From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT–YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that Indians seem to disdain economic growth.…
Star India’s Uday Shankar, already top dog in general entertainment, wants to prove his mettle again in sports TV There is a new spring in Uday Shankar’s step. The entertainment channels of Star India, the Indian unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire and the company that Shankar leads as chief executive, are back firmly…
By Goutam Das and Chaitanya Kalbag On a sunny October afternoon at an Andalusian-style resort in Southern California with breathtaking views of the Pacific, a senior PepsiCo information technology (IT) executive stopped in mid-sentence to peer thoughtfully into a glass of Chardonnay. The conversation, around outsourcing to India, had paused at Infosys, the poster child…
Debu Bhattacharya, Managing Director, Hindalco, discusses the CBI case against his company. By Chaitanya Kalbag Hindalco Industries Ltd.’s Managing Director, Debu Bhattacharya, says that had he known how complex and fraught the process would be to set up an alumina plant and a smelter in Orissa, he would have never put it up. “I really don’t understand where we…
Govt’s fiscal profligacy has made a mockery of the FRBM Act The government’s fiscal profligacy has made a mockery of the FRBM Act. Pranab Mukherjee sounded pleased earlier this week when he told a TV interviewer that India’s projected fiscal deficit of 6.8 per cent of GDP in 2009-10 was still better than the 11…
Apologising is never easy. Barack Obama knows this now. He made a non-apology apology last week to a Massachusetts police sergeant two days after saying the officer “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr because he was trying to break into his own house. Obama’s decision to wade into a local issue…
It’s hard to be a couch potato in India because (a) most homes have stiff, unyielding sofas; (b) it’s not easy to set yourself up with a six-pack of beer and a bag of chips unless you go on a major shopping expedition; (c) your wife wants to watch Saraswatichandra threatened by a lynch mob…
‘My view has always been I don’t care about the topline’ Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy has seen it all: bootstrapping an enterprise with what is loose change today, going on sales calls riding pillion on a Vespa scooter, walking away from a GE deal because it was leaving little profit on the table, setting…
In a spirited panel discussion moderated by Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag, Yashwant Sinha, MP and former finance minister, M. Damodaran, former SEBI chairman, Satya Poddar, Partner, Ernst & Young, Samiran Chakraborty, Regional Head of Research, Standard Chartered Bank and Nilesh Shah, President, Corporate Finance, Axis Bank, shared their views. Edited excerpts Chaitanya Kalbag: All…
In his first media interaction since The Walt Disney Company took over UTV, RONNIE SCREWVALA, now turned employee, tells CHAITANYA KALBAG and AJITA SHASHIDHAR how he intends to take the company to greater heights. How difficult was it to transition from a successful entrepreneur-driven company to being a part of a large global company? UTV…
Despite the crisis, a clear message must be sent to the investor community that India is open for business. There was an initial spurt of excitement after the new Reserve Bank of India governor was announced. Professor (Raghuram) Rajan is obviously highly accomplished. But there is only a very limited amount the central bank can…
“I use the word ‘blue collar’ purposefully at Xerox. It is the heart and soul of most economies” URSULA BURNS is the first African-American woman Chairman and CEO of a Fortune 500 company and she wears that badge with some pride. Her logic for that is simple: she needs to inspire others-and get some mileage…
Timing is everything, and with a number of state elections soon, leading to the general election next year, cynicism and opportunism are manifest. The Congress-led government now in power will be remembered as the most corrupt in our history. I remember visiting the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s house in Isla Negra, west of Santiago, a…
Or, why India really needs to dig itself out of a mineral hole Last week I was on a flight to Mumbai. About two hours in, the captain announced that there was unseasonal heavy rain ahead and it might be difficult to land in such bad weather. “We have fuel for about fifteen minutes,” he…
I remember back in the 1970s, when a new India was just over a quarter of a century old, Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his foreword to his “Calcutta” wrote: “The imperial residue of Calcutta, a generation after Empire ended. is both a monstrous and a marvellous city. Journalism and television have given us a rough idea…
They say nothing sharpens our minds as much as high danger or a threat to our survival. We are prepared to stand and fight when we are cornered. Twenty-two years ago, when we were staring into the abyss, we pulled a reformist rabbit out of our socialist hat. But it took just about five years…
From the Editor These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that we Indians seem…
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and It is all moving…
Although commerce is older even than the thirty pieces of silver that persuaded Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus Christ, it took humans a long time to start to formally teach, and learn, the elements of business. The oldest business school in the world, ESCP Europe, was set up in Paris in 1819, a pipsqueak in…
From the Editor When I stepped into this role in mid-2010, it seemed India was unstoppable. Gross Domestic Product growth had averaged 8.5 per cent since 2004, when the United Progressive Alliance won power. The financial markets in the United States and Europe were in disarray after the US sub-prime crisis laid down a napalm…
From the Managing Editor An early breakfast is something that most journalists don’t care for. Most of my tribe skip it and among those who don’t, very few sip their coffee before 10 am. Like Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, we finish our days late and start them late, you see. It was, therefore, unusual for…
From the Editor Raghuram Govind Rajan is a lucky man. Two weeks into his new job as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India his friend Ben Bernanke, who he calls “cautious and nuanced” in his book Fault Lines, handed him a big gift- a delay in the “taper” in the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative…
From the Editor Once every year, we pay obeisance to the best and strongest companies in India. It is not grudging admiration. Our corporate icons deserve every bit of their applause. No management school, or case study, or how-to hardback that you pick up at an airport bookstore can teach you how to plot a…
At Business Today we write about companies all the time. Often, it is a top-down view. We meet the Chief Executive Officer, the senior members of the management team, the stock-market analysts whose job it is to keep a gimlet eye on their wards, the suppliers, the competitors, the regulators. But it is very important,…
Exactly two years ago we ran a cover story on India’s skills crisis. This was just after Subramanian Ramadorai was named Adviser to the Prime Minister in the National Council on Skill Development. How quickly have we moved down the skilling highway? Glacially slow, and frighteningly so. For a nation where tens of millions of…
In 1908, when Henry Ford began making his revolutionary Model Ts on an assembly line in Detroit, there were 241 carmakers in the United States. (In comparison, India has 20 carmakers in 2013). “I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the…
Sometimes India’s economy resembles a rambunctious teenager brought up short by a finger-wagging headmaster. Our finance minister can now recite with his eyes closed a string of figures that seek to prove that India has not done badly at all in comparison with the rest of the developing- and indeed the developed- world. P. Chidambaram…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT-YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
From the Editor I remember sticking an aluminium one-yen coin and a copper one-US-cent coin to my computer screen in Tokyo around the mid-1990s and watching in fascination Las they became equal in value, with the yen appreciating to 100 to the dollar. It was nice for frequent travellers like me- when I paid my…
From the Editor Looking down at my bowl of gazpacho at dinner one recent night. I realised that I do not own a single moustache spoon, with guards, so that guests with resplendent whiskers could eat soup and not leave any trace behind- the kind made for Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner around 1900. Nor…
From the Editor We need to place the AgustaWestland helicopter “kerfuffle”- as a former defence minister put it- in context. The 12 AW101s were headed for the Indian Air Force’s Communication Squadron, which flies VVIPs around. to replace its ageing Mi-8 fleet. The new helicopters are strictly not combat craft-they are personnel carriers and can…
From the Editor Most of us are lucky if we get fifteen minutes of fame. You can be famous, but not rich. Fame is fleeting, and unless you are V.S. Naipaul, your best shot at fame is when you are young or Amitabh Bachchan, in good health, good to look at, and very good at…
From the Editor Many, many moons ago, I used to visit a cousin pursuing his B.Tech. programme at IIT Madras. The campus was beautiful; of an early Sunday morning you saw deer darting past drowsy students who had lolled around the amphitheatre the night before watching a movie after consuming a special dinner in the…
From the Editor The US Congress stepped back just in time from the fiscal cliff, but Indian sensibilities about the Delhi gang rape and killing fell off another cliff days before we went to press. P.N. Vasanti of the CMS Media Lab told me that coverage of the rape aftermath (and by that I mean mostly…
Without second-generation reforms and a drastic overhaul of its institutions, India is condemned to mediocre income and growth. As befits an ancient land, India is not bereft of clairvoyants. Three times over the past decade, some of our best economists, managers, bureaucrats, industrialists, politicians and private citizens put their brains together and came up with…
‘This Year We Will Fall Short of the Target’ After a lifetime spent powering TCS to its current position as the country’s pre-eminent technology company, S. Ramadorai took over as Advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Council for Skill Development in February 2011. He spoke to Chaitanya Kalbag and Shamni Pande on the…
A disgraced Ranbaxy has a long and expensive journey ahead before it regains the trust of global and Indian customers. By E. Kumar Sharma and Chaitanya Kalbag Two inspectors working for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on a trip to a Ranbaxy Laboratories factory late in January 2008, were stunned by what they…