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Water Purifier Players Battle for Every Drop
It’s said the next world war will be fought for water. While this frightening scenario — a global battle between nations for the precious resource — is strictly hypothetical in proportions, a skirmish over water has already erupted in India. No, not the disputed Cauvery water nor the water sharing between India and its neighbours, but between brands in the water purifier market. And it’s between market leader Eureka Forbes (EFL) and Hindustan Unilever which has been fo...
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- South Asia
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Investors Back Social Initiatives in India
Bangalore: When Pune-based sanitation services provider Saraplast Pvt. Ltd started hunting for funds late last year, it was confident of attracting investors. The company had all its documents in place, a three-year track record of profits and a business model that it thought could be scaled up. However, Saraplast was baffled when investors indicated that they did not think its business of operating portable toilets was a business at all, even in a country where 55% of the populati...
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- South Asia
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SKS at the Crossroads
By Shloka Nath On a rainy afternoon at a five-star hotel in suburban Mumbai, Vikram Akula is making a fervent pitch to a group of potential investors in the enterprise he founded, SKS Microfinance (SKS). Akula and SKS chief executive Suresh Gurumani take turns at the mike to impress on the rainmakers the advantages of investing in SKS, well on its way to becoming the world’s biggest microlender. While their purpose is the same, the two men present a study in contrast. Akula,...
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- South Asia
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IDE India Featured on PBS
NewsHour correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on how India is trying to feed its growing population while maintaining the environment. Watch the full video: ...
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- South Asia
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We Must See India As One – Prahalad
When Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad and his colleague Stuart Hart wrote an article on the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in 1998, no management journal accepted it. Unconvincing, they said. In 2002, Strategy+Business agreed to publish it and that one idea changed the way multinationals thought. Suddenly, everyone was looking at poor people across the world as a lucrative market. Prahalad followed his idea up with the bestselling title The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. The fift...
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- South Asia
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A Paradigm Shift in Ayurveda
Imagine this: You are a budding and ambitious entrepreneur in your mid 30s and you are interested in healthcare or say Ayurveda, to be more precise. The best part is you are also sanctioned an appreciable fund to set-up a chain of Ayurveda centres across India. Sitting in your boardroom, you are thinking about the locations for your new centres. Which places are you likely to choose, keeping in mind that you have sufficient funds? Maybe a place where there are high-income gro...
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- South Asia
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Danone May Apply Bangladesh Lessons to India
Groupe Danone, the $18-billion French dairy company, is understood to be exploring a strategy for India which will leverage on its experience in Bangladesh. One of the things Danone is studying is to enter with an affordable initiative, what it internally calls a bottom of the pyramid one. Danone has a joint venture with The Grameen Group in that country, from early 2006, with a focus on easily affordable dairy products. The Grameen Danone Foods model relies on the creat...
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- South Asia
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A Fresh Start – Rural Job Seekers Find a Brighter Future
To get a sense of India’s rural-urban union, drop in on a McDonald’s restaurant in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where hungry customers scan the brightly lit menu panel above the counter and line up to place orders. The eatery, nestled in a busy shopping mall in downtown Hyderabad, is unique: Most of the youngsters flipping burgers and taking orders are not city slickers, but employees recruited from India’s rural belly. Take college dropout K. Bhargavi, 23, who...
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- South Asia