Indian economic reforms: A welcome boldness. REFORMS, such as the welcome economic policy changes announced by India’s government on September 14th, can come in at least two different ways. One allows a steady procession of changes, each announced in turn, discussed, weighed for its merits, perhaps discussed in parliament, eventually accepted and implemented with care and precision. With luck, a political consensus is created around the changes, faults are found and corrected, then new ideas can be addressed. In India, at least for the past three years, and arguably for much longer, such an approach has proved impossible. While the economy grew fast, politicians—both national and regional—preferred to argue about spending revenues rather than promoting growth. Thus India’s way of promoting reforms has had to be different. On September 13th came an announcement of a small, but politically important, reduction in diesel subsidies.
The next day, September 14th, brought more welcome changes. There’s more. India's economy: Is this the bottom? India PC sales up 15.7 per cent in April-June 2012: IDC. PTI Aug 21, 2012, 09.08PM IST NEW DELHI: Computer shipments in the country increased by 15.7 per cent to 2.86 million units for the quarter ended June 2012 against the same period last year, research firm IDC said today. The India PC market shipments for Q2 2012 (April-June) stood at 2.86 million units, a sequential gain of 8.6 per cent over the previous quarter, while the year-on-year growth was at 15.7 per cent, IDC said in a statement. "Despite the environment around costs being volatile and unpredictable, consumers continued to be demanding, which has largely enabled the PC growth in Q2 2012," IDC Senior Analyst Kiran Kumar said.
Further, fulfilments for the ELCOT project in Tamil Nadu for a second successive quarter ensued growth in commercial PC market as well, Kumar added. In terms of vendor share, Lenovo sustained its lead with a 17.1 per cent market share in Q2 2012, while HP tipped Dell to take the second place with a 13.7 per cent market share. A tale of two Asian nations|Business. India's Aakash-2: iPad Guts In A Miraculous US$21 Android Tablet. Inexpensive homegrown tablets - think between US$60 and $200 - abound in India, where the per-capita income, despite the fast-rising economy, remains US$3,700 per year. But the uncrowned king of inexpensive, Indian-made tablets is the Aakash tablet. I say uncrowned because the student-designed, government-subsidized Aakash has yet to hit the market. And for awhile this year, the $35 tablet looked like it never would.
Besides poor reviews of version one of the Aakash tablet, there have been fingerpointing and legal suits flying between the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), whose students and professors designed the tablet, the Indian manufacturer, and the Canadian firm DataWind overseeing the manufacturer. The Aakash-2 sports the same ARM chipset as the iPhone 4 and the first iPad. How cheap? And what will students get for $21? Internally, the Aakash uses a single-core ARM Cortex-A8 running at 800 MHz, an video co-processor to provide HD video, and 256 MB of RAM. Credit: Shutterstock. Indian Outsourcing Firms Hire in U.S.
India’s slowdown: Farewell to Incredible India. Economics blogging: Salute to the India of ideas. How Shailendra Katyal took Lenovo to No. 1 position in India. Rahul Sachitanand, ET Bureau Jul 31, 2012, 05.18AM IST MUMBAI: Shailendra Katyal cut his teeth as a marketer at consumer products & services company Marico. After more than a decade of building brands in multiple categories, from Nihar Naturals cosmetics to Hair & Care (a 'non-sticky' hair oil), in March 2011 the 37-year-old IIM-Calcutta alum moved out of his comfort zone and into an industry alien to him: information technology. It was a leap of faith, but not a reckless one for sure. In the 16 months at the Chinese IT and electronics giant, Katyal has been instrumental in helping the local operation jump to pole position from No 5 two years ago.
By more than trebling market share from 5% over this period, Lenovo India has raced ahead of entrenched players such as HP, Dell and Acer. Much of those gains have been because of Katyal's efforts to transform Lenovo's perception from that of a stodgy enterprise business into a hip youth-centric brand. Katyal dodges the question artfully. Homemade tech to reduce India's cyber threats. India should be using only locally-developed technology to fend off cyberespionage activities as foreign-made equipment can be manipulated by other countries for spying.
According to a report by the Economic Times on Sunday, cybersecurity analyst Jiten Jain said there are countries which are subsidizing their domestic IT companies to sell products abroad below cost prices in order to facilitate spying on other nations. This happens not just between feuding nations, but among friendly countries too, he said. "Only using complete, indigenously-developed technology can save [India] from espionage," Jain said. The cybersecurity analyst added telecom networks and smartphones can be bugged, and there have been cases in which the equipment automatically updates itself without the user's knowledge. The report added that Indian authorities urged ethical hackers to work with them to spread awareness and detect vulnerabilities in the networks. India Tech Online: Information technology news and views from India. Indian Technology's Fourth Wave. Industry consultants have long been predicting the demise of Indian info tech.They have cited attrition rates, rising costs, and even the advent of cloud computing as reasons why the Indian tech industry will suffer steep declines.
But they have been dead wrong. Within a short 20 years, Indian IT has grown from almost nothing to a $73 billion industry. Even during the recession, the industry grew 6 percent and remains on track to grow an estimated 15 percent this year. That is because Indian technology companies have been moving up the value chain to provide such high-value tasks as research-and-development and business-transformation services. Now Indian industry is riding its fourth wave: the development of sophisticated technology products. The Indian technology industry got its start running call centers for companies in the West.
New Breed of Entrepreneurs 1. 2. 3. 4. During my last three trips to India over the past 12 months, I met about 400 local entrepreneurs. History of science and technology in the Indian subcontinent. The history of science and technology in the Indian Subcontinent begins with prehistoric human activity at Mehrgarh, in present-day Pakistan, and continues through the Indus Valley Civilization to early states and empires. The British colonial rule introduced some elements of western education in India. Following independence science and technology in the Republic of India has included automobile engineering, information technology, communications as well as space, polar, and nuclear sciences. Prehistory[edit] By 5500 BCE a number of sites similar to Mehrgarh had appeared, forming the basis of later chalcolithic cultures.[1] The inhabitants of these sites maintained trading relations with Near East and Central Asia.[1] Based on archaeological and textual evidence, Joseph E.
Early kingdoms[edit] Ink drawing of Ganesha under an umbrella (early 19th century). The Hindu-Arabic numeral system. , and Post Maha Janapadas—High Middle Ages[edit] The iron pillar of Delhi (375–413 CE). The Future of Indian Technology. The Indian technology industry got its start running call centers and doing low-level IT work for western firms. Then, in the 2000s, it started taking on higher-level IT tasks, offering management consulting services, and performing sophisticated R&D. Now there is another transition happening, one far more significant: a transition to development of innovative technology products. Instead of providing IT services as the big outsourcing companies do, a new breed of startups is developing high-value products based on intellectual property.
The Indian industry group NASSCOM estimates that in 2008, the country’s software product revenues totaled $1.64 billion. It forecasts that this will grow to $11 billion per year by 2015. I attended the NASSCOM Product Enclave in Bangalore, this week, and gave several talks to the 1000+ entrepreneurs in attendance. Why are highly paid workers in an industry that does lucrative contract work for multinationals jumping ship?