Now, your rights face inflation!a

New RTI rules introduced by the Chhattisgarh government come across as blatant misuse of power and undermine the very essence of the act

Once again, the much hyped Right to Information Act (RTI) has returned to the headlines. And this time, it is due to the outrageous hike in RTI fees by the Chhattisgarh government. While all states charge Rs.10 as fee and Rs.2 per print page of the RTI response, Chhattisgarh has increased the fees to Rs.500 and Rs.15 per print copy. The main reason cited is reduction of frivolous applications (interestingly, official sources have stated that the number of applications filed in Chhattisgarh since RTI got enforced is just around 50!). Furthermore, they have made it mandatory to cite reasons for filling applications, restricted the number of queries per applicant to one and also limited the word count to 150. The move has been taken after the Karnataka government took a similar step in 2008 with respect to number of queries and word count and the UP government hiked RTI application fees.

This fee hike would deprive people who seek information especially at a time when the Chhattisgarh government is undertaking face saving measures in the light of the paddy procurement scam. The Central government has given the power to revise fees. But as per sub-section (1) of section 6 and sub-sections (1) & (5) of section 7, “The fee shall be reasonable and no such fee shall be charged from persons who are of below poverty line as may be determined by the appropriate government.”

Read more.........

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri 
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles. 

IIPM Best B School
IndiaManagement Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age WomanIIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting

“It players are expanding the reach”

Rohit Kapoor, President & CEO, EXL Services

B&E: Nasscom came out with a report that says that the IT-ITeS industry in India has crossed the $100 billion mark. What’s the next frontier for the industry in your view?
Rohit Kapoor (RK): It will continue to remain a growth industry, and will continue to grow in double digits. And it means that there will be terrific opportunities for the employees and the associated countries in the upcoming future as well, if we talk about EXL services. The BPO industry in India is still in its nascent stages, and I think growth over here will pick up in a gradual fashion. But it will take place for a sustained period of time. The reason for that is that it’s very difficult to extricate out processes, which are embedded in a client’s organisation. EXL has been growing very rapidly. For the last five years, our growth rate has been in excess of 35% CAGR. I think that the industry has quite a lot of things that need to be put in place. One, the customer is no longer looking for labour arbitrage, but is looking out for domain expertise and the ability of the provider to solve their pain points and business problems. And I think the investment that is required by the companies to make sure that they understand the client business and they can use different types of tools and techniques to help solve a customer’s problems (whether that be technology, a process, analytics, or some kind of a work flow) is really important.

B&E: How is the hiring process shaping up at EXL currently? Is the frenzy continuing as before?
RK: For the BPO industry, hiring continues to be fairly strong. Our headcount is around 18,000 employees, and last year, we hired around 3500 employees. We expect to hire in a similar fashion in 2012 and beyond as well. The hiring is being done in all the centres that we have; not only in Delhi NCR, but in Pune, Bangalore and Kochi as well. There is always a fair amount of hiring that we do for some of the knowledge processing work like decision analytics, operations and process excellence & risk and financial transformation. Those are higher skill set capabilities and we continue to hire there as well.

B&E: What’s your projected revenue, and how is inorganic growth helping your growth objectives?
RK: We expect to be at the top end of $354-358 million in revenue for the calendar year 2011. Certainly, there has been a diversification strategy that the BPO companies have gone for. Initially, they were purely India focused, but now they have got offices in multiple countries. For instance, EXL started its business entirely from India and now we have offices in more than 7 different countries. There are now multiple choices that our client has to access talent and to be able to get services. For EXL, we have always said that we would like to grow on an organic basis at a fast pace; and compliment that with mergers and acquisitions, preferably acquisitions. In 2011, we have acquired OPI, a financial and accounting BPO company for $100 million and also took over a portion of a business from Trumble for $250,000. We also acquired the captive operations of Life Pro, a life insurance business based in the US. Our objective ultimately is to run the customer’s back end operations. We have got to leverage that and apply that to any geography & any skill set and then provide that to our customers.

B&E: How do you see moving towards tier 2-3 cities as a viable business and growth option?
RK: I think you need to balance it out. There are certain advantages in terms of lower cost structure, but disadvantages as well in terms of non-availability of management talent and better infrastructure. Asking your senior members in the team to establish business in these cities is also one of the major challenges and what type of support you will get from the local government becomes critical. There are a number of tier 2 cities, which we find to be really attractive like Kochi, which is turning out pretty nicely for us in terms of the above mentioned points, as they largely govern the setting up of a center in the city.

Read more..........

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting

OUR DATA CUSTOMERS ARE OUR ONE BIG DIFFERENTIATOR

How MTS India is addressing the needs of today’s upload generation by creating product differentaition and offering innovative solutions.

You operate in a very competitive environment, with players like Tata Photon+, Reliance Netconnect, and other mobile service operators. In such a situation what is it that differentiates you as a brand and what is your USP?
Unlike the other brands, what really differentiates us is that we are not really a voice brand which is also in data; we’re a brand that primarily exists for data audiences. Therefore, our product, our network, our services, the structure of the company, and how we deal with customer service are tailored much more for data customers. Data customers are rather different from voice customers – that’s one big differentiator for us. Even from the branding point of view, we have some differentiators. Our brand, for example, is unlike other telecom brands in India, which are very collective in nature in terms of connections and strengths of the respective groups. We are doing completely the opposite, and we are focusing on individuals. So, even as 99% of the brands are talking about connectivity, we’re are talking about empowering an individual, making him influential, powerful and more secure. Apart from that, we build differentiation in the way we choose our media, the kind of sponsorships we have, the kind of market and imagery we are using.

Your data offering “MBlaze” is on the CDMA platform. Is it a better medium for data delivery?
Being on CDMA, we have some intrinsic advantages over the other operators, and that’s not just true for MBlaze but also for players like Tata and Reliance, which too offer their data on the CDMA platform. A CDMA network has two pipes, one for voice and the other for data, and therefore your data speed and throughput are faster, much more consistent and reliable. In GSM there is no such distinction in pipes, therefore, as there are more and more calls on bandwidth, they choke the pipes leading to poorer and poorer data connectivity. This is the reason why in India, and all over the world, when it comes to dongles and data, CDMA always has an advantage.

So the trend is that GSM in India will be used for voice and CDMA for data. Do you agree?
For now, definitely, no question about it. But it’s very hard to predict in this category what will happen 10 years from today, as technology changes rapidly. But for now that’s the trend and it shows in the market place. Three CDMA players dominate the dongle market. Collectively, the three players have captured almost 80% of the Internet dongle market. The remaining 20% is dominated by GSM players like Airtel, Idea, Aircel et al, with 3G offerings. While Vodafone is actually now using our dongle, called “NetCruise”, it’s basically a Vodafone branded product, but powered by MTS. Vodafone is only marketing it. The entire service experience is delivered from MTS network.

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM Proves Its Mettle Once Again.....
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM RANKED NO.1 in MAIL TODAY B-SCHOOL RANKINGS
Planman Technologies

Project future leaders

From “Indian National Congress” to “Indian New Congress”

I nodded my head in disapproval. These days, this has become quite often with me, more like a habit. Well, you’d be curious to know that which invites this nod of disapproval. It’s our country’s prevailing state of affairs that bothers me and burgeons deep concerns over its future. The world is anything but like of yore. It has become incredulously faster, is changing at a rapid rate and is progressing by leaps and bounds. We as a country are progressing too and the world is watching us grow closely & keenly. However, this wave of proliferating corruption in recent times is not only pulling us back from our path of progress but perpetrating an air of cynicism within the entire country.
Stories of scams & bribes have become a common phenomenon these days and have led to a building negativity amongst people. Corruption has spread its wings from small bribes to wealth of epic proportions. The people of India have lost all kinds of faith in any authoritative leadership. Consequently, Anna Hazare has become a local, national as well as an international hero on fighting corruption. And India’s oldest political party is in the eye of such a storm.
So, how does the Congress deal with this daunting problem? Applying our logic to what we tell brands would be one way to tackle this. Let’s go back in time and look at the case of Bajaj Auto. Bajaj had not ventured into bikes and had been a powerful scooter brand of the country. Bajaj decided to relaunch itself in a new avatar. This is what Bajaj did – (a) Changed the leadership, from Rahul Bajaj to Ravi Bajaj; (b) Changed its product offering, from scooters to motorcycles and; (c) Ensured that the new product offering is good and lives up to the expectations of the people.
So what can the Congress learn from this? The Congress needs to take the following steps: (i) Create a new offering to reappraise people. Instead of having old leaders and party members, the party should have MPs under the age of 40 years; (ii) Bring changes in the leadership. The party should induce new, fresh faces. If Rahul Gandhi is going to be their next Prime Ministerial candidate then he should be projected as a leader. A young brigade will perhaps allow people to forget the past misgivings of the party and give it another chance. If you don’t have something new to offer, people will not even give you a second look.
What Congress needs to do is to project future leaders and give people a new ray of hope for a promising tomorrow rather than mull over past catastrophes. The Congress needs to transform the party into a young party imploring the young and old of India to offer them an opportunity to clean up the mess and present a new transformed India.
With the country’s frustrations surging to an all time high and hope having turned its back creeping into some tiny corner of their hearts, the party needs to give the people hope. Hope fraught with the above strategy is the only way for its redemption and victory. However, the choice is for the party to make. Either one will be significant in deciding its future.

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM Proves Its Mettle Once Again.....
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM RANKED NO.1 in MAIL TODAY B-SCHOOL RANKINGS
Planman Technologies

“New media is hot buy today”

Media agencies have evolved from only buying print, tv, cinema, radio and outdoors to doing lots of digital buying, says Dnyanada Chaudhari.

As a media planner what is the environment like today and what are the fundamental challenges for professionals in this industry?

The fundamental challenges for us are that we need to keep up with the whole dynamism of the changing landscape. We have to be up and about regarding the changes taking place around us. Just look at the programmes on television today. Every month they are changing. As a media buyer we go where the consumers drive us and the consumers are buying into these changes. In such a dynamic media environment, we have got to keep up with the changing times and also figure out what’s going to last. So keeping your ears to the ground, assessing the changes and the kind of impact they will have on the industry, figuring out the long-term trends and dealing with lots of uncertainty around are the challenges we face today.

How would you describe the evolution of media buying agencies in the face of so much changes taking place in the sector?

I think the whole media consumption pattern is changing and a lot of new products have entered the market, which reflect the changes taking place around us. A lot of new advertisers with novel ideas and skills have come up, which is helping advertising to break new and fresh ground. Till sometime ago, the role of most media buying agencies was limited to only trading and buying media space for their clients. In recent times though, media agencies have taken on a more differentiated role. Media planning has become more focused and there is a much greater emphasis on getting returns for an investment made. So you will find there is a lot of conversation happening on ROI before a buying commitment is made. Similarly, a lot of analysis goes into assessing what the kind of impact would be for taking media space in the IPL or other large media properties. There are hard negotiations on buying terms and conditions besides getting clarity and understanding in terms of what works and what doesn’t.

What are the more visible trends that are impacting media consumption and how are media-buying agencies reacting to them?

Consumerism and technology are having a visible impact on the way we consume media. The impact of consumerism is not just on FMCG consumption but on a whole lot of other things, including media consumption. In the same way that rising consumerism has led to changing consumption patterns, technology is driving consumers to adapt in various ways leading to changes in the pattern of media consumption as well. For example, today mobile phones, which have deep penetration in the population, are used not just for chatting but for hearing songs, playing games, conducting financial transactions and so on. As such media buying agencies are now looking more to the potential of new media and not just at traditional media. The digital space has now become hot for both advertisers and sellers. So a lot of agencies have evolved from only buying print, radio, TV, cinema, outdoors to doing a lot of digital buying.


For more articles, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM Proves Its Mettle Once Again.....
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM RANKED NO.1 in MAIL TODAY B-SCHOOL RANKINGS
Planman Technologies