Tata Executives to Discuss Alternative Factory Site
Tata Motors Ltd. led by MD Ravi Kant are coming to Karnataka on Wednesday, and on Thursday a meeting is scheduled with the chief minister, per state officials.
ArcelorMittal to Reduce Output
The world's largest steelmaker by output, is ready to cut production by 15% or more in response to weaker demand. Aditya Mittal, CFO, believes this cutback is temporary. This will occur during the 4th quarter and he expects to normalize production levels at the begining of 2009. He says the first thing you do when you do a production cut is try to reduce the level of exports. He expects the credit crisis might propmpt customers to cancel orders. AM is prepared to extend credit, but none of the customers availed of it. From a customer point of view, the steel company does not feel a credit crunch.
Why the nuclear deal is good for India: Bush administration worked with the IAEA to include language in its agreement affirming fuel supplies to India that would be unemcumbered and unimpeded. And at the same time, the Bush administration worked with the NSG to ensure that there would not be an automatic cutoff in the event of a resumption of Indian nuclear testing. Instead, the Bush administration convinced the NSG only to convene to discuss what to do in the event of a resumption of Indian nuclear testing. The government of India has been very clear in saying that the suspension of fuel supplies at its power plants would be grounds for removing Indian facilities from the IAEA safeguards agreement.
Congress will approve the deal and reaffirm the conditions that it has already set to try to control downside risks relating to proliferation, but considerable damage has already been done in undermining legislative intent in the IAEA and the NSG, so Congress is now in between a rock and a hard place. The Bush administration did not follow through as the Congress had wanted, A lot of damage has already been done.
General Electric is now the only U.S.-owned company that makes nuclear power plants. General Electric would be constrained from building power plants in India unless the Indian government passes liability waivers to cover the huge expense of a nuclear accident, and this is not easy for the government of India to do because of the terrible industrial accident in the city of Bhopal in India in 1984, at a Union Carbide insecticide plant, in which perhaps 20,000 Indians died.
U.S.-India Business Council, when it was pushing hard for this deal, claimed that there would be 27,000 new jobs created annually in the nuclear industry in the United States, which is pure fantasy. There's only one U.S.-owned company that builds power plants, and it's likely to be shut out of the Indian market unless the government of India passes liability waivers in the event of nuclear accidents.
Bystanders fumble and fall as they try to run away from the site of the gunbattle. A senior New Delhi police officer, Karnal Singh, told reporters at the scene of Friday's firefight in the Jamia Nagar neighborhood that there were five gunmen. Two were killed, one was arrested and two escaped, he said. Police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said two policemen were wounded in the fighting. Soon after the gunbattle broke out around noon Friday, scores of police officers, many in riot gear, could be seen fanning out through Jamia Nagar, a leafy lower middle-class neighborhood. The scene was chaotic with authorities trying to get civilians out of harm's way while subduing the militants.A group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen has claimed responsibility for the New Delhi attacks. India has routinely blamed Pakistan or Bangladesh-based militant groups for dozens of attacks in the last three years. But as the death toll has mounted this year, evidence has pointed to the involvement of Indian Muslims, raising difficult questions for the government about growing anger among India's large Muslim minority.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a rare acknowledgment that Indians and not foreign Islamic groups may have been behind the New Delhi attacks, but cautioned the country's security services were facing "vast" intelligence gaps.
Several alleged SIMI activists have been rounded up in recent months, but police have made little apparent headway in finding those behind the attacks. Authorities believe the Islamic militants aim to spread fear among ordinary Indians and provoke violence between the country's Hindu majority and Muslim minority. Relations between Hindus, who make up more than 80% of India's population, and Muslims, who account for about 130 million of India's 1.1 billion people, have been relatively peaceful since the bloody partition of the subcontinent into India and Muslim Pakistan at independence from Britain in 1947.
Edited by jagdu - 15 years agoMUMBAI, India -- Harry Potter, make way for Hari Puttar.
"Hari Puttar" is set to hit Indian cinema screens this week after a court in New Delhi rejected a suit by Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. unit that claimed the name was too close to its Harry Potter series.The court said people who have watched the Harry Potter movies and read the books would know the difference between that and an Indian Punjabi film called "Hari Puttar -- A Comedy of Terrors."
Despite a legal challenge, the film 'Hari Puttar' will open this week in India.
The producers, Mirchi Movies, said the movie bore no resemblance to the famous boy-wizard franchise. Hari is a common name in India and Hindi for God, while "puttar" is Punjabi for son.The producers, Mirchi Movies, said the movie bore no resemblance to the famous boy-wizard franchise. Hari is a common name in India and Hindi for God, while "puttar" is Punjabi for son.
Despite a legal challenge, the film 'Hari Puttar' will open this week in India.
The producers, Mirchi Movies, said the movie bore no resemblance to the famous boy-wizard franchise. Hari is a common name in India and Hindi for God, while "puttar" is Punjabi for son.They clearly great to have won this case per Munish Purii, Mirchi's chief executive said."Hari Puttar" is not a tale of magic, but the story of an Indian boy and his cousin forgotten at home in Britain where his family has recently moved, in a plot more reminiscent of the film "Home Alone." In the Indian film, 10-year-old Hari Puttar must guard his scientist father's top-security computer chip from bumbling burglars, while his parents are away.
Honda Seeks to Boost Auto Sales in India
Auto makers have looked to hot markets like India to help pick up the slack and introduced the new model to help lift Honda's India sales above those of last year. In India, auto sales fell in August from a year earlier, marking the second monthly fall in a row. Even in India, they are not immune to the cyclical nature of the economy. Investors have been very nervous about near-term prospects of the Indian automobile market. India's slowdown is temporary. It's sure to bounce back in the next few months. Although Honda dominates the motorcycle market in India, the Japanese company doesn't offer any models in India's small-auto segment, which makes up the vast majority of car sales.
Hoping to raise pressure on that chamber, Mr. Bush quickly issued a statement praising House passage and prodding the Senate to do the same thing. "I urge the Senate to quickly take up and pass this important piece of legislation before their October adjournment," the president said. "Signing this bipartisan bill will help strengthen our partnership with India."
The House approved the measure 298-117 without debate in an unusual Saturday session, held as lawmakers try dealing with the financial crisis and wrapping up the year's business. The accord reverses three decades of U.S. policy by shipping atomic fuel to India in return for international inspections of India's civilian reactors. Military reactors would not be subject to examination.
Supporters say it would bring India's atomic program under closer scrutiny. Critics say it would boost India's nuclear arsenal and spark an arms race in South Asia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said the measure "furthers our countries' strategic relationship while balancing nuclear nonproliferation concerns and India's growing energy needs."
But Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D., Calif.) said in a statement before the vote that the agreement "flies in the face of decades of American leadership to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction."
The deal enjoys strong support from senior lawmakers in both parties. But it has stalled in the Senate because at least one lawmaker has anonymously blocked it from coming to a vote, according to congressional aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters. Supporters warn that while Congress argues over the deal, U.S. businesses are losing opportunities as France, Russia and other countries eyed India's multibillion-dollar nuclear market.
India built its bombs outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which provides civil nuclear trade in exchange for a pledge from nations not to pursue nuclear weapons. India has refused to sign nonproliferation agreements and has faced a nuclear trade ban since its first atomic test in 1974. The agreement with the U.S. has been a top priority for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Mob killing threatens India's business appeal
The last moments of Lalit Kishore Chaudhary, chief executive of a multinational auto parts company in India, were filled with terror. On Monday, the quiet and dedicated 47-year-old businessman was hunted through Graziano Trasmissioni India's plant on the outskirts of Delhi by an angry mob.
More than 40,000 students show up in the arid state of Rajasthan every year, looking to attend one of the 100-plus coaching schools here. These intensive programs, which are separate from regular high school, prepare students for college-entrance exams. In Kota, most of the schools focus on the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.
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More than 40,000 students show up in Kota every year looking to attend one of its 100-plus coaching schools. At left, students at a Bansal Classes school.
The seven IITs nationwide are statistically tougher to get into than Harvard or Cambridge. While around 310,000 students took the entrance exam this April, only the top 8,600 were accepted. A whopping one-third of those winners in the current academic year passed through Kota's cramming regimen.
"If we stayed at home, we just wouldn't be able to study enough," says Mr. Agarwal as he takes a break from lessons. "If you don't study hard, you won't get admission." Today, he starts studying at 7 a.m., works on practice problems until noon. After lunch, he goes to class, where he gets the answers to the problems, gets home around 8 p.m. and does homework until midnight.
Kota has become a cram-industry boom town as more Indians seek to send their children to college and economic expansion has far outstripped the increase in college placements, making the competition fiercer. Students study full-time for two years just for one entrance exam, mostly for the IITs but also for other universities and colleges. The rigor has become part of its selling point: As Kota's reputation for success has spread, more young hopefuls have flocked to the city.
Vinod Kumar Bansal
"At first, around eight of us studied around my dining-room table. Then I added a few stools to make it 12, then I added a foot to each side of the table," says Vinod Kumar Bansal, who is credited with starting the cram-school craze when he began tutoring students in the 1980s. He went on to found Bansal Classes, the city's first cram school, called "coaching institutes" here. It all started because Mr. Bansal grew ill. He was working in a chemicals factory when he started having trouble climbing steps; he later discovered he had muscular dystrophy, a hereditary muscle disease for which there is no cure. "My plan was to become a chief engineer of the plant or a general manager but things went in a different direction," he says.
A few of his early students got into an IIT and word spread. Parents in Kota, and then beyond, started asking for his help. In 1991, he started a school, Bansal Classes. He initiated an entrance exam for his own school to identify the brightest prospects for IIT success. He developed an intensive study system that bombards students with test questions for nine hours a day for two years. They only teach what is on the IIT exams -- mathematics, physics and chemistry.
Now, Bansal Classes' 17,000 students study six days a week. One Sunday a month, they have a six-hour test which is set up just like the IIT exam. After two years, students have taken the mock test more than 20 times. The course of classes costs up to $1,500 a year, a hefty price for many Indian families. But the payoff can be huge: An IIT degree vaults a graduate into the global elite. Graduates include Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., and Arun Sarin, former chief executive of Vodafone Group PLC, the U.K.-based phone company. More than 1,500 Bansal Classes students got into IIT in the academic year that started in July.
Last year, Bansal Classes opened a new, bigger campus that is in better condition than some IITs and is fully wheelchair accessible for Mr. Bansal, who still teaches up to five classes a day. Girls represent 13% of the students, a percentage that is climbing. They wear light-blue polo shirts that say, "Bansalite today, IITian tomorrow." The boys have no uniforms. The Bansal campus is strangely quiet. Teachers say there are rarely disciplinary problems, except for the occasional student sneaking into a class to repeat it, and a bit of graffiti. Even that is aspirational: The writing on one metal bench says, "Bansalites rock, IIT rocks, Lyf after IIT rox."
Mr. Bansal, 58, says he is now worth more than $20 million. His mobility has declined to the point where he can barely lift a pen. But he says being in a wheelchair 12 hours a day means he has more time to think of challenging questions for students. "Teaching is my breakfast, lunch and dinner," he says. IIT officials have no official opinion on the cram schools. However, some public and private schools have complained that they are losing their brightest students to such programs.
While some parents complain that the coaching classes give students an unfair advantage and an unbalanced education, Bansal teachers say their students aren't taught enough in regular schooling, so cram courses are needed to help them get into the IITs.The success of Bansal Classes spawned dozens of imitators, many of them started by Mr. Bansal's former employees. Some even teach students how to ace the entrance exam to get into Bansal Classes.
Cramming has been the salvation of Kota, an industrial center in the 1970s that then fell on hard times. In the past three years, new malls, restaurants, hotels, Internet cafes and clothing stores began to spring up to serve the 16- and 17-year-old cram kids. Many homeowners have added second and third floors to rent out to students.Balwan Diwani, manager of Milan Cycle, a bike shop in Kota, says bicycle sales have surged to more than 2,000 a year from fewer than 200 five years ago. Mamta Bansal, no relation to the school founder, quit her job as a maid to start a service to deliver boxed lunches and dinners to 30 students as they study. "We try to make what their mothers would cook for them," she says. "I have had to learn how to make dishes from Gujarat, the Punjab and southern India."
Local schools also have benefited: Cram students have to attend regular classes so they can pass their high-school exams and graduate. Some high schools have early morning classes so cram students can finish early and move on to cramming."There used to be a lot of hooliganism and goons," says Pradeep Singh Gour, director of the Lawrence and Mayo Public School in Kota. "Now the entire city is like a university campus."
Mr. Agarwal, the student from the northeast, says that if he gets into IIT, he would like to study aeronautical engineering and eventually work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the U.S. One of his cousins used his IIT degree to get a high-paying job working for Merrill Lynch & Co. in Tokyo.He got average scores on recent practice exams, though, which he knows will not be good enough. "IITs seats are limited but boys trying to get in are unlimited," he says.
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate passed a landmark nuclear pact with India on Wednesday night, opening the door for U.S. energy companies to enter India's fast-growing market.
President Bush met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the Oval Office last week, ahead of the U.S. Senate's passage of a key nuclear-energy deal that will open the Indian market to U.S. companies.The agreement, which now only needs the signature of President Bush, will require India to allow international inspections of its nuclear facilities. The Bush administration has made the deal a top priority. Senate voted 86-13 to approve the treaty, in a vote. President Bush issued a statement congratulating the Senate for passing the bill, and said he looked forward to signing it into law saying this legislation will strengthen global nuclear nonproliferation efforts, protect the environment, create jobs, and assist India in meeting its growing energy needs in a responsible manner.
India's power-generation capacity is lagging far behind the country's expanding energy needs. The economy has grown an average of 8.7% each year over the past five years. That trend, combined with rising incomes, has lifted electricity demand by 9% a year. Other countries have expressed interest in getting into the Indian market, and France concluded its own civilian-nuclear deal with India on Tuesday. For U.S. companies, the deal will open a multibillion-dollar market for the sale of everything from power-transmission equipment to airplanes. Suppliers of technology and equipment, including General Electric Co. and Westinghouse Electric Co., a unit of Toshiba Corp., hope to benefit from India's nuclear-power plans. General Electric built nuclear power plants in India in the 1960s and is interested in building new reactors there, as well as providing fuel and other services for new and existing reactors. General Electric said it has had "limited" discussions with Indian officials about the country's energy plans.
Westinghouse Electric, based outside Pittsburgh, plans to build up to eight reactors in India for $5 billion to $7 billion each. It stepped up meetings with government and industry officials in India this year in anticipation of an agreement. Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. have bid to sell 126 fighter jets to the Indian government, in a deal valued at $8 billion to $10 billion. The White House and State Department held last-minute negotiations over the past two weeks with key members of Congress to get the deal completed before the president leaves office. The House of Representatives approved the treaty, which was three years in the making, on Saturday.
The U.S. has sought to curb the spread of nuclear technologies globally. It has also tried to strengthen ties with India, which it sees as a potential counterweight to China. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has staked his government's survival on the deal, which he argues is crucial for India's energy needs. Sen. Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, urged colleagues in the Senate to approve the deal, saying to have a good strong relationship with this country in this century will be of critical importance to our safety as a nation and to the safety of mankind.
Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, however, raised concerns that Mr. Bush failed to set sufficient safeguards against India testing nuclear weapons. Sen. Dorgan said the agreement hadn't received adequate consideration by Congress and that it rewarded India for what he described as the nation's defiance of international nonproliferation principles. Mr. Bush and Mr. Singh met in Washington last week, when the two sides first hoped the agreement would be sealed. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office then, Mr. Bush said the deal had taken a lot of work on both our parts.
