from Abhiram Nandakumar:
A garage, a beaker and a Bunsen burner
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, one of India’s most influential businesswomen and among the world’s most powerful women, says she’s an accidental entrepreneur.
Mazumdar-Shaw has shown that modest garage start-ups can extend beyond software and hardware companies. She set up what is now India's largest listed biotechnology company in 1978 and she encourages others to follow suit.
“Today a lot of early stage research work can be done in a garage,” she said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.
Mazumdar-Shaw reckons opportunities for bio-tech startups are huge, considering the demand for sophisticated technology like genomic based systems, diagnostics for cancer stem cells, and high-end synthetic biology. All these are usually developed in small labs across the country.
“What I find today is that there are a large number of very innovative young biotech entrepreneurs who are doing things in a very small way. CellWorks is doing very interesting work on drug design.”
Her advice to budding entrepreneurs – If you have a novel idea and are looking to set up a business, don’t think twice, just go for it.
from Summit Notebook:
Infrastructure still top-of-mind in India
On Monday, we kick-off the 2010 India Investment Summit. We'll have exclusive interviews in Mumbai and Bangalore. In 2006 we held the first Reuters India Investment Summit. It was my first time in India. I've had the privilege to return every year. How time flies. Here we are four years later. Some of the key players may have changed but the big, over-arching theme is still the same: Infrastructure. It's the key to realizing the country's potential but bureaucracy, tough financing and hesitant overseas investment have slowed development in the sector, calling into question the future of India as a powerhouse.
India has had only mixed success in its efforts to accelerate construction of roads, bridges and power plants. The statistics are mind-blowing...the country is growing at 8.5% and has a population of 1.2 billion that is making a mad-dash from the countryside to sprawling cities. Call them growing pains...in India's expanding cities there is an acute need to speed project approvals, implement new financing models and attract overseas investment for much needed infrastructure. But, while the business opportunity is tremendous investors looking to India as a way to play the emerging markets are wary given the history of missed deadlines and red tape that makes getting projects completed a challenge.
Is red tape getting better or worse? Which sectors are attracting most interest? How do returns compare with similar projects globally? How do sector companies attract foreign investment in large projects? Are the challenges forcing investors and developers to look overseas instead?
These topics and more will be the key points of discussion at the Reuters India Investment Summit in Mumbai and Bangalore September 27-29.
To read our exclusive stories and analysis starting September 27 copy and paste the link below to your browser: www.reuters.com/summit/IndiaInvestment10
Bangalore: Teething troubles on path to globalisation
It has been a rather uneasy transition for Bangalore from “pensioner’s paradise” or “garden city” to the information technology capital of India.
Longtime residents often complain of immigrants from other parts of the country ruining their paradise. Such complaints have been common in Mumbai, which has witnessed waves of immigration since the 1950s, but Bangalore old-timers tend to blame the city’s problems on the “IT fellows”.
It’s fair to say the city’s infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the growing population. Traffic jams, as everywhere in the world, are incredibly annoying and travelling in Bangalore makes one wonder what exactly inspired Thomas Friedman to sing praises of this city in “The World is Flat”.
The much-maligned metro rail project is blamed for turning the city into an ugly mess. Gone are many of the broad tree-lined avenues and pretty neighbourhoods that gave the city a small town feel.
But isn’t the very existence of a metro system going to help people avoid the traffic in the future? Residents of Bangkok used to complain about the construction work on the sky rail and the elevated roads. Now, the toll roads and the sky rail are the pride and joy of Thailand’s capital.
In its zeal to become a global city, Bangalore should look eastwards. Kuala Lumpur, for example, has changed beyond recognition in the last ten years. This was a city which had a major problem with cockroaches before its makeover.
Nobody has benefited more from the arrival of immigrants than the locals. Local landlords are getting fatter and richer charging super-high rents.Local auto rickshaw drivers make a killing on those who don’t speak Kannada and local officials get lakhs from kickbacks.Local youth get more money working for IT companies than they ever would have for locally run businesses.The real problem is that locals don’t want to see others making money and living well. I see a bit of MNS in the locals that have posted comments here.Wake Up! India is ONE country.
Preparing for the Delhi Half-Marathon
Running a 21-kilometre race is no joke, especially if you’re not an athlete by any stretch of imagination.
Thousands of websites offer advice on how to train, what to do and what not to. I’ve personally found most of them useless, considering that they don’t seem to understand the matrix of training in India, let alone Bangalore.
A big impediment to training, of course, is a full time job but preparing for a race in this metropolis known as “The Garden City” is an obstacle in itself.
Picture this! I’ve dealt with pothole filled sidewalks, pollution caused by endless traffic jams, hostile stray dogs, Diwali firecrackers going off in every street corner and power failures that ensure I’m dancing and not running in the dark.
Last week, I was chased by a bull! At least the threat of a stone often scares away stray dogs.
On Saturday, I was one of 1,600 people who took part in the Nike Human Race 10 k. It wasn’t an unforgiving 4:30 pm sun on what was one of the hottest October days in the city in recent memory that hurt.
A ridiculous warm-up session turned out to be aerobics promotion for a gym which left most runners tired before the race began.
it would be very kind of u if could advice about some good websites which can help me in preparing for marathon
Do India and U.S. have more in common than they think?
First impressions count. That’s true no less with airports, the gateway to a globalised world for any country.
Which is why the United States and India may have more in common than they like to think.
I have been one of those thousands that have spent three hours in Delhi International Airport making it from check-in though to the boarding gate. Which is why I read with interest the recent spat between deputy planning chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and civil aviation minister Praful Patel over who is responsible for the chaos.
But this kind of controversy is not just confined to India. I read this piece in May from Thomas L. Friedman, the author who coined “The World is Flat”. The full article is here. But have a look at this paragraph.
“A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.”
Having lived in Washington DC before moving to India, I can sympathise with Mr. Friedman. Some of the worst queues outside India, I have seen at airports was at Dulles and JFK airports.
Are India and the United States two sides of the same coin?
Even though I am based in the US, I am a frequent traveler to Europe/Asia/South America. I completely agree with Tom Friedman that arriving into an American Airport today is like coming to a 3rd world country – long lines, confrontational immigration agents, arbitrary rules, decrepit infrastructure, everyone is a terrorist unless proven otherwise…
from FaithWorld:
India’s Hindu caste quotas edge towards private companies
The issue of redressing the imbalance of Hinduism's ancient caste system by creating job and college entry quotas for lower caste and other disadvantaged groups in India seems to be gaining headway in an election year. Now it may be the turn for private industry.
Parties across India's political spectrum appear to be seeing caste-based reservations, as the quotas are known, as potential vote winners. It is a sign again that caste consciousness will become ever more important in what in theory is a secular Indian state.
Now multinationals enjoying the fruits of an Indian economic boom may find they are not immune. Much to the horror of many industrialists worried about their international competitiveness.
India's Supreme Court has already this year upheld a government policy to reserve about half of all state college seats for students from lower castes, in what some call the world's biggest affirmative action scheme.
Then, the Indian Express quoted on TuesdayHindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Gopinath Munde as demanding quotas for lower castes in private companies. His comments were not endorsed officially, but the caste issue was out of the bag for a party that could well win the next general election. The Hindu nationalists' election strategists must realise they could win millions of votes with such policies before a general election due by early 2009.
Turn a few pages of the Indian Expressand there is a full-page advert for Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati, known as the "Queen of the Untouchables" and the potential "king maker" in the next general elections. Celebrating her first year in power, she proudly espouses her move to introduce quotas to private companies participating in state partnerships in her state, India's most populous. It was the first prominent policy in India to include private business into the quota system.
I recently returned from Bangalore covering the Karnataka state election in southern India where the Janata Dal (S), the main regional party, made headlines by proposing to reserve about a third of seats in IT companies in Bangalore for local Karnataka residents.
