दृष्टिकोण – Indra's Viewpoint

Indian politicians are busy in personal mudslinging- weak, weeping, communal and what not. Media doesn’t carry any report, if any of the parties are concerned about the extremely poor record of the project executions, be it roads, power plants, or ports. Neither the ruling ones claim nor those in opposition question. One of the king makers wish to put the country in reverse mode by banning English education, computers, and even tractors for creating employment. How long will the people of India tolerate the nonsense of this class who happens to be either the kings or the king-makers too? Should it just be overlooked all together? But how is it possible when media is selling only this stuff 24×7? It is really frustrating.

For a change look at this man who is older than me, leads the second biggest business house of the country with some of the most innovative companies of the country and keeps pushing,

Three Indian companies, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries (RIL), diversified conglomerate Tata Group and IT bellwether Infosys Technologies – have entered Business Week magazine’s list of world’s 50 most innovative companies.

That is not all. As many as 47 Indian companies have made it to the list of world’s biggest 2,000 companies by US magazine Forbes. RIL, State Bank of India, and Oil and Natural Gas Corporation are among the top 200 companies ranked 121st, 150th and 152nd, respectively. All the three have improved their ranks considerably from their last year’s positions. Four Indian companies, Hero Honda Motors [Sun Pharma [Indian Bank [and Jindal Steel and Power Ltd are the new entrants to the list.

However, none of the Indian companies have managed to find a place among the top 100 firms this year as well. When can it happen?

Interestingly some among the companies are manufacturing and metal ones too such as Hero Honda Motors, Larsen & Toubro, BHEL, Tata Motors, M&M, SAIL, HINDALCO, and NALCO.

Five Indian companies are also among ‘the world’s 25 unsung innovative companies’ of Business Week too.

As reported in Business Week, ‘in spite of these many challenges, India is slowly but surely making a mark in the global supply chain. Indian manufacturing companies are vendors of choice for global automobile multinationals. Leading carmakers such as Hyundai, and Suzuki Maruti, even to smaller extent, General Motors, Toyota, and Ford (F) are supplying cars from its plants in India to the rest of the world. India becomes more lucrative because of its frugal manufacturing as well as frugal even with design and development that is very expensive in the developed countries.

At a time when global auto majors are struggling, carmakers in India have been able to expand their overseas presence with exports from the country registering whopping 57.04 per cent growth in the last fiscal. India touched 3,31,539 units in FY09 as against 2,11,112 units in the previous financial year.

And it is not only automobiles. A recent news report from ship building is equally exhilarating and talks tones about India’s manufacturing. India joined a club of select nations. The keel for the country’s first indigenous aircraft carrier was laid that will be launched in 2011 and is scheduled to be delivered to the Indian Navy in 2014. With this project India has become the fourth nation, after the US, Russia and France, to be capable of designing and constructing full deck carriers.

It will be manufacturing that must make India lead the global competition, as it is the core sector. Many more surprises from many sectors are still not known.

It was in 1982 that I bought this plot of land in Salt Lake. When my simple mother from a very rural background saw this land, she exclaimed, ‘Dear Son! Didn’t you find any better place?’ We had built a house at Bodarhi earlier to provide a better quality of life for our parents. So we took some time to start the work on this Salt Lake house.

It was 1989 that we could complete ground floor, though the structure for all the three floors were ready by that year. My mother stayed in this house on a Diwali night, though she didn’t see the house completed. She would have been the happiest, as she longed for it the most. In a very sudden cerebral attack, she went in coma and could never recover. She died on February 28, 1989. It was the year when Rakesh graduated from IIT-Kharagpur and left for MS at Purdue University, USA and my father breathed his last on September 24 after a long illness. Rental advance from the ground floor helped me in meeting some of the expenses of Rakesh. Interestingly, my father never saw AJIRA. Perhaps, that was his destiny.

We then finished second floor and gave it on rent but unluckily to a miscreant who created the worst nightmare of my life for me. It was only in 1997 that Rajesh and Shephali managed to negotiate the deal, though a pretty good cost of Rs 5 lakh from my hard earned provident fund money to get rid of the demon.

By 1992 end, we had completed the second floor. We built it a little better for our living. In January 1993, we had a number of functions related to the marriage of Rakesh and Alpana in the premises. By the time, the house had got its name AJIRA that included the first letter of all the names in the family, but meant courtyard of a house and also one that doesn’t get old in Hindi.

In 1996, on advice of Mr. Bhatter we left Hindustan Motors’ flat and started living in AJIRA. It provided some financial advantage of house rent. But as HM under new management of CK Birla decided to retire every one strictly at 58 years, I was to retire in 1997. Many things were happening in AJIRA. The unscrupulous tenant had created a legal mess. Because of a lack of experience in this field, I got involved into the local politics and suffered physically as well as mentally. For the first time, I found myself totally helpless. None actually helped in real sense of the term. Rajesh got married with Shephali from AJIRA. After the marriage along with the guests I left for New Delhi to join Harig Crankshafts as President.

Rajesh and Shephali continued living in AJIRA. In 1999, Rajesh also left Calcutta and went to USA for his MS. Thereafter, we gave the first and ground floor on rental and kept the second floor for ourselves.
I got my heart attack and surgery in 2000 and the same year in October, I decided not to work anymore. AJIRA helped us as son and took care of our usual monthly expenses, as my sole major employer in life HM didn’t provide a good enough superannuation.

Last year in January, Shannon also visited Salt Lake. I was waiting for that to happen. When we were in US in September-November 2008, the plan to sell Salt Lake house got initiated. It was the part of the winding up plan seeing the age. Ultimately, like a typical Indian parent, we shall have to live with or near one of the three sons.

We came to Salt Lake in February 2009 to outright sell AJIRA that was built with a lot of pain of all the family members. But the offer of a School of Financial Studies for a lucrative rental changed the minds of both Anand and Rajesh. Moreover, the offer for the outright sale was nowhere near the target. In the meantime, seeing the damage to the wooden fittings and structures under closed condition for many years, we decided to vacate the second floor and put the whole building on rental. We sold, gifted, and transported all that we had collected for more than three decades with a heavy heart.

Ultimately, yesterday on the first day of the Bengali year (Poila Baishakh) the draft agreement got signed, and I am leaving today for Noida. I don’t know if I shall come back again in AJIRA to live. So Alvida (Sayonara) AJIRA! Let me live with its sweet and sour memories and my ‘Karma’.

While the election news coverage on all the 24-hours channels is getting menacingly boring and to a great extent agonizing, many things though sparingly reported keep the hope for innovating and shining India alive. Why should not I and many who belong to my clan be with those?

IIT-Bombay is organizing TechConnect 2009 for industry professionals to view its research projects and prototypes and to explore opportunities to commercialize IIT-B’s researches and technology. It will showcase 42 exhibits across manufacturing, ICT, defence, energy, healthcare and processing industries – ranging from mobile jammers, prosthesis for children with bone cancer to treating cancer cell by heat and drug via magnetic nanoparticulates to IT for agriculture and even local area public transport.

DRDO’s BrahMos: India can soon claim to be among the first in the world to be ready with a supersonic land-attack cruise missile and then perhaps with a hypersonic one. Sivathanu Pillai, the chief executive officer and the head of the Indo-Russian BrahMos, an acronym from the Brahmaputra and Moskva, has made the BrahMos Land Attack Cruise Missile Mark II real despite opposition from the Indian Army that kept upping its demands and reducing the size of the targets in the tests. Pillai aims at arming Indian army’s artillery divisions with a missile the world had not seen. The BrahMos that is fully debugged is ready. The recent successful demonstrations of the BrahMos have scuttled the move in the army to import the Tomahawk or its clones.

IIT-KGP: After three years of research, IIT-Kharagpur, along with the Tokai University of Japan, has invented the novel injection that uses a micro needle to extract blood or deliver drug painlessly by using the suction-based pressure that a female mosquito uses to suck blood.

India-born Sanjay Jha tops among US CEOs: Motorola’s India-born chief Sanjay Jha has emerged America’s top paid CEO. With a total payout of over USD 104 million in 2008, Jha is the only CEO to get a compensation package exceeding USD 100 million, with Occidental’s Ray Irani at a distant second with USD 49.9 million.

Despite worldwide recessions, global hotel chains, as many as 37 international hotels brands are knocking at India’s doors to invest in India’s attractive hospitality sector.

Despite the industrial slowdown, the engineering giant, Larsen and Toubro, got around $1 billion worth of orders in the last week of March. Its order backlog has risen 13 per cent to Rs 77,000 crore, from Rs 68,000 crore in December 2008.

BHEL, the power equipment giant PSU got orders worth Rs 59,687 crore in FY09, a rise of 19 per cent over FY08. The total order book is around Rs 1,17, 000 crore. BHEL is doubling its current manufacturing capacity of about 10,000 Mw to 20,000 Mw by 2012.

Reliance Industries (RIL) commenced gas production from the KG-D6 block in the Krishna Godavari basin. India will save $9 billion in oil import bill annually with the beginning of production from the fields. Bringing a deep sea discovery such as the one made in the Krishna-Godavari basin into production within six-and-a-half years is a record against the global practice of 9-10 years.

Luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz India plans to increase its headcount by up to four-fold at the research and development centre in Bangalore in the next few years and will invest Rs 150 crore. It will increase its headcounts to between 500 and 1,000 engineers for its R&D centre in Bangalore in the next few years that employs currently about 200-220 people.

Aircraft maker Boeing Co., opened recently a research and technology centres in Bangalore, only the third such outside the US. With ongoing research collaborations with the National Aerospace Laboratories, the Tata group and the Indian Institute of Science, Boeing expects this centre with around 30 scientists to build technologies for future planes. According to Boeing projection, India would need 1,001 aircraft worth more than $105.0 billion over the next 20 years.

The $15-billion engineering and industrial product company of the US, Eaton Corporation, plans major expansion of its India operations aimed at making the country a hub for its global research and development activities and has decided to recruit over 600 engineers over the next two years.

Many Indian companies have also undertaken innovation as its route to go global. Praj Industries sells technology and engineering services to global firms that set up ethanol plants. It has just announced a breakthrough: the cellulosic biomass to ethanol technology, a second-generation process to extract ethanol from corn cob and sugarcane bagasse, both waste products in food production. The new technology will enable companies to produce ethanol from food waste, not food. Its scientists are also working on taking the company from the second-generation to the third in biofuels.

The world scientific fraternity recognizes the India’s talent. The highlights of the Battelle/R&D Magazine report state: [India] is becoming a top player in biopharm, automotive, IT/software, and IT-enabled services. India adds value to its customers’ products with large scale/low cost intellectual property.

MNCs are still building manufacturing facilities in India. Volkswagen India, the wholly-owned subsidiary of the world’s third-largest vehicle maker, will produce Polo, its top-selling model, at its greenfield plant at Chakan that is an e580-million plant, with a manufacturing capacity of 1.10 lakh car.

Nano has kept on getting terrific reviews from all corners of the world. Business Week, New York Times, Economist, and many put excellent coverage of this cute car that has all the potentials to become the car for the world.

I keep on searching the right material to read, and surprisingly I keep on finding many. It may be about the powerhouses that Indian entrepreneurs have built over the years or about the startups or mini global companies that keep on surprising with its performance through innovative approaches.

In this election season, one can hardly expect to see something like ‘Seven Wonders of India’ on the most respected 24×7 news channel. I have been watching Pranay Roy from his star News days. Today Pranay has created a media empire of his own.

I have been watching the serial on ‘Seven Wonders of India’. Whenever I missed I felt bad about it. Beside TajMahal, the wonder of wonders, selected among ‘Seven Wonders of India’ on NDTV were Jailsalmer Fort, Nalanda, Minakshi temple, Konarak, Khajuraho, Dhola Vira, and Red Fort. And I wonder why Ajanta Ellora and Hampi didn’t get into the list. But as Pranay Roy explained NDTV has selected 7 out of shortlisted 21 out of total of 222 sites from all over India. It had two spiritual wonders too- Tawang Monastery and Golden Temple.

Rightly described as the eighth wonder of the evening, the dance performance of Aiswairya Ray Bachchan and her group was one of the most wonderful one that provided entertainment to the celebrities and suited the ambience of the occasion. But perhaps the most exciting was the dresses and costumes made out of textiles and weaving of various regions presented by models. And last but not the least was the fantastic music through drums of India.

We have not been to three of the seven wonders- Minakshi temple, Jaisalmer fort, and Dhola Vir and the spiritual one, Tawang monastery. I am sure god permitting we shall make it soon. Some dignitaries talked of going and seeing the places of interest in foreign countries. I went to see many places in Europe and Japan finding some space in between my business trips. Let me confess I didn’t enjoy the visits as I was not knowledgeable about its history. I have been visiting many places in last few years, but I hardly find visitors that belong to the class of people that were present at Pranay’s function. Perhaps that is one reason that these places do hardly have good hotels and other basic infrastructures. I wish they would have been visiting the some of the 222 wonders in India.

I wish some of the big business houses would have been volunteering offered to government to undertake the task of developing the infrastructures or protection of these wonders. I saw Konark for the first time in 1965. I vested it again in 1970s and found a lot of surface erosion. Perhaps the numbers of our heritage sites are too large to be maintained suitably with the government budget. It requires technology and research too, for the prevention of deterioration, besides educating the people visiting it to avoid mutilating it.

One of the coordinators of the function talked of creating heritage sites for the Gen Next. I am sure the creation such as Akshardam near Noida is one that will meet the expected standard. And I wish BJP instead of talking to construct Ram Mandir at disputed site proposes to help building Nalanda International University as the grandest in the world in which Indians of tomorrow could take pride.

And then I request NDTV to market prepare and market DVDs at nano price, the total of the sites state wise and that of the finale function too.

I had my heart problem. I had to undergo surgery. My uncle has also a bad heart but he did some herbal treatment. Years ago, Dr. Akhilesh Thakur, an MD and my brother-in-law had narrated me a story about the self mending of heart trouble of a woman vendor of vegetables. When the woman was brought in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed that her heart was blocked and required surgical operation. She could not afford the cost, lived on medicine, and soon started selling the vegetables going from village to village. After some years, the woman was again brought in the hospital but this time for a fracture. While she was getting treated, the cardiac doctor who had attended her earlier wanted to find out the condition of her heart. Surprisingly, the woman didn’t show any sign of heart trouble. The doctor then investigated further and found that the heart had developed a new artery to feed the heart. Perhaps the amount of physical exercise she had to do for living led to creation of the artery. That was Dr. Akhilesh’s explanation.

I read a news item today that confirms what Dr. Akhilesh concluded.

An international team of researchers that included a Canadian-born Indian neurosurgeon Dr Ratan Bhardwaj has found that the heart can regenerate itself. “We have shown for the first time that the heart is capable of regeneration,” Dr Ratan Bhardwaj – who gave primary inputs for the research under lab supervision of Jonas Frisen at Stockholm’s Nobel Medical Research Institute – told TOI just after the research paper was published in the prestigious journal, Science. (TOI, Kolkata, April 3, 2009)

I wonder why Dr. Akhilesh and his peers couldn’t have continued with some research on the subject and got the credit of the research team mentioned in the news report.

Here is another case of opportunity lost for an indigenous Indian product as reported in Business World.

According to the Gujarat-based Psyllium Husk Processors Association, in 2007-08, India produced 9 million tonnes – 98 per cent of the world’s total production – of Isabgol, a traditional Indian laxative made of psyllium seed husk. But the bulk of this produce was exported and sold as ‘value-added’ products in the US and Europe by multinational companies (MNCs) such as Procter & Gamble (P&G), Kellogg’s, Reckitt Benckiser and GlaxoSmithKline. Interestingly, Isabgol is widely used in the US and Europe as a breakfast cereal and is marketed as health food according to Dr Anita Gupta, senior gynaecologist at GM Modi Hospital in Delhi.

PS: Interestingly, when I searched for’ Broken heart can mend itself’ on Google, I came across a number well written poems with the same caption. The lyrics proved to be right.

I wish I would have taken my 5-km morning walk as seriously as I do take today. Further, I wonder why none of the manifestos for Election 2009 include setting up a Yoga Centre in each village as preventative measure to keep our population physically fit. Perhaps, it may sound against the secular image that all parties are trying to project.</font