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Expat Bangladeshis spend more calling home than others: survey
Dhaka, 28 June (bdnews24.com)—Expatriate Bangladeshis called home more frequently than their Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan and Filipino counterparts, spending $48 a month to stay in touch, a survey says. The survey ’"Teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid", conducted by LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy research institute, found 87 percent of Bangladeshi migrants called home at least once a week, while 34 percent called home daily. Dr Rohan Samarejiva, chairma...
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- South Asia
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Street vendors to be rechristened as micro-entrepreneurs
They may be selling bananas, paav bhaji, cosmetics, cigarettes or just about anything else either on a push-cart going round streets or simply by standing on the roadside and now these street vendors are all set to get a new designation — micro-entrepreneurs. The National Policy on Urban Street Vendors, 2009, approved by the UPA government, recognises street vendors (or micro-entrepreneurs) as an integral and legitimate part of the urban retail...
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- South Asia
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Why Companies See Bright Prospects in Rural India
In late May, when India’s GDP numbers were released, many were happily surprised. In the fourth quarter of the fiscal year (January-March 2009), the economy grew 5.8% against expectations of less than 5%. For the year, growth was 6.7%, less than the 9% recorded in 2007-2008, but still very respectable during a global downturn. Multinational banks and brokerage houses rushed back to their spreadsheets to raise their growth forecasts for 2009-2010. But why were the estimates so pessim...
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- South Asia
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India Inc for PPP to better quality of education
The education industry is looking at an increased public-private partnership (PPP) in educational and training initiatives for matching skill-set demands of the industry with the available talent. Education is among a few sectors that has been insulated from the impact of a global economic slowdown but faces a huge challenge of reducing the gap of educated yet unemployable talent. “We would like to see more investment in PPP programmes to improve education quality at the bottom of...
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- South Asia
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The Infomercial Comes to Life in India’s Remotest Villages
By ERIC BELLMAN BENIPUR VILLAGE, India -- Advertisers in India can’t rely on TV, radio or even newspapers to reach the country’s 700 million rural consumers. So they use Sandeep Sharma. On dirt roads across the subcontinent, the former wedding singer cracks jokes, gives demonstrations and stages game shows to spread global consumerism, one village at a time. He is one of thousands of traveling performers who bring the world’s biggest brands to audiences of a hand...
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- South Asia
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Profit for Good
By Sarah Murray In water-scarce India, access to modern irrigation technology has long eluded the country’s 260m smallholder farmers. Now, small-scale manufacturing and a distribution system is bringing irrigation products to growing numbers of these farmers, generating water savings of 30-50 per cent, energy savings of 50 per cent and increased crop yields of up to 70 per cent. The new system is not, however, funded by a multilateral de...
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- South Asia
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Slumdog Entrepreneurs
Over the last five years, Mumbai has been blessed with two significant depictions. In 2004, Suketu Mehta wrote “Maximum City,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is one of the best books about a great city in recent years. In 2008, “Slumdog Millionaire,” a romantic tale of urban poverty and quiz show success, sold millions of tickets and won a bucketful of Oscars. Both capture the energy and diversity of Mumbai, but neither adequately captures the economic...
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- South Asia
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Crossing the Divide – The business of social good
Three years ago when we first started looking for money, we had only social venture funds interested in us; now, in the last month, I have got calls from mainstream venture capital funds who are interested in investing,” says Ashwin Naik, founder of Vaatsalya Healthcare Solutions Pvt. Ltd, a start-up that is building a chain of low-cost hospitals in rural and semi-urban India. That perhaps indicates how far for-profit social enterprises have travelled in the last few years to be r...
- Region
- South Asia
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