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Consumerism overwhelming Indian markets
India. Shining India. Consumer India. High?Growth India; Market-Oriented India; Investment?Inviting India. Since 1991, when India first broke away from its Nehruvian socialist ideology and went in for a market economy, things have been changing so fast as to make the progress achieved and noticeable, unbelievable. It has now the fourth largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world in purchasing power parity (PPP). Of its 1.2 billion people, as many as 450 million are apparently below the age...
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Development Center to Offer Grad Student Fellowships
Legatum, a private investment firm with an interest in sustainable development, gave MIT a $50 million structured gift to create the new Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, according an MIT press release. The LCDE hopes to offer a fellowship program for graduate students, starting in the 2008?2009 academic year and to ?create a platform for sustainable development,? according to the center?s Web site. The Legatum Center, which was announced on Sept. 17, will also offe...
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Let the music play
The New York or Nasdaq exchanges have been done, now Indian companies are setting their sights on exchanges such as Euronext and those in Dubai and Australia. Businesses are globalising and so are investors and so is access to capital markets The last five years form the best period in the Indian economic history when the economy has achieved many milestones. Whether it is sustained high economic growth rate, double digit industrial growth, rising saving and investment levels, huge fo...
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Bharat could save India from US recession
Fears of a possible US recession following the subprime crisis and the repercussions this could have across the globe have cast a shadow over economic forecasts for 2008. Despite repeated interest rate cuts, demand continues to be slack in the US with retail registering disturbingly low sales over the recent festive season. Persisting economic uncertainty, which leads to deferred consumption, can put a further brake on the slowdown and make recession a self-fulfiling prophecy. And if ...
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Vital to Access Asian Markets
Ten trillion dollars will be spent inside emerging markets in infrastructure development between now and 2030 in energy and water alone. Most will happen inside China and India at a pace not witnessed on this planet since America surged westward following the Civil War. The doom-and-gloomers counter: But their environments can’t withstand all that development! They’ll run out of water! All those cars will demand too much oil! All that coal-fired pollution will b...
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India’s empire builder
After celebrating his 70th birthday yesterday, Ratan Tata would in the normal course of affairs be facing mandatory retirement from the Tata Group. Two years ago, however, India’s most respected and acquisitive conglomerate ex-tended to 75 the age until which non-executive directors could serve, giving the man who has transformed it over the past 16 years a new lease at its helm. Although corporate governance purists at the time criticised the change as retrograde, it is a decision that few ...
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A soul-searching business
Like Hindu souls, disposable plastic cups are many times reborn in Dharavi. In a spiralling continuum, they are discarded and gathered in, melted down to their polypropylene essence, and re-moulded in some new plastic form. Recycling is one of the slum’s biggest industries. Thousands of tonnes of scrap plastic, metals, paper, cotton, soap and glass revolve through Dharavi each day. Location is the key to this. Until two decades ago, the slum was next door to Bombay’s biggest r...
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A flourishing slum
Around 6am, the squealing of copulating rats?signalling a night-long verminous orgy on the rooftops of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai?gives way to the more cheerful sound of chirruping sparrows. Through a small window in Shashikant (?Shashi?) Kawale’s rickety shack, daylight seeps. It reveals a curly black head outside. Further inspection shows that this is attached to a man’s sleeping body, on a slim metal ledge, 12 feet above the ground. With maybe a million residents, crammed in...
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