By Shirley Liu and Seema Rani Bhende
NEW DELHI, Nov. 4 – With the start of the Commonwealth Games 2010 less than a year away, questions continue to be asked if India is truly up to the challenge. Over the last several months, there have been mounting concerns from reporters and Commonwealth Games officials that New Delhi is unprepared and seriously behind planning schedule, which has raised doubt on India’s ability to execute the Games in a sound fashion. Continue reading
Oct. 27 – Business India magazine has just released its tenth best business schools survey which ranks India’s top institutions. The top ten is as follows with the name of each school also linked to its website.
1) Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
2) Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
3) Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta Continue reading
By Chris Devonshire-Ellis
Oct. 26 – In the latest politically correct movement of stupidity, the State of Orissa is now legally to be known as Odisha following a ruling by the Indian Union Cabinet. The regional language, previously known as Oriya, will now be called Odia.
The move follows prolonged lobbying by the BJP Party, long bent on correcting misnamed cities and states. The confusion arises partly due to the phonetic and dialect differences in pronouncing the English version and the local language version with the BJP determined to revert all names to the ones used locally. Hence Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai and Calcutta became Kolkata. Continue reading
By Mark Hannant
MUMBAI, Oct. 23 – Macro-economic trends currently favor Indian businesses looking to grow internationally and focusing on their communications is one area where they can improve their chances of success. Much ink is spilt writing about the difficulty of creating value through merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. Over half of deals fail to achieve their operational or financial goals according to PwC (M&A Integration Survey Report, 2008). The lack of success is often explained in terms of failed integrations and the reality that “buying is easy, owning is hard.” There is a growing understanding that those failures are in a large part due to the lack of post-merger integration planning and specifically a failure to deal with cultural issues. Continue reading
Oct. 16 – The Indian government’s application for a geographical indication mark for Darjeeling Tea is coming to a close, with the European Commission expected to recognize it within the next six months.
Geographical indication marks are a type of intellectual property mark that recognizes a specific region only as the name for a particular product. Champagne, Napa Valley and Roquefort Cheese are just three examples. The goods should be from a defined geographical region and possess distinct qualities linked to that area. Continue reading
MUMBAI, Oct. 14 – Following an inspection of the sites intended for the Delhi Commonwealth Games led by Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) President Mike Fennell, the Delhi Games Organizing Committee (DGOC) has the ignominy of having an Independent Technical Committee, made up of foreign experts oversee all aspects of DGOC preparations.
The CGF had delegates from each of the 71 commonwealth territories inspect all venues over the past six days. Fennell’s report was not good, stating that “There are particular concerns across all operational areas, as well as with the procurement processes.” Somewhat predictably, DGOC chief Suresh Kalmadi reacted angrily to the report and to the imposition of an independent review panel, saying that the CGF had come to India with an existing agenda and that the visit was extremely demoralizing. Continue reading
Oct. 13 – India’s salary rates are expected to increase at an average rate of eight percent this year and with as much as 50 percent of companies saying that they plan to recruit in the next three months, according to a survey conducted by global HR consultancy Mercer.
The Mercer India Monitor quarterly survey reports that companies were bullish for next year’s economic prospects with salaries expected to rise by as much as 10.9 percent. “Despite the fact that past year saw slowest growth in a long time, the economy is expected to grow at over six percent and industry is estimated to see overall average salary hikes at 8 per cent for 2009,” Mercer’s information product solutions business India leader Gangapriya Chakraverti said in a statement. Continue reading
Oct. 9 – Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his study of ribosomes.
The prize awards studies of one of life’s core processes: the ribosome’s translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics. Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life. Continue reading
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