pre-crisis levels in domestic demand driven sectors such as steel (96% utilisation) and cement (87% utilisation),” analysts at Angel Broking said. Profits are also getting restored in some of the worst-hit sectors such as automobiles, media and infrastructure, they said.

Mirroring the improvement, government expenditure that surged in the third quarter of fiscal 2009 to support falling demand declined 10.3% in the third quarter of fiscal 2010, observers said. Nifty companies (excluding oil & gas) are expected to grow their revenues and PAT by 14 % y-o-y and 21.8% respectively in the final quarter of 2010, estimate analysts at Prabhudas Lilladher.

This would be a “remarkable improvement” compared to the beginning of the fiscal when companies in the 50-share Nifty posted a measly 3.2% growth in revenues and 0.2% decline in PAT, they said. Even on a sequential basis revenue and PAT growth (excluding oil and gas) would be 13.8% and 13.6% respectively.

Automobiles, auto ancillaries, metals and mining, infrastructure and construction would record strong growth in sales and earnings, observers said.

However, the strong growth in profits has been largely driven by commodities. Since they are volatile, observers are concerned about their high share in growth. “Given their nature, estimates in these sectors are naturally volatile and subject to sharp changes,” they said. The metals sector delivered a whopping 210% returns in fiscal 2010, the highest among all key indices. Metals and oil & gas are expected to contribute a lot to growth in fiscal 2011.

Reference Link
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/biz/india-business/India-Inc-to-end-09-10-on-strong-note/articleshow/5785701.cms

Courtesy
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.

New tech to revolutionize power grids

HOUSTON: An Indian-American scientist is developing a technology with high temperature superconducting wires that would revolutionise the way power is generated, transported and used in the US.

Superconducting power cables can transmit up to 10 times more power than copper cables without the significant losses of traditional cables and are considered environmentally friendly, said Venkat Selvamanickam of University of Houston.

“Superconducting fault current limiters can enable uninterrupted power transmission when conventional circuits will otherwise succumb to outages in events such as lightning storms”, Selvamanickam added.

Reference Link
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/New-tech-to-revolutionize-power-grids/articleshow/5785675.cms

Courtesy
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.

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'Many Indians, Pakistanis work in joint ventures in Afghanistan'

Hamid Mir is among Pakistan’s best-known journalists. Co-founder and Islamabad bureau chief of Geo TV, Mir was recently in New Delhi to receive the SAARC Lifetime Achievement Award. Humra Quraishi spoke to Mir:

Do these writers’ meets help to improve the relations in the subcontinent?

Such meets do get writers and poets together and help in bringing about a better understanding between them. But, then, though these types of events are going on for several years but we, India and Pakistan, are still at point zero. But these efforts must continue. Also, i believe we ought to invite Iran and Burma to be part of SAARC because if we go into history, we have a lot in common with these two countries. And these SAARC meets focus only on India and Pakistan. What about developments in Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh?

You visit Afghanistan regularly. What is the situation of Indians and Pakistanis living there?

The fact is Indians and Pakistanis are working together and doing so smoothly. For instance, if the owner of a restaurant is an Indian, his employees and cooks will be Pakistanis and it works out rather well. There was this recent incident which for some reason went unreported in the media. The Taliban kidnapped an Indian engineer, working for a construction company in Afghanistan. He was released when the Pakistani cashier, also working in that company, contacted his kidnappers and pleaded with them that all construction work had come to a standstill and employees could be out of work because of the engineer’s kidnapping, so he should be released. It worked. The engineer was freed and without paying any ransom. So people-to-people bonding is there and it’s time the governments of India and Pakistan realise this. These days Indian movies and Pakistani music are very popular in Afghanistan. India’s Shah Rukh Khan and our Pashtun singer Rahim Shah are in their hearts.

We hear a lot about good Taliban and bad Taliban. What’s your take?

Talibans are Talibans and it’s a myth that they are fighting for Islam. They are fighting for the liberation of their home country, for the liberation of Afghanistan. And in the last 10 years, their lifestyles have undergone a massive change. Many use computers and other modern technologies. So changes are taking place.

What about the recent bomb attacks in Afghanistan where Indians and Pakistanis were targeted?

All that’s part of the ongoing proxy war. Both India and Pakistan follow the US policy in Afghanistan. It’s time they have or follow their own policy. Don’t overlook the large numbers of Pakistanis and Indians living and working there, roughly put about a minimum of 60,000 Pakistanis and a minimum of 8,000 Indians. Most of them work together in joint ventures. I travel there often and i feel more secure in Afghanistan than in Pakistan.

Do you think peace can prevail in the subcontinent?

I feel that today though liberals are in a majority, they are divided. But extremist groups are in a minority, but they’re well organised. Interestingly, some Pakistani politicians had used the slogan, Peace with India, as part of their electioneering campaigns and had won the election. I feel that both India and Pakistan should begin with Afghanistan and work together there.

Reference Link
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Many-Indians-Pakistanis-work-in-joint-ventures-in-Afghanistan/articleshow/5784892.cms

Courtesy
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.

Are you having enough of summer fruits?

To keep dehydration at bay, it’s best to include loads of fruits in your daily diet to make sure you remain cool and beat the heat…

Citrus fruits like oranges and sweet lime are juicy and high in water content.

Apricots can be cut and eaten or baked, cooked and pureed.

Blackcurrants with their intense flavour is best mixed with other fruits like strawberries, raspberries or apples.

Opt for sweet cherries, which can be added to and fruit salads.

Plums are sweet enough to eat raw, or you can make them into crumbles, pies or tarts.

Raspberries can be eaten raw and pureed, too.

Strawberries are the fresh produce of summer season. Serve chilled.

Watermelons have high water content and taste sweet and juicy to eat. Make a tall glass of fresh juice and enjoy.

Reference Link
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/health-fitness/health/Are-you-having-enough-of-summer-fruits/articleshow/5784633.cms

Courtesy
Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.