59 pc professionals may quit jobs due to lack of promotion: Survey

Majority of Indian professionals are likely to quit their jobs this year due to lack of promotional avenues despite good work results and a lack of communication and involvement by their top managements, according to a survey. For 59 per cent of respondents, finding out that the next position in the career ladder is a no-show was the top "get me out of here" factor, a survey by Regus, revealed.

Lack of communication and involvement by top management was the other big reason for most professionals to quit their existing jobs, 50 per cent of respondents said. Another 30 per cent said that they would leave a company which lacked ''vision''.

The job market in India is likely to get crowded after the summer vacation as Indian professionals may quit their existing jobs unless they are promoted, it said. Over 15,000 business respondents from the Regus global contacts database were interviewed during the February-March 2010 period and the survey was managed and administered by Marketing UK, an independent organisation, Regus said in a press release issued here.

Regus is a leading global provider of innovative workspace solutions. Regus'' Country Head, Madhusudan Thakur, said "as workers pack up their swim-suits and towels after the holidays, they are more likely to dwell on the pros and cons of the job that is waiting for them at home.

Supreme Court Forces The Govt To Act, To Stop Grains Being Wasted

Amidst all the raging controversy and debates over wasted grains and hungry people, the Supreme Court has certainly created quite a flutter by asking the government to provide foodgrains free to the poor than to allow it to rot. This verdict, although not practically implementable, did show the urgency and in many ways reflected what an average citizen would say looking at the TV reports of rotting foodgrains in storage.

So much so that it sent a Group of Ministers (GoM) into a huddle to immediately spell out what they intend to do. Since the Supreme Court wanted a definite answer by Monday Sept 5, the GoM has come out with the promise of revamping the rotten Public Distribution System (PDS) and has also promised to make an additional allocation of 2.5 million tonnes of grains at below the poverty line price to States. This will be done in the next six months.

I only hope that the Supreme Court keeps up the pressure to force the government to act. It is criminal to let grains rot while millions go to bed hungry. This can happen only in a democracy.

The nation is still not sure as to what to do to ensure household food security. I find the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) still grappling with a way out while the Ministry for Food and Agriculture insisting that providing a monthly ration of 35 kg to 37.2 per cent of the population computed to be below the poverty line is the answer. The issue has got so polarised that the NAC goes on harping on the need to ensure a universal right to food just because it has taken a position which suits its constituency.

The Supreme Court has questioned the justification of a universal PDS. I agree. There is no need for a universal PDS as it would provide a license for the grain traders to make a killing. The Supreme Court would do well to consider the more plausible approach by raising the upper limit of the beneficiaries in the sense that instead of 37.2 per cent, it needs to include 55 per cent of the population (which means following the UNDP estimate of poverty in India) as beneficiaries. This will automatically include all those cases which are on the border line. At the same time, it will also ensure that the National Food Security Act is not a half-hearted attempt.

However, providing 35 kg of grain to the BPL population is simply nothing more than food entitlement. When we use the term Food Security, as in the proposed National Food Security Act, we surely have to look beyond entitlements. And that is where the NAC fails, and so does the Ministry for Food and Agriculture.

Unfortunately, the proposed National Food Security Act is a stand alone programme. It fails to go beyond the quota of ration each family needs to receive. It fails to integrate agriculture with food security. Unless we make a sincere attempt to make a historical correction about our perception of food security in the long-term I fear sooner than later the Supreme Court may have to step in again.

Perhaps one way of looking at food security is to follow what Chhatisgarh has done in the past four years. It is running a right-to-food programme that has impacted the lives of everyone involved: labourer, small farmer, large farmer, middlemen, mandis and the government. Food Security is just the starting point, says a full page report in the Economic Times (Sept 2, 2010).

M Rajshekhar reports under the title New Food Rules: "The myriad ways in which such a welfare programme touches lives and other aspects of the economy have shaped -- and accelerated -- several ongoing trends. These might well be replicated, in varying degrees, as and when the Centre rolls out a national food security programme on similar lines."

The problem is that since Chhatisgarh is a State under the BJP rule, and the Centre is in the hands of UPA-II government, the political configuration is not allowing due recognition for what appears to be a more practical way to ensure food security. I would have been delighted if the UPA-II had invited Chhatisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh to actually oversee the country's food security programme. I wonder when will democracy mature to a level when cutting across party lines we begin to respect merit and performance.

Chhatisgarh relies on what is called local production-local procurement-local distribution model. Chhatisgrah bypassed its mandis in paddy procurement, instead buying through cooperative societies and procurement centres at the village level. The mandis, though, are unaffected, as the societies have to pay a procurement tax, the revenues from which go to the mandis.

For four years now, Chhatisgarh has been giving 35 kg of grain -- comprising rice and wheat -- a month at heavily subsidised rates to 3.6 million of its 4.4 million households. The ultra-poor pay Re 1 per kg, while the poor pay Rs 2 per kg, against the market price of Rs 12-17 a kg. The ration card is the document that enables this subsidised transfer

Computer memory can go smaller!

Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard are reporting this week that they can overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturisation of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution. In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip-makers had loomed so large that experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturisation that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smart phones and digital cameras.

But the new announcements, along with competing technologies being pursued by companies like IBM and Intel, offer hope that the brake will not be applied any time soon.

In one of the two new developments, Rice researchers are reporting in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches — an essential part of computer memory — that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible using conventional methods.

More important, the advance is based on silicon oxide, one of the basic building blocks of today's chip industry, thus easing a move toward commercialisation. The scientists said that PrivaTran, a Texas startup company, has made experimental chips using the technique that can store and retrieve information.

These chips store only 1,000 bits of data, but if the new technology fulfils the promise its inventors see, single chips that store as much as today's highest capacity disk drives could be possible in five years. The new method involves filaments as thin as five nanometers in width — thinner than what the industry hopes to achieve by the end of the decade using standard techniques. The initial discovery was made by Jun Yao, a graduate researcher at Rice. Yao said he stumbled on the switch by accident.

Separately, HP is set to announce on Tuesday that it will enter into a commercial partnership with a major semiconductor company to produce a related technology that also has the potential of pushing computer data storage to astronomical densities in the next decade. HP and the Rice scientists are making what are called memristors, or memory resistors, switches that retain information without a source of power.

"There are a lot of new technologies pawing for attention," said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a consumer electronics market research company in Seaford, New York. "When you get down to these scales, you're talking about the ability to store hundreds of movies on a single chip."

The announcements are significant in part because they indicate that the chip industry may find a way to preserve the validity of Moore's Law. Formulated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, the law is an observation that the industry has the ability to roughly double the number of transistors that can be printed on a wafer of silicon every 18 months.

That has been the basis for vast improvements in technological and economic capacities in the past 4-1/2 decades. But industry consensus had shifted in recent years to a widespread belief that the end of physical progress in shrinking the size modern semiconductors was imminent. Chip-makers are now confronted by such severe physical and financial challenges that they are spending $4 billion or more for each new advanced chip-making factory.

IBM, Intel and other companies are already pursuing a competing technology called phase-change memory, which uses heat to transform a glassy material from an amorphous state to a crystalline one and back. 

India to Have 237 Million Web Surfers in 2015

he number of Internet users in India is expected to triple in the next five years, according to a report from the Boston Consulting Group Wednesday but making money from them isn’t going to be easy.

Although PC penetration in India is low, at less than 5% of the population, and so is Internet use, with the country’s approximately 80 million Internet users averaging just about half an hour online a day, the report points to China’s growth and its 384 million surfers as a sign of how quickly this could change.

“The unexpectedly rapid pace of China’s online migration is a sharp reminder of how quickly the other BRICI markets are likely to evolve in terms of Internet penetration rates, the number of hours spent online per day and e-commerce adoption,” said the report, which focused on the top emerging markets, Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia.

“India is going to be different than what we’ve seen in mature markets but also in emerging markets. It’s going to be predominantly a mobile experience,” said Mr. Subramanian, who says the Internet will transform itself in the process.A lot of the growth in India will come from users who first surf the Internet from their mobile phones, said Arvind Subramanian, managing director BCG Mumbai and one of the authors of the report, even though right now only 1% of mobile phone users are using the Internet.

“The traditional Internet in its current form would be largely inaccessible even if it were to be available,” he said. “The language and literacy barriers in the country—those are formidable.”

Global sites that want to keep the edge they already have in India, compared to some other emerging markets, will have to Indianize more than they have so far.

“If you look at the Internet in Russia, China and Brazil, it is largely dominated by local sites, local content,” said Mr. Subramanian. “In India and Indonesia, it’s the Googles, Facebooks, Orkut.”

Going forward, “you will have language editions of all these global sites,” he said. The hardware might have to change too, to voice-based devices or other gadgets that are more intuitive to use, he added.

Mr. Subramanian says Indians are likely to take to services that enhance personal productivity, such as job alerts or continuing education. About 73% of people who go online in India spend time job hunting, the research showed, a finding backed up by Google search trends in India which show job-related terms in the top 10 most days.

“The other thing that’s big there is matrimonial which is a very unique Indian thing,” he said.

Most Chinese Internet users instead spend their time online instant messaging or listening to music and only 19% look for jobs. Russian and Brazilian web surfers use search engines a lot.

Making money from Indians on the Internet? That’s an even harder proposition.

“BRICI Internet users are much more likely to pay for online services than for content though Indian and Indonesian users are quite reluctant to pay at all, said the report.

Mr. Subramanian said that user fees, subscriptions or e-commerce aren’t going to be major sources of earnings for a while.

“A lot of it will come from other payers in the system using this as a way to reach a customer,” he said.

3G mobile service set for India launch

Decks were cleared today for launching 3G mobile and broadband services in the country, with the government allocating air waves to private operators after making certain amends to the licence terms.

The operators are authorised to use the spectrum for a period of 20 years from today, according to the amended licence conditions that allows companies to offer 3G services till the validity of the spectrum even if their telecom licences expire prior to that.

The government has imposed a roll-out obligation, under which the service providers would have to cover at least 90 per cent of the service areas in the metros within the next five years.

Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, RCom, Tatas, Idea Cellular, Aircel and S Tel were the operators who had bagged 3G spectrum in the auction in May that fetched the government over Rs 51,000 crore apart from about Rs 16,000 crore from the two telecom PSUs -- BSNL and MTNL.

BSNL and MTNL were awarded spectrum more than a year ago in view of their obligation to procure equipments through cumbersome process of inviting tenders. BSNL offers services throughout the country, except Delhi and Mumbai where MTNL is the operator. The operators have been awarded 5 Mhz of spectrum in each circle they won in the auction.

In the two metros of Delhi and Mumbai, three operators - Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Reliance Communication had emerged the winners while no operator could bag pan-India spectrum in the auction that was conducted between April 9 and May 18 this year.

The government had auctioned three 3G slots throughout the nation, while four slots were offered in five circles. 3G allows high-speed mobile broadband access enabling users to download full length movies, make video calls and watch live television programmes.

According to the amendment, if the operators fail to achieve the roll-out obligations, they would be given extension for one more year after paying 2.5 per cent of the spectrum acquisition charge per quarter.

Also, in case of two companies merging, only one slot of spectrum can be retained, according to the amended rules. The operators will have to pay the upward revised spectrum usage charges ranging between 3-8 per cent depending upon the quantum of spectrum held by them.

Indian Auto Boom Gets Bubbly

The chronic disease of the biggest auto markets in the world–overcapacity–could spread to India sooner than most people think.

As everyone from Hyundai to Honda spends billions to rapidly ramp up their production here, sooner or later they will be making more cars than they can sell, say some experts.

“I see overcapacity even in the BRICs countries,” Dieter Becker, global chair of automotive coverage at KPMG consulting told India Real Time. “The number of players (in India) has increased dramatically.” The BRICs countries are Brazil, Russia, India and China.

That might seem hard to believe with car and commercial vehicle sales climbing to a record highof around 2.5 million in the year ended March 31, and in a country where just 12 people in 1,000 own a car or utility vehicle.

But it’s an opinion that even some car manufacturers hold—around one-third of the 200 auto executives who responded to a KPMG survey out earlier this year predicted India would be struggling with overcapacity in the auto sector within the next five years.

It’s still a minority view—and hardly the 20% to 35% overcapacity companies are already dealing with in the U.S., Japan and Europe–but it’s something Indian auto executives (as well as investors and car buyers) should think about as they tune-up their plans in India.

“Now there are 50 players [in India] and they are still building capacity,” said Mr. Becker.

But auto executives and analysts said that if the prices and products are right, India will have no trouble boosting passenger car and commercial vehicle sales. The KPMG survey showed that 40% of respondents expect sales to climb to more than four million by 2014.

The real problem for auto companies in the not-too-distant future could be the lack of roads and parking spaces and possible rising fuel prices said, Paul Blokland, director of auto research company Segment Y.

“If you look five years from now then it may be impossible for people to use their cars or park their cars,” he said. “That will be more of an issue than capacity.”

Monsoon Session: Much Ado About Nothing

The Monsoon Session of Parliament concluded yesterday. This session was all about numbers, and percentages: 33 per cent reservation for women, 300 per cent salary hike for MPs across the board, and so on. Considering the hue and cry they made when this bill was under discussion, one does expect better performance from them in the Parliament. A look at these numbers proves the fact that our MPs are hardly bothered about discussing issues that affect us.

As the session comes to an end, we share some more numbers that might be equally relevant, as a yardstick to measure the performance of the “servants of the people”:

1.  55 per cent of the question hour in Lok Sabha and 44 per cent in the Rajya Sabha were lost due to disruptions. What this really means is that the majority of time when our MPs are supposed to raise issues of local and national concern was spent behaving like spoilt children, throwing tantrums, and walking out of the house. Relevant to note in context is the cost of this misbehavior: Rs 20,000 per minute, according to this story.

2.  The Question Hour was a major disaster. Only 10 per cent of starred questions were answered. This is a direct corollary of point one — since the MPs were so busy misbehaving, 90 out of every hundred questions asked during the time allotted to question-and-answer exercises went unanswered. Keep this in mind next time you are confronted by an issue of concern to you, and wonder what your MP is doing about it. Either he is not asking the question, or if he is, then no one is answering it.

3.  64 MPs did not even bother to show up for a single hour of a single day of the monsoon session — with an attendance record like that, you wouldn’t be allowed to write your school exam. Also, your company would have handed over the pink slip by now.

4.  The Indian National Congress, the party leading the government, saw 34 per cent of its MPs participating in the debates relating to the laws they were trying to pass — in other words, 66 per cent of Congress MPs did not bother to attend. The main opposition party, the BJP, did even worse — only 24 percent, that is, one in four BJP MPs, bothered to debate the laws the government sought to pass.

5.  Considering the fuss about reservations for women in Parliament, the performance of women members tells a story. While women currently constitute 11 per cent of the total strength of the Lok Sabha, only 8 per cent of women MPs bothered to attend debates. Incidentally, in a government that is essentially a gerontocracy [average age of Cabinet -= 64] our hope is supposed to lie in the “younger” MPs — defined as age 40 or less. In this category, which comprises 13 per cent of the Lok Sabha, only 8 per cent participated in the various debates, thus matching the performance of the largely non-performing women. On the good side, young MPs did ask a lot of questions — 13 per cent of the total questions asked came from them. Of course, considering point 2 above, all of their activity was of little use anyway, since not too many questions were answered during this session.

6.  What is really startling is 47% of the bills that were introduced in the parliament were passed in just 2 hours. And the most debated N-bill saw participation from only 20 MPs.

Apart from this, the Nuclear Liability Bill and the Direct Code Tax bill that were introduced are yet to be cleared. The Direct Tax Code will replace the Income Tax Act, and will ring in many changes in personal and corporate taxation. It will come into effect starting April 1, 2012.