The New face of Bangalore.

My city !

From "The Economist" magazine

THE arriving businessman, anxious to get to grips with India's information-technology industry in its very capital, may need a little patience. He might meet his first traffic jam just outside Bangalore's airport. He can examine the skeleton of the early stages of a planned flyover on the airport road. Construction started in February 2003 and was due to be completed in April 2004. Three-quarters of the work is still to be done, but the building site is idle. A dispute over cost escalation led to a cancellation of the contract (the rusting steel that forms the skeleton was getting more expensive by the day).

To say the least, this is bad public relations for Bangalore, the hub of the great Indian boom in software and remote services, such as call-centres (known as “business process outsourcing”, or BPO). It seems to confirm recent scare stories that the city has ground to a halt, and its government does not care. Late last year, some of the leading lights of Indian information technology (IT), such as Wipro's founder, Azim Premji, and his counterpart at Infosys, Narayana Murthy, gave warning that Bangalore was in trouble. The Indian Express, a national newspaper, took up the cause with a front-page series on “Bangalore crumbling”.

The government showed its disdain for the IT billionaires by allowing the withering of the “Bangalore Agenda Task Force”. This was an initiative led, and largely financed, by Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys, to improve governance and infrastructure in Bangalore through partnership with the private sector. Worse still, from the IT industry's point of view, the government decided to apply an “entry tax” of 13.5% on goods brought into the state—a big burden on firms relying on imported computers.

For those perennially pessimistic about India, all this was just the latest proof that its democratic structure will always end up stifling its economic prospects. Bangalore alone accounts for about one-third of India's software exports and, with 265,000 workers, nearly one-third of total employment in IT services and BPO. No other Indian city has such an “ecosystem” of mutually reinforcing strengths. So one would expect Bangalore's woes to have a nationwide impact.

Yet Wipro and Infosys are taking on nearly 1,000 new staff every month. There were jitters this month on the stockmarket after Infosys forecast a sluggish quarter ahead. But NASSCOM, the industry's lobby, expects Indian IT services to continue to grow by 25-28% annually. BPO, from a much smaller base, will grow even faster, by 35-40%. The three biggest Indian IT firms—Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro—are now among the top ten globally in terms of stockmarket capitalisation, gross profits and employees.

There are a number of explanations for this paradox. First, Bangalore's troubles, while serious, are not terminal. Second, India has plenty of other locations for IT and BPO investment. But third, and most important, these are still businesses with fantastic potential, and India's advantages are so great that, however bad its aim, it will be hard-pressed to shoot itself in the foot.

Bangalore, say officials, is the fastest-growing city in India. Its population, only 800,000 in 1951, had grown to 5.6m in 2001, and is estimated at 7m now. It appealed to the British Raj's soldiers—and then to Indian pensioners—because of its beautiful, mild climate, the finest in India, and the lush greenery of its many parks and gardens.

That still helps draw the IT industry, as do its technical and scientific institutes. It is home to the Indian Institute of Science, singled out in the Indian budget this year as a centre of excellence in research and development to be promoted as a “world-class university”, as well as the location of the organisation spearheading India's space programme. Karnataka has 77 engineering colleges producing more than 29,000 graduates a year.

Now, to these attractions are added an abundance of talent, a relaxed and cosmopolitan atmosphere, and a lively nightlife. Many recent graduates come, at their parents' expense, to hunt for a job. The big IT firms have built huge campuses in Electronics City, a few kilometres out of town. Some are as modern and efficient as anything in Silicon Valley, from the state-of-the-art remote network-management systems to the cappuccino bars.

But commuting is a nightmare. Bangalore suffers the infrastructure shortcomings common to many Indian cities: a water shortage, inadequate sewers, an erratic power supply, and pot-holed roads too narrow for the traffic they need to bear. But Bangalore may be unique in the speed of its decline. Samuel Paul of the Public Affairs Centre, an outfit that monitors the government's performance, says it shows that just a few months of neglect are enough to undo years of improvement. Hearing the negative signals about Bangalore that the new government sent out, many city workers stopped bothering. The result: “total urban chaos”, according to Sudip Banerjee, boss of Wipro's “enterprise solutions” division.

But this chaos has not infiltrated the Wipro campus, however, nor those of its competitors. They build much of their own infrastructure. Their virtual connections to the West sometimes seem stronger than their physical ties to India. “Our body is in India,” says Mr Nilekani, “but our head is in New York or somewhere.” So the impact of “crumbling” is diluted. In the long run, it may make Bangalore a less attractive destination. But firms still have to coax Bangalore-based staff with incentives to move elsewhere.

Few in the IT industry have much good to say about the new government. At least, however, it is pretending to be friendly to business. It has dropped the entry tax for exporting firms and is even talking of setting up a committee with the private sector, along the lines of Mr Nilekani's defunct task-force. All its talk of expansion will inevitably be bogged down in bureaucratic delay, and the building will itself cause disruption. Things will get worse before they get better. But are they now, or will they become, very much worse than elsewhere in India? Probably not.

Bangalore's troubles will, however, encourage local and foreign firms to examine the many other options available. It used to be, says Partha Iyengar of Gartner, a consultancy, echoing an old IBM advert, that in the IT industry, “no one ever got fired for choosing Bangalore”. Now the city is a “drastic victim of its own success” that is becoming less and less attractive. For the most sophisticated work, in research and development, Philips's Mr Hoekstra argues there is still no alternative: “if Bangalore sinks, India sinks”. But he wishes the Karnataka government had deterred the call-centres. For them, and many other BPO activities, there is plenty of choice.

Gartner has classified Indian cities in four “tiers” of attractiveness to foreign firms seeking to outsource work to India. Bangalore, along with Delhi and Mumbai, occupies the top tier. But it lists six places as “Tier 1-1” cities, just behind the leaders. They are Gurgaon and Noida, the fast-growing towns on the edges of Delhi; Mumbai's new town; Chennai (formerly Madras) and Hyderabad in the South and Pune in the West. Then there is a whole range of places just below that vying for business. Last month Dell, an American computer giant, opened a contact centre in Mohali in the north. Kolkata (once Calcutta) is trying to shed its image as a bastion of labour militancy and is aggressively courting investment in IT and BPO.

Most of the big Indian IT firms and many of the smaller ones have operations in several Indian cities. Vee Technologies, a BPO firm with its headquarters in Bangalore, employs 300 people there for its “high-cost work”, but about 500 in the town of Salem, about three hours away, where costs are lower and staff far easier to retain. Lakshmi Narayanan of Cognizant, an American IT firm with its main Indian base in Chennai, says IT job-hunters are starting to move there and to Hyderabad to look for work, as they do to Bangalore. Chennai alone has an estimated 100,000 software professionals, and is expected to add another 50,000 this year.

Mr Narayanan says companies such as his worry more about mounting costs than they do about the infrastructure. Bangalore, with the influx of foreign firms pushing up wages, is where they are mounting fastest. P.V. Kannan, boss of 24/7 Customer, a BPO firm, reckons the city is about 10% more expensive than other places in India. Staff attrition—running as high as 40% for the industry as a whole, and even higher at the lower end of the call-centre market—is a particular problem because of all the foreign firms.

The successful firms are expanding aggressively. OfficeTiger expects to double the number of its employees to about 4,000 by the end of the year. 24/7 Customer added 1,200 people in the past year, and has 4,200 now. It expects to grow by 40% this year and next.

Optimism about India's prospects in these businesses is based, firstly, on the sheer range of work now encompassed by the IT and BPO industries and, second, on its potential for further expansion. The business that started it all—offshore software development—still has plenty of room to grow. The world becomes more dependent on IT by the day. Even as new applications are churned out, old ones need maintaining and even newer ones developing.

The qualities of those graduates give India its biggest competitive advantage and, in the long run, the one that gives most cause for concern. Partha Iyengar of Gartner forecasts that in 5-7 years' time, many of the software processes at present performed manually in offices in Bangalore will be automated. India will have to move upmarket and “who is going to convert the army of programmers into businessmen?”

The biggest constraint on the growth of India's service industries may be the available talent pool. Nevertheless, the bullish projections for Indian IT and “IT-enabled services” produced in 2002 by NASSCOM and McKinsey seem within reach. They forecast that the combined industries would, by 2008, employ 4m people (up from fewer than 900,000 in 2004), earn $57 billion-65 billion from exports (compared with $17 billion in 2004), and account for 7% of GDP (compared with 4%).

The challenge this poses for the firms leading the boom is how to expand fast enough to meet demand without jeopardising quality. For quality, as much as cost, is what is driving the demand. It is in this context that Bangalore's troubles have to be seen: as the acute growing pains of a still-infant industry. It is a worry not because the difficulties are insuperable, but because some can be solved only by the government. India's IT industry has thrived in part because, unlike most other sectors of the economy, it has largely kept the government out of its business. That period is coming to an end. Neglect, the industry is learning, is not always benign.

The Rickshaws of Kolkata

Here in Kolkata , these are everywhere. The government plans to ban them. But there's no denying that these have become part of the city's streets and the city itself would seem quite incomplete without them.

These photographs are from the "International Herald tribune" Asia-Pacific Page.

Could You Please Make Me a Shade Lighter?

How Indians came to view fair skin as an ideal--and a business opportunity

This is an article from the TIME website.
The link to this article is here

Explains why "fair and lovely" is the world's largest selling fairness cream.
And why our matimonial ads are far more bizarre and comical than the ones mentioned in the article.
I dont agree with the sense of optimism , prevailing towards the end of the article. Life for women in India is no TV soap. And no amount of posturing by some ex-model in a serial is going to change centuries of prejudice. At least not in my lifetime.

The article hits the nail on the head by rightly mentioning about "racism" which most indians practice (maybe not in classrooms , offices or the street , but definitely in marriage alliances and such.) But it remains somthing we as a nation remain tightlipped about and even try to cover up and play down.

Being fair has nothing to do with beauty. It is merely aspirational. Being fair is equated with a higher social status. After all in our minds -- arent fair women supposed to be socially "forward" and racially superior ? They are NOT, but images and dogmas rule !

Anyways read and decide for yourself. ---------------------------

Up close, Rajashree Thakur makes a terrible ugly duckling. Her face is a flawless ocher, punctuated by ebony eyes and framed by jet black hair, and in the light of the setting sun, she glows. Thakur plays the lead in India's new hit soap Saat Phere ("seven circles around the fire," a Hindu marriage ritual), which, between riveting digressions into the lives, loves and secrets of a Rajasthani family, is the tragedy of Saloni, too unfortunate-looking for love. "It's not that Saloni isn't beautiful," clarifies Thakur, a former model. "It's that she's dark. Because of her complexion, her family thinks no one will marry her." At today's shoot in the hills north of Bombay, Saloni seeks solace at a temple after another day of dusky humiliation, only to be lectured on the virtues of fairness by a fat, ivory-skinned 9-year-old boy. "Ah, Saloni," grimaces Thakur. "She goes through hell."

The notion that Thakur's skin color could qualify her as unattractive is hard to fathom. Hers is a universal beauty, and in the West, despite concerns about the sun's rays and skin cancer, people spend billions of dollars trying to duplicate her café au lait tone. But Asia, from its geishas to its Ganesha gods, has always prized the pale. And in India the desire is a national obsession. You see it in the personal ads, which range from the general ("Whitish girl invites match") to the pinpoint specific ("Suitable alliance invited for ... fair, smart, only daughter having advanced training in footwear molds designing") but consistently mention the aspirant's light skin. You see it in pharmacies selling Fair & Lovely lightening soaps and creams and--new this season--Fair and Handsome, for men. And you see it in commercials, in which India's top two models, Katrina Kaif and Yana Gupta, are part English and part Czech, respectively. Lightness is big business. Fair and Handsome's maker, Mohan Goenka of Calcutta-based Emami, says the fairness-cosmetics market has grown two-thirds in the past five years, to an annual $250 million. India's 60,000 beauty salons do a roaring trade bleaching faces and blasting skin with tiny sand blowers.

No one can say for certain where this fascination with white skin originated. Thakur and Goenka point to pale-faced conquerors from Britain and central Asia who forcefully instilled a reverence for whiteness. Cultural conservatives complain Hollywood is pushing aside Indian heroes in favor of Westerners all too ready to display their pale flesh. Some sociologists argue that in a country where most people still farm, dark skin is associated with lowly labor in the outdoors.

Cory Wallia is Bollywood's top makeup artist and a man whose cautionary--and perhaps apocryphal--tales on whitening include the time the mother of a bride insisted he slap on so much white foundation that the young girl somehow turned blue. (The punch line? The mother approved.) He believes the real reason for the fairness craze is more troubling than most care to admit. While no one suspects that Westerners seek tans to change their ethnicity, Indians, he says, are motivated essentially to do just that. "Indians are more racist with other Indians than any American ever was with his slaves," Wallia says. "The desire for whiteness has very little to do with beauty."

But fashions--even cultures--can change. Although darkness is still akin to evil in rural India, Wallia says that in Bombay, reflecting its position as the capital of an increasingly cosmopolitan India, dusky is becoming a popular look. Thakur, as her character Saloni, may even be poised to become India's first overtly dark-skinned icon. "People stop me everywhere and ask me, 'Why are you crying so much on TV? It's not fair.'" In fact, says Thakur, the climax of Saat Phere will break another Indian taboo. "Saloni eventually decides she's not going to get married. She is educated, she can sing and dance very well, and she just doesn't consider her complexion a problem." And does the single, dark Saloni live happily ever after? Thakur laughs and says, "Of course. This is Indian TV. Not every rule was meant to be broken."

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Heres what the channel says about the programme. --

Saat Phere is a story of a girl’s struggles against the stigmas forced upon her by society and her quest for her unique identity. Although India has progressed in various fields of technology, science & education, discrimination against women remains the root cause of regression in many societies in India leading to degradation of women.

One such story is that of Saloni, a dark complexioned 24-year-old girl. Salonis’s talent is overshadowed by her complexion. Faced with such a situation, Saloni is determined to not let society's will be imposed upon her and ruin her life and has the will, spirit and the courage to embark upon the journey to search for her own unique identity. Yehi hai Saloni ka Safar.

IIM-L seethes with anger, shock

This is an article from Times of India , Bangalore Edition, dated today, 24th Nov '05. Sums up the mood in the IIMs on the death of one of their own.

By Prashant Srivastava/TNN

Lucknow: On the surface there is bereavement and condolences, but below it a storm of anger and dismay is brewing. Not just in IIM Lucknow, which lost an alumnus to the gun-weilding goons of the oil mafia, but also across the IIM fraternity—faculty and alumni included. And the anger is triggering the question of whether IIM graduates should opt for the public sector or government jobs.
To them S Manjunathan’s death doesn’t make sense. He was the happygo-lucky kind. A do-gooder with a song on his lips and honesty to live by. And above all, he was only doing his job. “Is it actually worth it for our students to work in an environment like this?’’ asks a shocked IIM Lucknow director, Dr Devi Singh. He says it is instances like these that will make the student community think twice before taking up assignments in Uttar Pradesh.
If hatred for the “system’’ is another fallout, it does not seem an overreaction, for the sales officer in Indian Oil Corporation was trying to check rampant malpractice of selling adulterated oil in the state. Manjunathan’s mentor Prof Debashis Chatterjee says, “politicians don’t have a right to stand on podiums and give long speeches on brain drain.’’ He adds that the student community and the academia has starting debating whether we are so feeble as to let this pass.
Second year student Satish Pulekar says the incident incited the students enough to stand in unison for the cause supported by Manjunathan. “We are taught to strictly adhere to the value system and not to compromise on any account. Such incidents, though highly traumatising, only firm our resolve to fight it all out,’’ he says. The sentiments are shared by batchmates Garima Dixit and Pooja Sikka.
The sole point of discussion among the students on Wednesday revolved around the huge difference between working in Manhattan and Uttar Pradesh. “Should we work at the expense of our lives?’’ they asked. “People say IIM graduates never do anything for the country, never join PSUs. Look what happened to one who did,’’ said a student bitterly.

IOC field staff have to face oil mafia alone By Sanjay Dutta/TNN

New Delhi: S Manjunathan may have sealed his fate the day he decided to join a state-owned oil company. As a sales officer of IOC, the government also made him police the adulteration mafia, worth Rs 10,000 crore a year. But unlike the mob, he had no protection for doing his job.
About 1,000 sales officers working throughout the country for the four state-owned oil marketing firms are living under the shadow of death for over a year now. This is when the government abolished the anti-adulteration cell in the oil ministry and asked the companies to check such malpractices under its marketing discipline guidelines.
Under this, a sales officer is supposed to take the prescribed action on the spot against a petrol pump owner or gas agency dealer when any malpractice.

I have nothing to say.....

....but the total lack of media interest on the shocking Manjunath murder has ticked me off.
The Mumbai bye-elections, the murder of the Indian in Afghanistan got their articles.

Even the CAT exam ,had 4 FULL articles on it.
The nation bitched eloquently about the 1300 "privileged" students , who will make it into one of the IIMs, study for two years and then presumably work for some firang for the rest of their days (earning of course loads of $$ in the process.) Articles popped up debating whether the cut-offs this year will be 59.5 or 60.25 !!!

Does we care about , or even want to listen to the ones who place country and home above their own ambitions ? Perhaps they dont really look good on Page 1 (or 3).

I came across this article on someone -- who chose to join a PSU after graduating from IIML , when he so easily could have joined any hi-flying private firm, someone who refused to compromise on his principles, AND who paid with his life for his honesty and his uprightness.

I also must mention, that i first came across this article here. Not in a newspaper.
Other stories I found are here. and here.

Perhaps , the thousands who slog blindly for CAT and other exams, should understand that being a manager is not just about earning the big bucks, or about driving a Merc or working in a fancy highrise .
It also just might be about sweating it out in "Gola Gokrannath" , measuring adulteration levels in Petrol pumps, dealing with the corrupt mafia daily, keeping your head held high , maintaining your integrity and honesty. . . . and getting shot in the process.

Rest in peace, sir. You are an inspiration.