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21/12/2013

Taiwan’s take on Indian diplomat incident in the US

Thanks to one of our fellow readers, Arjit,

Taiwanese video explaining this incident 

http://youtu.be/04FMiZ-l_60

Until now, I hadn’t appreciated that my fellow Chinese had this kind of sense of humour!

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20/12/2013

Tejas aircraft gets initial official clearance – The Times of India

Tejas, India\’s indigeneously-designed Light Combat Aircraft, on Friday got initial operation clearance (IOC-II).

Tejas - Wings of Indian Aviation

Tejas – Wings of Indian Aviation (Photo credit: Premshree Pillai)

Defence minister AK Antony handed over release to service document (RTS) to Indian Air Force chief NAK Browne.

The certification paves the way for the induction of Tejas into the Indian Air Force.

Speaking at the event, Anthony said: \”It is a great day for the whole nation.\”

via Tejas aircraft gets initial official clearance – The Times of India.

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19/12/2013

Outrage in Parliament, govt. vows strong action – The Hindu

Amidst outrage expressed by members in Parliament, India on Wednesday asserted that it will intervene “effectively and specifically” to ensure the return and restoration of dignity of its Deputy Consul General in New York who has been arrested on charges of visa rules violation.

File photo of Deputy Consul General in New York Devyani Khobragade.

Responding to concerns expressed by members across party lines in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid condemned the U.S. action and said he will not return to the House if he fails in his responsibility to bring back the arrested diplomat Devyani Khobragade.

Spelling out the series of steps initiated to scale down the privileges granted to U.S. diplomats in India, he said there was a “conspiracy” in which Ms. Khobragade was “virtually trapped”.

He said the diplomat is “innocent” and the U.S. action was unwarranted. “It is not illegality that she is accused of, but the illegality she refused to oblige,” he said.

Maintaining that the government was not over-reacting by taking a slew of measures against the U.S., Mr. Khurshid said the treatment meted out to Ms. Khobragade had “not happened out of blue” and there is a “history” behind it.

He asserted that the government is determined and “will intervene effectively and specifically to ensure that dignity of the diplomat is preserved.” Mr. Khurshid made suo motu statements in both the Houses after members expressed outrage with demands that a resolution be passed to condemn the U.S. action.

“It is my responsibility. We will bring back the diplomat (arrested in New York) and restore her dignity. If I fail to do it, I will not return to this House,” he said in Rajya Sabha.

In the Lok Sabha, he said, “First and foremost, our effort is to bring her out of this situation and then we will talk to the US government.”

via Outrage in Parliament, govt. vows strong action – The Hindu.

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18/12/2013

How to win at leapfrog – excerpted from Reimagining India: by McKinsey & Company

From: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-pacific/how_to_win_at_leapfrog

India has a unique opportunity to avoid repeating other countries’ mistakes. Khosla Ventures founding partner Vinod Khosla argues that the “leapfrogging” mind-set requires policies that foster innovation not imitation.

December 2013 | byVinod Khosla

There’s a general tendency in life to want to do what others have done. It’s an understandable impulse but shortsighted. One of the great things about being a relatively poor, trailing, but rising power like India is that you have the opportunity to see what you want to imitate—and, more important, what you want to skip.

Here’s an example. In 2000, I chaired a three-day telecommunications seminar for McKinsey & Company in New Delhi. I talked to everybody about skipping the landline. I said, “If I were India, I wouldn’t worry about adding ten million more copper lines. I would go straight to voice over Internet and mobile.” I didn’t have it exactly right; I missed how big mobile could become and how quickly. But my argument was that the giant traditional telecom-equipment and -system providers were offering the wrong system for the 21st century. Happily for India, despite its plans to the contrary and its focus on “traditional technology” landlines, the right thing (mobile) has happened. And India is not alone in this path—Africa has taken a similar evolution toward mobile telephony.

Was this a one-time phenomenon? No. There are many areas where a developing country can apply this kind of leapfrog mentality and find a different path to a better future: education, health care, energy, even infrastructure. But the key, which leapfrog advocates often miss, is how you go about creating this alternative path.

…

So rather than trying to predict the future, India’s leaders should be trying to fit into the future as it happens. Instead of setting out ten concrete goals, they should encourage one broad direction and adopt an evolutionary mind-set. That way, as the world changes, as the price of oil shifts or a breakthrough technology comes along, India can adapt.

Take transportation, a pressing future need for India. In a linear model, you might presume that if there are 80 cars per 100 people in the United States, then that’s where India will end up and begin to plan for that. But if I were building the system, I would look for ways to anticipate and skip what exists today (my rule number one) while trying to lean in the right direction (rule number two). I would consider the possibility that for the world in 2025, self-driving cars, like the ones Google is well on the way to developing successfully, will be widespread. And then I would ask: What are some of the implications of that assumption?

The first implication is that we’ll need a different type of transportation infrastructure. With a system of self-driving cars at scale in the United States, you might end up with one-fifth of the current number of cars sold annually. Instead of owning cars individually, perhaps drivers of the future will think of cars more the way we do taxis and limos now or like fractional jet ownership of the sort that NetJets pioneered—as fleets you could tap into for different occasions and with a lower total cost of ownership. With the fleet approach, the quality of service could improve because customers wouldn’t be tied to the cars they bought. For a night on the town, you might get a BMW; for everyday use, a Prius; for hauling stuff over the weekend, a Suburban. And all ordered on your smartphone.

A second implication of the spread of self-driving cars and the adoption of a fleet approach to car ownership is that cities can set aside less space for parking. Think what phone companies do in dense urban spaces. They don’t add a phone line for every person in a building. They multiplex: if there are 100 people in a building, they run 25 to 30 lines. With self-driving vehicles, we could multiplex cars the same way.

A shift toward a multiplexed fleet of auto-navigating vehicles would enable India to cut resource usage in a major way, lessening the need for capital investment and reducing expenditures for steel. Electric cars would become more affordable; the usage factor would be much higher, so the payback time would be much shorter. Even with today’s batteries, you could justify paying a higher price for electric cars. Instead of being driven 6,500 kilometers a year, electric cars would be driven 160,000 kilometers a year, like a taxi. That, in turn, would lower oil consumption.

Such a distributed system would be much more adaptive than making a massive investment in a new electric rail network. Loads would dynamically balance to fit demand. A distributed approach to transportation doesn’t require betting on a single $10 billion project. In effect, the transportation network can be built out one $20,000 car at a time.

If these assumptions are correct, the future of India’s transportation system will look very different from the one the government is planning for. That’s what happened to India, accidentally, in communications. Why not learn from the telecommunications experience and apply the lesson to cars? The precise outcome doesn’t matter (my assumption may be wrong). The main thing is to create a regulatory and investment climate to support the right broad policy goals (access to transportation) rather than lock everyone into specific technologies. In a nutshell, we don’t know what the future winners are—and it would be foolish of government to attempt to determine that. But we can try to set the groundwork.

…

India needs more innovation capitalism. Take education. In Kenya, Khosla Ventures has funded a start-up called Bridge International Academies, which is operating hundreds of schools that break even at $5 per child a month, a price even the poorest can afford. We’re opening one or two new facilities a week. The model combines physical schools that can take up to 300 kids, but instead of using textbooks the pedagogy runs off mobile phones. We compete head-to-head with public education provided for free by the Kenyan government and are winning—both in outcomes and in the minds of low-income parents who willingly choose the Bridge option over others.

The shift to online education is slashing costs and transforming traditional approaches to teaching. Instead of a prescriptive system that specifies a strict time (four years of high school) and variable results in learning, we’re moving to a world of fixed learning (the subjects you master and skills you acquire) and variable time. The increasing sophistication of online assessment tools allows each student to advance at his or her own pace.

So when India plans for education in 2025, it may still want to build many more Indian Institutes of Technology. But it also needs to think about how it can leverage the technology revolution to reshape education at all levels and rethink its physical infrastructure. It needs to be sure it is creating policies that encourage these trends and financing lots of experiments.

One thing we’ve learned with Internet start-ups is that everything needs to be iterated continually. A successful venture like Pinterest went through 300 evolutions before it caught on. With online education, it will be the same. Like any biological system, it won’t be perfect at first, but it will keep on getting much better.

The same principles apply to health care. Today, if you compare the doctor-to-population ratio in the United States and India, India’s is ten times lower. The resource-intensive answer is to say we need to build ten times the number of medical schools we currently have. A better alternative is to accelerate the adoption of new computer diagnostic systems, delivered via cell phones and cheap tablets. I believe such systems can eventually replace 80 percent of doctor visits and deliver results with a better and more consistent quality of care.

…

I’m not arguing that India doesn’t need more and better physical infrastructure—roads, ports, power plants, and the like. I’m saying that the size of that future increase can be reduced by scaling out an alternative electronic infrastructure, which is also cheaper to build.

Despite India’s well-known problems, I am optimistic about its prospects. Its enormous young English-speaking population is a huge advantage. Its democracy, though messy, adds resilience and stability to the system and gives it an advantage over planned-and-directed economies like China, despite China’s reputation for “getting things done.” The overseas Indian community is increasingly emerging as a great resource for seeding—not only capital, but also a desire to experiment and try something different. And, frankly, new ideas are more important than capital.

The critical missing link is to marry that leapfrogging mind-set to a better policy framework that sparks innovation and experimentation—one that reimagines the future by encouraging instead of prescribing.

About the author

Vinod Khosla is founding partner of Khosla Ventures. This essay is excerpted from Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower. Copyright © 2013 by McKinsey & Company. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 

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18/12/2013

Toward a uniquely Indian growth model – excerpted from Reimagining India: McKinsey & Company

From: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-pacific/toward_a_uniquely_indian_growth_model 

India can’t afford to emulate China. Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra says the country’s states must compete, not march in lockstep, if India is to develop its own path to sustainable prosperity.

November 2013 | byAnand Mahindra

According to this way of thinking, India is an underachiever, perversely holding itself back—and needs only to fire some particular afterburner in order to get its rocket to full speed. The government needs to go on an infrastructure building spree, or open the door to big-box retailers. Political parties need to crack down on corruption and nepotism. Farmers need to adopt smartphones. Something will trigger the long-awaited boom, and the billions in foreign direct investment (FDI) that have flowed to China over the last two decades will at last head south.

If we continue to judge India’s progress by China’s, using metrics like FDI and GDP growth, or statistics like the kilometers of highway and millions of apartments built, we will continue to be branded a laggard. India’s messy coalition governments are not suddenly about to become as efficient and decisive as China’s technocrat-led Politburo. Nor should that be the goal.

Moreover, India simply cannot afford to grow like China has over the last two decades. In authoritarian, tightly controlled China, the costs of that headlong economic expansion are obvious. Unbreathable air and undrinkable milk, slick-palmed officials and oppressive factory bosses provoke tens of thousands of protests each year. In a society as diverse as India’s—riven by religious, community, and caste divides—those kinds of tensions can easily erupt in violence and disorder. Already the battle between haves and have-nots is driving a powerful rural insurgency across nearly a third of the country. Labor riots can turn into religious pogroms. Farmer protests can turn into class wars.

For India’s economy to expand as rapidly and yet more sustainably than China’s, we need to make our differences into virtues rather than vulnerabilities. For too long we have clung to a mind-set shaped by the early independence years, when the areas in the northwest and northeast had become Pakistan, and India’s first government was struggling to weave a patchwork of provinces and maharaja-run kingdoms into a nation. In those days, the risk that India might break apart was very real. One of India’s great accomplishments is that no one worries about that anymore. Indeed, the idea of a united India runs so broad and deep that it allows us to consider a counterintuitive way of thinking about growth—that the best way to propel the economy may be to encourage different parts of the country to go their own way.

I’m not suggesting secession, of course. But there’s no sense in pretending that “India” is a single investment destination or even a coherent, unified economic entity. India’s 28 states and seven territories are as different from one another—as varied in language, food, culture, and level of development—as the nations of Europe. In some ways, Gujarat has more in common with Germany than with Bihar. Companies understand this. When they make decisions about where to locate factories or R&D hubs, they’re looking at the tax policies, physical and legal infrastructure, or labor costs in the particular state they’re considering—not at some mythical “India” visible only at Davos. We should be celebrating and encouraging these differences.

…

India needs to find a way to distribute growth—to create new urban hubs all over the country that can attract talent and money. Even if government had the power to bulldoze neighborhoods and erect forests of skyscrapers, as some seem to wish, it would struggle to surmount the challenges currently facing big cities like Mumbai and Bangalore. At double or triple the population, those megacities would become ungovernable. We need to break these problems into manageable pieces, developing hundreds, even thousands of smaller cities around the country where the problems of water, transit, power, and governance can be negotiated at the local level. India’s sprawling subcontinent can never become a plus-size Singapore. But perhaps we can weave together an urban web that is the equivalent of a thousand Singapores.

Technology is making this more than a fantasy. Given how much India has benefited from the way fiber-optic cables have already shrunk the world, we should be quick to see the opportunities in shrinking the subcontinent, too. With widespread 4G connectivity, many businesses will be able to operate from anywhere. That will create an advantage for locations emphasizing efficiency and livability. Workers will be able to perform their tasks closer to home, if not actually at home, thus relieving pressure on India’s roads and bridges. Even manufacturing can be distributed, once technologies like 3-D printing become more widespread. Populations of laborers will no longer need to cluster around big factories. Indeed, once every home can become a manufacturing hub, the kind of small enterprises that have been the backbone of the traditional Indian economy could find ways to thrive in the modern world.

Forced to compete for talent and for business, cities will have to experiment and innovate. Several corporations, including Mahindra, have begun exploring new ways to live, work, and play in planned enclaves like Mahindra World City outside Chennai. While these efforts are continuing, the government, too, should foster and support such experimentation as a matter of urban policy. Already the government taxes coal and fossil fuels used in the power and transportation industries, and offers tax incentives for renewable energy and nonpolluting vehicles. But we can go further, finding new ways to use technology to improve and expand the delivery of government services. The government’s Unique Identification project, which uses biometric data such as photographs, fingerprints, and retinal scans to create cost-effective and easily verifiable ID numbers for all Indian residents, is an excellent example of how government can leverage technology to help India’s citizens. These new numbers will make it easier for Indians to pay taxes, collect government benefits, and receive other government services. They also will help prevent fraud, bribery, vote rigging, and illegal immigration, as well as facilitate the delivery of many private-sector services.

India’s new cities will be its afterburners, the catalysts sparking new bursts of growth. The innovations developed in each scattered enclave will be emulated and improved upon elsewhere, and thus give rise to innovation. Rather than directing where capital should go, or funding white-elephant infrastructure projects, the central government should set the rules of the game and then step back.

What India needs from the world as much as investment dollars are bold thinkers who can help to define these new ways of living. We should seek out these visionaries, give them a platform to test their theories, and invite them not to build gaudy skyscrapers but to help develop new ways for the human race to live. Foreign direct ideas should be as valued a commodity as traditional FDI.

The world has a stake in India’s success—and not just because of the need for someone to pick up the slack from a slowing China. Much of the developing world faces the same challenges India does. The solutions developed here—the answers to almost metaphysical questions about how societies should work and grow—will have worldwide relevance.

For better or worse, India is where the future will be made. Let’s get it right.

About the author

Anand Mahindra is chairman and managing director of global conglomerate Mahindra. This essay is excerpted from Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower. Copyright © 2013 by McKinsey & Company. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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18/12/2013

Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower – McKinsey & Co

India’s rising economy and burgeoning middle class have earned it a place alongside China as one of the world’s indispensable emerging markets. But what is India’s true potential? And what can be done to unlock it?

Reimagining India

In Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower, McKinsey brings together leading thinkers from around the world to explore and debate the challenges and opportunities facing the country. The book’s contributors include CNN’s Fareed Zakaria; Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates; Google chairman Eric Schmidt; Mukesh Ambani, the CEO of India’s largest private conglomerate; Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria; and Nandan Nilekani, cofounder of Infosys and chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, as well as a host of other leading executives, entrepreneurs, economists, foreign-policy experts, journalists, historians, and cultural luminaries.

As the foreword notes, “While McKinsey consultants have contributed a few essays to this volume, Reimagining India is not the product of a McKinsey study; neither is it meant as a ‘white paper’ nor coherent set of policy proposals. Rather, our aim was to create a platform for others to engage in an open, free-wheeling debate about India’s future.”

http://www.mckinsey.com/features/reimagining_india_book

Simon & Schuster (US) | Executive editors: Clay Chandler and Adil Zainulbhai

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18/12/2013

Butter chicken at Birla – excerpted fromReimagining India: McKinsey & Company

From: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-pacific/butter_chicken_at_birla

What succeeds at home may not work overseas. The chairman of Aditya Birla Group, Kumar Mangalam Birla, says Indian companies must be prepared to change long-held traditions if they are to thrive on the global stage.

December 2013 | byKumar Mangalam Birla

Mahatma Gandhi was killed in my great-grandfather’s home. Near the end of his life, India’s founding father used to stay at Birla House when he came to Delhi, and in January 1948 an assassin shot him point-blank as he walked out into the grassy courtyard where he held his daily prayer meetings. The house and garden are now a shrine and museum, visited by tens of thousands of admirers every year.

Growing up, I hardly needed to visit the memorial to be reminded of the values held by my close-knit Marwari family. Our tiny community, originally from Rajasthan, has had spectacular success in business, in part because we have maintained tight familial relations and traditional values—including many of those promoted by Gandhi himself. Marwari traders apprenticed their sons to other Marwari firms, loaned each other money, and insured one another’s goods, confident that their partners held to these same codes. To some in the West, our ways probably looked old-fashioned: when I took over the company, in 1996, at age 29, after the sudden death of my father, no meat was cooked in Birla cafeterias; no wine or whiskey was served at company functions.

Seven years later, we bought a small copper mine in Australia. The deal wasn’t a huge one, worth only about $12.5 million, but it presented me with a unique challenge of the sort I had not yet faced as chairman. Our newest employees were understandably worried about how life might change under Indian ownership. Would they have to give up their Foster’s and barbecues at company events? Of course not, we reassured them.

But then several of my Indian managers asked why they should have to go meatless at parties, if employees abroad did not. At Marwari business houses, including Birla, the top ranks of executives traditionally have been filled with other Marwaris. I had introduced some managers from other firms and other communities, and they had a valid point. I was genuinely flustered. My lieutenants were relentless: I had never faced a situation where my own people felt so strongly about something. Yet at the same time, I knew vegetarianism was a part of our values as a family and as a company. A core belief! I had broken a lot of family norms, but I thought this one was going to be multidimensionally disastrous for me.

 

Fortunately, my grandparents merely laughed when I approached them with my dilemma: they understood better than I did that our company had to change with the times. If we wanted to make our mark on the world, we had to be prepared for the world to leave its mark on us.

The Aditya Birla Group is now one of India’s most globalized conglomerates. We have operations in 36 countries on five continents and employ 136,000 people around the world. Over 60 percent of our revenues come from overseas.

…

Some lessons surprised me even more. Ironically, before we became more international, I used to be much more impressed by someone who could speak the Queen’s English than, say, by a chartered accountant from Jodhpur whose spoken English required some effort to understand. Now when I look across all our operations in places like Brazil or Egypt or Thailand, I see a whole host of people who aren’t comfortable in English, who need interpreters, but who are very, very good at what they do. Sadly, it took that experience for me to respect an accountant from Rajasthan—my home state—as much as a graduate of St. Stephen’s in Delhi. At one time, we even wanted to run English classes for some of our employees! Now it’s not an issue in my mind. If you can get your point across, if you are adding value, if you are competent, then bloody hell to your English.

…

The good news is that globalization gets easier over time: there is a snowball effect. The next time we bought a pulp mill in Canada, we were known. The New Brunswick government was comfortable with us; the mill workers knew who we were. Interestingly, as we become more global, people have real feedback to fall back on. When we acquired Columbian Chemicals, in 2011, executives at Columbian headquarters in Atlanta were able to go across town to the Novelis headquarters and ask about us—what we were all about, how we’re run, what sort of autonomy we encouraged. They were talking to people to whom they could relate easily and who could give them honest and accurate information. Maybe not all of it was positive, of course, but at least it was real.

Now, when we want to recruit expat talent to move to India, it’s much easier as well because they know about our global operations. They know that opportunities across the group are getting bigger and more interesting. That’s made us a more attractive employer to non-Indians. As we are “going global,” we’re also finding that global executives are becoming more willing to “go Indian.”

As I’ve said, this has taken years of painstaking work. It’s not an overnight process, and it’s not as easy as writing a check. There are opportunities out there for ambitious and well-run Indian companies—as long as they remember that the world will change them as much as they hope to change the world.

About the author

Kumar Mangalam Birla is chairman of the Aditya Birla Group. This essay is excerpted fromReimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower. Copyright © 2013 by McKinsey & Company. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 

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18/12/2013

The rediscovery of India – excerpted from Reimagining India: McKinsey & Company

From: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-pacific/the_rediscovery_of_india

Is diversity an excuse for disunity? CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says Indians must embrace their common ambitions if the nation is to fulfill its tremendous potential.

November 2013 | byFareed Zakaria

Is India even a country? It’s not an outlandish question. “India is merely a geographical expression,” Winston Churchill said in exasperation. “It is no more a single country than the Equator.” The founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, recently echoed that sentiment, arguing that “India is not a real country. Instead it is thirty-two separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.”

India gives diversity new meaning. The country contains at least 15 major languages, hundreds of dialects, several major religions, and thousands of tribes, castes, and subcastes. A Tamil-speaking Brahmin from the south shares little with a Sikh from Punjab; each has his own language, religion, ethnicity, tradition, and mode of life. Look at a picture of independent India’s first cabinet and you will see a collection of people, each dressed in regional or religious garb, each with a distinct title that applies only to members of his or her community (Pandit, Sardar, Maulana, Babu, Rajkumari).

Or look at Indian politics today. After every parliamentary election over the last two decades, commentators have searched in vain for a national trend or theme. In fact, local issues and personalities dominate from state to state. The majority of India’s states are now governed by regional parties—defined on linguistic or caste lines—that are strong in one state but have little draw in any other. The two national parties, the Indian National Congress and the BJP, are now largely confined in their appeal to about ten states each.

And yet, there are those who passionately believe that there is an essential “oneness” about India. Perhaps the most passionate and articulate of them was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. During one of his many stints in jail, fighting for Indian independence, he wrote The Discovery of India, a personal interpretation of Indian history but one with a political agenda. In the book, Nehru details a basic continuity in India’s history, starting with the Indus Valley civilization of 4500 BCE, running through Ashoka’s kingdom in the third century BCE, through the Mughal era, and all the way to modern India. He describes an India that was always diverse and enriched by its varied influences, from Buddhism to Islam to Christianity.

…

Can the country live up to its potential? If so, it will happen only because of a bottom-up process of protest and politics that forces change in New Delhi. India will never be a China, a country where the population is homogeneous and where a ruling elite directs the nation’s economic and political development. In China, the great question is whether the new president, Xi Jinping, is a reformer—he will need to order change, top-down, for that country.

In India, the questions are different: Are Indians reformers? Can millions of people mobilize and petition and clamor for change? Can they persist in a way that makes reform inevitable? That is the only way change will come in a big, open, raucous democracy like India. And when that change comes, it is likely to be more integrated into the fabric of the country and thus more durable.

I remain optimistic. We are watching the birth of a new sense of nationhood in India, drawn from the aspiring middle classes in its cities and towns, who are linked together by commerce and technology. They have common aspirations and ambitions, a common Indian dream—rising standards of living, good government, and a celebration of India’s diversity. That might not be as romantic a basis for nationalism as in days of old, but it is a powerful and durable base for a modern country that seeks to make its mark on the world.

About the author

Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, an editor-at-large for Time magazine, and author of The Post-American World (W. W. Norton & Company, April 2008). This essay is excerpted from Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower. Copyright © 2013 by McKinsey & Company. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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17/12/2013

Why India is sitting on a social time-bomb of violence against women

There are 37 million more men than women in India, and most of them are of marriageable age given the relatively young population. A social time-bomb is now setting off there with terrifying consequences, and until the gang-rape in Dehli a year ago, very little attention was paid to this.

A demonstration in January 2013 in response to the gang-rape in Delhi.

Imagine a world where the proportion of girls being born is so low that large proportions of males just cannot find partners when they come of age. In such a world they are more likely to congregate in gangs for company. In turn, that means they are more likely to engage in risky behaviour: i.e. commit crime, do drugs and engage in violence against women. In gangs, men are more likely to harass women and even commit rape.

But this isn’t some dystopian fantasy – there are 37 million more men than women in India, and most of them are of marriageable age given the relatively young population. A social time-bomb is now setting off there with terrifying consequences.

While researching for my e-book on violence against women in India, earlier this year I came across an extraordinary article on why some brothers living in the same household were sharing a wife rather than marrying separate women.

Let that sink in for a moment. The Times of India reported in 2005 on instances where between two and five brothers living in a house, in rural areas in the state of Punjab, had married the same woman. It was extraordinary not just for what was in it, but for what was left out.

The article – \”Draupadis bloom in rural Punjab\” – cited two reasons for these polyandric arrangements: they prevented the household from splitting into multiple families and therefore dividing the meagre land they owned; men just could not find wives to settle down with. [The women are called \”Draupadis\” in reference to the princess who married five brothers in the Hindu epic The Mahabharata]. Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh told the Times of India: “the small landholdings and skewed sex ratio have abetted the problem.\”

via Why India is sitting on a social time-bomb of violence against women.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/12/13/slow-change-comes-to-india-a-year-after-delhi-gang-rape-expert-zone/

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16/12/2013

India’s debit card safety rule boosts sales of payment solution companies | India Insight

Companies that help in processing card payments look set to benefit from rising demand for portable card swipe machines after the Reserve Bank of India adopted new rules to prevent fraud and enhance security.

Merchants in India usually swipe cards through a reader to generate receipts that customers sign, but the new rule, effective Dec. 1, adds another layer of security by making debit card holders enter their personal identification numbers to validate transactions via these machines, also referred to as point-of-sale (POS) terminals.

Businesses such as fuel stations, hotels and restaurants that normally keep their card machines out of the customer’s reach will have to buy the portable, GPRS-enabled devices to offer convenience to clients.

Sunith Menon, India’s managing director for France-based Ingenico S.A., which manufactures such devices and supplies them to various banks, expects revenue to rise by 20 percent as demand for the wireless POS terminals rises after the new RBI mandate.

“We are seeing an increased requirement coming in from banks,” he said, adding that ICICI-First Data, Bank of Baroda and Axis Bank were among those who have placed orders for GPRS-enabled POS terminals.

Of the 20,000 POS terminals sold every month by Ingenico in the country, 10 percent were GPRS-enabled models. Menon now expects such devices to account for a 30 percent share in his near-term sales.

The new PIN mandate would affect more than 350 million debit card holders in the country. A recent study by industry body ASSOCHAM showed that the debit card users, growing at an annual rate of 18 percent, were clocking sales of 69 billion rupees using POS terminals every month.

The number of POS terminals in the market has grown significantly in the recent years. As of the end of September, there were 965,000 terminals in use across the country, 46 percent higher than the 661,000 devices in March 2012, according to data provided by e-payment services provider Worldline India.

Pine Labs India, which counts Starbucks, Future Group and Pantaloon Retail among its clients, has installed about 4,000 GPRS swipe machines since November, higher than the monthly average of 200 to 300. In the next month, the company expects to install another 2,000 such machines.

via India’s debit card safety rule boosts sales of payment solution companies | India Insight.

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