When I’m sixty-four Give me your answer, fill in a form Mine for evermore Will you still need me Will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four? Average life expectancy at birth for Indians in 2010 was 64.4 years, which means the Beatles song could be an elegy. We fared more poorly than our neighbors,…
Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
From the Editor Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up — very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody hot and wet and…
From the Editor On June 1, as the mercury hit 47 Celsius and turned Delhi’s roads — or what passes for them in most parts — into pancake griddles, the government released a report that feebly tried to suggest remedies for the human-resource mess in Air India. The same day there was bad news about…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have noted the gold-plating stage yet, but we certainly know…
From the Editor There are times when we at Business Today chafe at being a fortnightly. There is so much happening in business and the economy that we storytellers are fit to burst. It is not just what you see in the printed magazine—our website www.businesstoday.in is up to nearly a million page views. Our…
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…
Budget 2012 is the final opportunity for the UPA to set the economy on as next years’ exercise will be influenced by the 2014 Lok Sabha elections Five experts on the economy joined Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag to discuss Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee’s options as he finalises the forthcoming Union Budget. Yashwant Sinha,…
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…
Innovation in India is not just about patents filed but about affordable, scalable solutions. At the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum held in Mumbai last fortnight, Business Today gathered an eclectic collection of thinkers to brainstorm about one topic: How important is innovation in the emerging world order? The hour-long discussion saw Gururaj Deshpande, serial entrepreneur;…
The text message from the finance ministry went out close to midnight on Sunday. October 28, hardly a time when the ministry is expected to be working, the message informed its journalist recipients that Finance Minister P. Chidambaram would address the media less than 12 hours later. The subject of the interaction was not disclosed. With that began a sequence of…
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…
‘One has to learn new competencies’ Few of us know that KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, produced the critically acclaimed Hindi movie Black. Or that he has taken up pistol shooting as a hobby. Or that his teenage son is a keen photographer, but he knows a thing or two about…
‘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…
Poor Manmohan Singh is caught between the Pros and the Cons. The Pros in the Opposition are telling the prime minister, who has never seemed sullied by money politics, that he should be resigning. The Congress, led by A. Raja, is telling him that he is allegedly complicit in the 2G scandal. The sad part…
Optimism is good, but let’s not be foolhardy. It is good that we are feeling bucked up at the beginning OF 2018. Major economies expect growth in tandem for the first time since the global financial crisis of 2008. World trade is seen growing at a decent clip after two slow years. Commodity prices are firming…
“In India, I See a Lot More Acceptance of Gender in the Workplace” DuPont Chair & CEO ELLEN KULLMAN in conversation with CHAITANYA KALBAG. Edited excerpts: Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of has managed to get things moving a bit in terms of a more positive attitude towards bilateral…
“Goodness is something to be chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” …
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…
“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…
Spare a thought for Indian business schools’ Class of 2013. These young women and men will be heading out into a world where financial well-being is not guaranteed, the global economy is epileptic, and the view from a management perch is vertiginous. “The bigger question is, how relevant are we in a changing world?” asks…
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 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…
From the Editor We are waiting to exhale. Food prices fell in the last fortnight of December, for the first time in six years, and headline inflation is expected to drop sharply to about 7.5 per cent in December. The rupee has risen two weeks in a row. Industrial production rose 5.9 per cent in…
From the Editor Three economists are gazing at a glass half full of water. The optimist sees a glass half full. The pessimist sees a glass half empty. The realist picks up the glass and drinks the water. I’m sure you’ve heard that joke, but we are hard put to find some levity as we…
From the Editor Companies and human beings are surprisingly similar. Over a long period of time we build an intricate geodesic dome of habits, rules. principles, emotions, likes and dislikes. Changing ourselves is very. very difficult, even when we know that our future well-being, prosperity and happiness depend on how we change and adapt. Similarly,…
From the Editor It was a bracing week: I started and ended it with conversations with honest men whose cleanliness shone through. Both had had something to do with ‘national resources’ up in the stratosphere or deep down beneath the seabed. There is much financial skullduggery afoot, but we have not run out of sentinels,…
From the Editor One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At ev’ry word a reputation dies. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3 At every word of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Manmohan Singh’s reputation has…
From the Editor I remember a composite satellite photograph of the world taken at night time. One country stood out like a black blotch on a map that was mostly shining—North Korea, the ‘Hermit Kingdom’. This fortnight I felt very much like I live in my own hermit kingdom. Perhaps an ascetic life in a…
From the Editor I have a confession to make. Many moons ago, I studied to be an accountant and despite one of the world’s toughest entry barriers with single-digit-pass rates in the chartered accountancy examinations-dreamt of crunching numbers while boning up on ‘double-entry bookkeeping’ and the mysteries of profit and loss. But the world of…
From the Editor The word “flurry” is used to describe a sudden blast or gust, or a sudden commotion, and it. has been used frequently to label the announcements from the government’s blunderbuss over the past three weeks. My dictionary also tells me flurry is the “death-agony of the whale”, but we don’t want that,…
Competition is fierce and kicking in India, not least between business magazines. Which is why we love being flies on the wall as we watch the 800-pound gorillas slug it out with the upstarts in their pens. The stories are always riveting. They tell us why long-time incumbents drowse at the top of the tree;…
The day before this issue of Business Today hits news stands, America will vote for a new president. The day after you invest less than 80 US cents in our quality journalism (in the event that you paid its full cover price), the Chinese Communist Party will meet to anoint a new leadership. Both transitions…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have not got to the gold-plating stage yet, but we…
A laughter club in Mumbai is forced to “zip it” because a humourless neighbour is disturbed, not long after a 63-year-old cartoon unleashes a cleansing of school textbooks that would warm a tin-pot dictator’s heart. In the same “cosmopolitan” city, a woman is arrested for possessing liquor that she was using to make chocolates, and…
From the Editor The deeper we sail into the economic doldrums, the greater is the wonderment that there is so much locked-up promise in India that we cussedly ignore. Politics oozes from every pore of ours; we expect the economy to take care of itself. Over the past few months I have talked in great…
From the Editor When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be …
From the Editor Caprice and cowardice were both on display last fortnight. Ten days after a bunch of state election results delivered a hard punchi in the Congress party’s solar plexus, Pranab Mukherjee delivered a Budget for 2012/13 that was simultaneously retrograde and revanchist. Reformist it was not, and neither was it bold, despite many…
From the Editor Our Prime Minister can seem like an accidental politician. Speaking publicly, he comes across as earnestly wooden, and when he addressed the nation on September 21, the eve of the autumnal equinox, you often felt the tele-prompter was scrolling up faster than Manmohan Singh could enunciate, But speak he did, and many…
From the Editor Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a dacoit. “In the ravines (of Chambal) you will find rebels. The dacoits are in Parliament,” the actor growls. It is probably coincidental that the movie was made…
From the Editor What a fortnight it has been. We have plumbed new depths in animus and acrimony. Not a day goes by without a shrieking melee, either at a press conference or on the streets. The “Reform Spring” has very quickly faded into a fruit-salad autumn, with mangoes and bananas flying around in a…
From the Editor “I am a tiny speck in a sea of brands, buffeted by colour, geometry and neon, a homo brandus furiously rowing his flimsy coracle as it is carried inexorably towards the lethal rapids of consumerism. “Brand” has interesting etymology. We say something “brands itself on our consciousness” or that our latest purchase…
From the Editor Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 If you have ever had the misfortune of falling…
From the Editor By the time this issue of Business Today hits the news stands, voting for new governments in three Indian states will be completed. The seven-phase Uttar Pradesh election will stretch through February. Tiny Goa follows in early March. When the votes are counted on March 6, one in five Indians will have…
From the Editor In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a creature with a bull’s head and a man’s body who dwelt at the centre of the Cretan maze or labyrinth. Theseus killed the monster, but forgot to put up a white sail to signal his victory when he returned to Athens, and his distraught father…
From the Editor Some things were on a fast track as the heat dragged us into the dog days of June, and some were on a slow track. A hirsute man in ochre raiment was about to stop eating, and since we at BT chronicle business it is relevant to note that Ramdev’s Patanjali Yoga…
From the Editor I once knew a Chief Financial Officer who took a course in “Interpersonal skills. Asked why he needed to learn to get along better with his colleagues, he said: “Because I want to learn to say ‘No’ with a smile.” Bean counters have always been feared for their attention to budgets, line…
Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India of traffic chaos, noise and tumult. Gujarat’s administrative capital reminded me more of Putrajaya, Malaysia’s high-tech capital complex outside Kuala Lumpur, than of the headquarters of Modi Unlimited. The Gujarat…
From the Editor I remember when I was a child eating the only canned peas available then. They were hard, bland and left a metallic taste in my mouth. Even if they were drowned in ketchup or smothered by spices, they remained barely edible. Why would anybody want to aspire to a “phoren” lifestyle when…
From The Editor It seems churlish to sound a pessimistic note about India’s economy when a large contingent of our business and political leaders is hard at work evangelizing “India Inclusive” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Here in teeming India, though, we could not help gathering several worrying threads in a cautionary skein.…
From the Editor “If a thousand suns were to rise in the heavens at the same time, the blaze of their light would resemble a little the supreme splendour of the Lord…. I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.” The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 11-12 & 32 Julius Robert…
From the Editor “Sssssay now … what we have we here?” hisses Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book, smacking his lips over Mowgli. “Jusssst you wait till I get you in my coils!” Corruption certainly seemed to be strangling the Incredible India magic this fortnight. It began with nationwide conniption over corruption as Anna…
From the Editor “Chamko … kapdon ke liye behtereen sabun. Bar-bar, lagatar. Chamko. Kapdon mein chakachaundh chamak lane ke liye. Khushbudar, jhaagwala – Chamko.” Romance blooms when charming salesgirl Deepti Naval turns up at the bachelor digs of the shy and; gawky Farooque Shaikh to peddle a new brand of detergent in ‘Chashme Buddoor’. Life…
From the Editor This has been a summer of discontent, and the portents are not auspicious. One day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced his second underwhelming Cabinet reshuffle this year, Mumbai was hit by three terrorist bombs. The markets took in both the fizzle and the pop with equanimity: the Sensex fell only 1.5…
From the Editor Stock markets and their behaviour are an inexact science. Technical analysts will study head and shoulders patterns, Fibonacci retracements, stochastic oscillators and sundry chicken entrails to tell you why prices are headed up or down. It’s like baking a bad lasagna- layers of febrile data, volatile fund flows, political flux, a government…
From the Editor Know one’s onions” means to know one’s subject well. But do we really know why our economy fares as it does, how supply and demand and rain and drought affect commodity prices and push food inflation close to 18 per cent, or the price of onions up by 350 per cent? Why…
From the Editor When I lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s, children at my daughter’s school could clamber into an “earthquake truck” for a foretaste of what The Big One might feel like. You held on while furniture and light fittings swayed, rattled and bounced around a simulated home inside the truck at the…
From the Editor Most of us are cursed with poor memory. We need episodic markers to help us measure our lives from one significant remembrance to another. Our collective memory is etched with historic events. The day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon/Indira Gandhi was assassinated/the Berlin Wall fell have calibrated the second half of…
From the Editor I remember my first car with great fondness. It was a Fiat 1100D, and I crashed it barely a month after my wife and I bought it. There was another crash a little later; we were the third owners of the car, but it held up well. Three years later we sold…
Jeff Immelt stepped into Jack Welch’s shoes four days before 9/11. Even more than the legendary Welch, he has GE blood in his veins – his father worked for the company and he met his wife at the company. The 28-year-old GE veteran stands six feet four and has a firm grip, as befits an…
Just as we were putting this special issue of Business Today to bed. Thomas M. Hoenig. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote a provocative essay titled Too Big to Succeed in The New York Times, noting that America’s five largest financial institutions are 20 per cent bigger than they were before…
And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him…stupendous.” …
Have you heard the story about Warren Buffett, the 215 millionaires, and the coin-flipping orangutans? It takes some telling and you will have to buy a biography of the Sage of Omaha to read it. The point the world’s canniest investor made (in 1984) was that markets are not efficient, stocks are not all priced…
H for Hitler. A for arrogant, R for rascal, I for idiot …” I’m sure many of us remember the “Hari Sadu” commercial about the cheeky young man getting back at his nasty boss because he’s already heard from job site naukri.com. It was acid, funny, and emblematic of the “me do” generation that is…
Nothing matches the rush of blood to the brain when you read super-sized success stories. Nothing tells the story of the Milky Way of densely-packed stars across India’s business sky as vividly as our annual BT500 rankings. Year after year, from the first listing in Business Today’s March 7-22 1992 issue, the rankings have chronicled…
Remember when mall meant a tree-shaded promenade in Shimla or one of those picturesque cantonment towns, and plastic was when your grandmother graduated from tin buckets in the bath- room? Now the Oxford dictionary lists “malling: the action of passing time at a shopping mall”, and tykes, tots, teens and tweens wash through our malls…
A professional suitable match for a beautiful, slim MBA Punjabi girl… Boy to be MBA, Engineer, CA.” Not too long ago, in the matrimonial ads crowding our weekend newspapers, brides or grooms looking for a mate proudly proclaimed that they were “BA Pass”, the key to a happy life. No longer, though. India produces millions…
‘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…
V. Vaidyanathan takes wing with a $17 million stake in a star NBFC By Chaitanya Kalbag The next time you are flying somewhere, do not bury your nose in a book or plug in your earphones. Take a good look around. And if you happen to be sitting next to Vembu Vaidyanathan, a wiry, fast-talking…
There are companies which are defying the law…. We have taken a series of measures, says SEBI chief In the 20 months he has been Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Upendra Kumar Sinha has taken several initiatives, but has also been involved in controversies. The Supreme Court order upholding SEBI’s decision…
Development is not a Linear Process, says World Bank’s Country Director Roberto Zagha has been the World Bank’s Country Director in India since January 2009, when the economy was reeling from the global financial crisis and just before the national elections that brought the UPA back to power. Zagha, a Brazilian national, has been closely…
Everybody is going to die, but I am going to die last, says Vedanta’s chairman He started out as a scrap trader in Patna. Today, with a personal fortune of $3.5 billion, Anil Agarwal is one of the richest men in the world. Over the last three decades, he has transformed the Vedanta Group into…
The Method Man – Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall man, but he exudes self-assurance and authority. There is something of the High Priest of Mohenjo-Daro about him, presiding at the altar of Capitalist Gujarat under…
‘Washington is Starting to Look Like Delhi’ Says British historian and Harvard University professor Niall Ferguson An erudite scholar, acclaimed author, and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, British historian Niall Ferguson wears several hats. At the India Today Conclave, Ferguson spoke on “American decline: Myth and Reality”. On…
We Were Leaders, but We Were Not Leading, says Paranjpe Since June 2005, when he took up the mantle of Non-executive Chairman of Hindustan Unilever (then Hindustan Lever), Harish Manwani has seen three executive leadership changes at the consumer goods major. First, there were two managing directors, Arun Adhikari and S. Ravindranath, under him. Expat…