Rio de Janeiro in Brazil will have a different kind of carnival this year. From June 20 to 22, the city will host the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which is expected to bring together heads of states, ministers, senior officials, representatives from international organisations, civil society leaders and environmentalists. Since the conference is a 20th year follow-up of the most famous environmental meeting held in the recent decades"the...
12:55 PM, Feb 13, 2012
USA The US, ranked number one, has always been a leader in innovation. However, after the recession, innovation has taken a backseat in the USA. This could possibly hamper job creation. India India, ranked sixth, is one level higher than the UK in innovation. Its most innovative sectors are energy, healthcare, telecommunications, and fast moving consumer goods. China China is the fourth most innovative country and the second largest investor...
12:18 PM, Feb 13, 2012
In October 2009, nine months after converting the floundering Nature's Basket into a gourmet food store, its team was pleasantly surprised. Its seven stores in Mumbai had seen sales grow at 70 per cent " a surprisingly quick validation of their change in strategy. Getting there, however, has been a rough ride. Two years earlier, Godrej's Nature's Basket business wasn't going as planned. The store, set up in 2006, had...
11:52 AM, Feb 11, 2012
Part detective, part academic, part chronicler, Stephen Tankel provides what is arguably one of the finest and most detailed accounts of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the terrorist group that represents the greatest threat to India. The hook for the book is the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks when 10 trained LeT fighters wreaked havoc in South Mumbai. That was the turning point for LeT when it announced to the world that it had...
11:39 AM, Feb 11, 2012
This spring, there is music in the air. Here are some music festivals that will leave you whistling a tune. Sulafest 2012 Location: Sula Vineyards, Nashik When: February 4-5 Artists: Nitin Sawhney, Blackstratblues, Papon & East India Company Damage: Rs. 1,800. The highlight this year is undoubtedly Nitin Sawhney. He is a huge favourite of Rajeev Samant, founder and CEO of Sula Vineyards. Area79 Music and Arts Festival Location: The...
12:43 PM, Feb 10, 2012
While the Uttar Pradesh elections hog the lion's share of coverage in national media, the Punjab elections are proving to be the more colourful of the two. YouTube, Facebook, and other media platforms are full of the hilarious conversations between cartoon characters Jeeta and Jaggi created by the Congress, who take pot shots at the failings of the SAD"BJP (Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party) government. SAD has responded through their...
12:28 PM, Feb 10, 2012
You know, there is no easy way to say this, says Gaurav Jain, the 39-year-old managing director of Swastik Roadlines and explains. His father had started Swastik in partnership with two friends. Jain joined the company in 1999 when it was doing very well. It had 23 trucks. None of the founders realised what was around the corner. Ever since its inception in 1997, the company had grown on the...
05:50 PM, Feb 09, 2012
The overwhelming majority of investment analysts belong to two basic camps when it involves predictions. The first tend to take themselves and their learned prognosis for the world pretty seriously. More often than not they are paid by their employers to predict the future. Funnily, these otherwise talented individuals do not appear to have come to terms with the futility of forecasting. The second camp studiously avoids making predictions and...
01:46 PM, Feb 07, 2012
The court hearings had gone on through all of August. On September 8, 2010, the Bombay High Court was packed to the rafters with newspaper reporters of all hues. There was a battery of lawyers representing the Government of India and telecom giant Vodafone. There were two judges who had been hearing the famous Vodafone tax case: DY Chandrachud and JP Devadhar. Though Devadhar was in Nagpur that day, he...
01:18 PM, Feb 07, 2012
No one is switching off lights at 6 pm or slashing salaries and headcount by a quarter and cutting back on travel budgets. Actually, there are very few Indian firms exhibiting those typical knee-jerk reactions that one associates with tough times. Instead, when our team began interviewing CEOs of some of India's best run companies to gauge how they'd plan their strategy to tide over this year of uncertainty, we...
11:39 AM, Feb 04, 2012
D Shivakumar Age: 52 Designation: Senior Vice President (Sales), India, Middle East and Africa Region, Nokia. Formerly Managing Director, Nokia India Career: Joined Nokia India in 2006. Prior to that was heading the consumer electronics business of Philips India. Has also spent several years with Hindustan Levers Education: Graduated from IIT Madras in 1982 and IIM Kolkata in 1984 Interests: Is passionate about writing, teaching and is an avid sports...
11:27 AM, Feb 04, 2012
Will a day come when India's poor can access government services as easily as drawing cash from an ATM? The day will come very soon when transfers from the government will be as easy, or easier, than using an ATM. But transfers to the poor are a very small part of what any government does. And no country in the world has made accessing education or health or policing or...
04:13 PM, Feb 03, 2012
I do not minimise the difficulties that lie ahead on the long and arduous journey on which we have embarked. But as Victor Hugo once said, "no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come". I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud...
04:03 PM, Feb 03, 2012
Railways is the lifeline of the nation. It has been doing a wonderful service so far. But it has not been keeping pace with the advances made in rail technology worldwide. Today, I am not confident of sending my family on a train given the number of accidents. So, improving safety of the railways is a very urgent necessity. But to be truly world class, the Indian Railways also needs...
11:38 AM, Feb 01, 2012
In the late 1990s, during the good old days of dotcom 1.0, many browsing centres across the country tried to marry email with snail mail. They targeted old people who were comfortable reading on paper, but whose children preferred the speed of email. For a fee, these small-time entrepreneurs took printouts of email and delivered the letters home. But people were worried about privacy and the experiment died soon. A...
10:57 AM, Feb 01, 2012
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