B4U India

Airtel launches mobile services in Lakshadweep

Sat, 24 May 2008 06:37:00 -0400

Airtel has taken yet another technological leap to provide mobile services at Lakshadweep Islands and becomes the first private mobile service operator to start functioning in the Islands.

Mobile services have been made available to the entire population in Kavaratti, Agatti and Bangaram Islands.

Bharti Airtel Limited Director Deepak Mehrotra said: "We are committed to bringing world-class services to customers and adding value to communities and businesses on the Island. Opening up the mobile opportunity for people in Lakshadweep, Airtel is committed to driving affordability and availability that can spur the uptake of mobile telephony in the Islands."

Initially, Airtel will provide both prepaid and postpaid services in three Islands viz Kavaratti, Agatti and Bangaram.

Airtel has set up two towers in Kavaratti and one each in Agatti and Bangaram. The entire population of these three Islands can now avail Airtel Mobile Service.

Company's Chief Operating Officer Vikas Singh said, "We are extremely delighted at being given the opportunity to provide mobile services in Lakshadweep Islands. Bharti has been at the forefront of the telecom growth story in India, which is one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world. We are committed to providing world-class telecom services to our customers in Lakshadweep."

State-of-the-art 2.5 G Enhanced Response (ER) network on an 1800 MHz spectrum managed by Ericsson, world leaders in mobile phone and telecom infrastructure.

Bharti Airtel, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is India's leading integrated telecom services provider with an aggregate of 64.26 million customers as of end of March 2008, consisting of 61.98 million mobile customers.

Bharti Airtel has been rated among the best performing companies in the world in the Business Week IT 100 list 2007.

The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. (ANI)

Skills imperative to be addressed through UK-India partnership

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:50:00 -0400

UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) in collaboration with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is organising a seminar on “Addressing the Skills Imperative through the UK-India Partnership” to be held at the British Council, New Delhi on May 27.

D. Purandeswari, Minister of State for Human Resource Development would deliver the inaugural address and Bill Rammell, UK Minister of State, Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education will deliver the keynote address.

The seminar aims to bring forth macro skills issues in India with specific focus on financial services, creative industries and health sector. It will also provide a platform to the UK sectoral councils and skills academies to share best practices.

The Indian speakers include Dr. Naresh Trehan, Chairman. CII Task Force on Rural Health and Senior Cardiovascular Surgeon, Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals and Chairman Medicity, Gurgaon; Amit Bhatia, Founder and CEO, ASPIRE; Dr. Rakesh Khurana, Chairman, Knowledge Network India Pvt Ltd; Anand Kapoor, Director Image Foundry; Deepak Bhandari, Chairman and Managing Director, EPOS Health (India) Pvt. Ltd, Ravi Pillai Country Director, City and Guilds (South Asia) and Dr. Shubnum Singh, Chief Medical Affairs, Max Health Care Limited

The UK speakers include Sylvia Perrins, National Director of National Skills Academy for Financial Services; Tom Bewick, Chief Executive, Creative and Cultural Skills Council and Brian Payne, Executive Director, UK Networks, Skills for Health Council.

CII – UKIERI and IMACS (Knowledge Partner) shall also launch the Study on the Skill Gaps in these sectors. The seminar is the first step towards global strengthening partnerships for skills development.

The output of the seminar will be shared with the relevant stakeholders and will contribute towards defining a systematic approach to address issues within the Indian skills value chain. (ANI)

Inflation will be high for another four months: Rangarajan

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:49:00 -0400

The Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council on Friday expressed confidence that inflation will dip to 5.5 per cent by the end of current fiscal, although it will remain high for another four months.

"As it stands now, for another four months, inflation will remain high even though it would show a tendency to decline at around 6 per cent. Inflation may reach even 5.5 per cent by end of this fiscal," C Rangarajan ,Chairman of the Council said in a seminar on the 13th Finance Commission.

There is a limit to oil bonds for compensating losses for Public Sector oil marketing companies, due to rising global crude prices .Some adjustment in the retail prices is called for at some particular point, he added .

Terming industrial growth of three per cent in March 2008, as a 'blip', he was hopeful of high industrial production in subsequent months and said that economy could expand by around 8 per cent in the current fiscal.

"We still think the overall growth rate during 2008-09 could be around close to 8 per cent. Accordingly, industrial production will be little higher than that," he said. (ANI)

Gender stereotypes influence intent to pursue entrepreneurial careers

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:48:00 -0400

When it comes to business, only the aggressive, risk-taking alpha male can expect to succeed. The statement might sound sexist but according to a new research, it represents a commonly held gender stereotype, which influences whether or not men and women decide to pursue entrepreneurship as a viable career option.

According to a University of Missouri researcher, perception may limit both men and women in the decision to become entrepreneurs.

“Perception may limit both men and women in the decision to become entrepreneurs,” said Daniel Turban, professor and chair of the Department of Management in the Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business.

“One sex is not inherently more qualified than the other; unfortunately, the underlying societal stereotypes associating entrepreneurship with masculine characteristics may influence people’s intentions to pursue entrepreneurial careers.

An interesting result of our study is that both men and women reported similar intentions when entrepreneurship was presented as gender neutral. This suggests that common gender stereotypes can be nullified,” Turban added.

Although entrepreneurship is a masculine-stereotyped domain, Turban said many of the characteristics believed to be important to entrepreneurial success also are traditionally feminine.

For example, caring and nurturing, building relationships with others, and humility are typically attributed to females, but also characterize good entrepreneurship.

In the research, the team asked undergraduate business students to read mock news articles about entrepreneurship, answer a comprehensive question, and complete a scale about entrepreneurial intentions.

In the control article, there was no mention of gender or gender differences in entrepreneurship. In other articles, the masculine and feminine stereotypes were subtly presented or directly emphasized.

“When the masculine stereotype of entrepreneurship was subtly presented, men had higher entrepreneurial intentions than women, and both men and women were similar to the control group. Those results suggest that entrepreneurship is typically stereotyped as a masculine career option,” Turban said.

“However, when masculine characteristics were strongly linked with entrepreneurship, a condition people might expect to favor men, we found that women had higher entrepreneurial intention scores while men had lower,” Turban added.

Turban said one reason for the persistence of gender differences in male-type careers, like entrepreneurship, may be that common masculine stereotypes associated with this role are not openly discussed in society. Men and women are subconsciously influenced by widely held stereotypes. Turban said that if the goal is to attract more women to entrepreneurship, it may be more desirable to describe entrepreneurship as gender neutral.

The study, “The Effect of Gender Stereotype Activation on Entrepreneurial Intentions,” will be published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. (ANI)

Bird breeders demand industry status in Kolkata

Thu, 22 May 2008 09:54:00 -0400

Thousands of colourful exotic birds are being bred by over 30,000 breeders across West Bengal.

The bird business is definitely booming. From parakeets of different hues like yellow, blue, ash, white, grey-black or violet, foreign birds are finding a huge market in India.

However, these breeders, who are successfully running this business for almost three decades, are presently fighting a battle with the Government to get recognition as an industry.

A breeder from Uttarpara in Hooghly district, Pranabesh Mukherjee said, “Its illegal to keep Indian birds as pets according to the Wildlife Protection Act. However, there is no law preventing breeding and trade of foreign exotic birds in India.”

“But no government campaign against keeping birds in cages make this distinction. The government advertisements give the impression that no birds can be kept as pets,” Mukherjee said, added that this often led to harassment by police during transportation of the foreign birds.

Ratan Kumar Mitra, another breeder said, “The foreign birds are finding large markets here because of the sheer variety in colour. Smaller birds like the budgerigars, finch, the hugely popular lovebirds, parakeets and even larger ones like Rosella have undergone colour mutation abroad, through human intervention.”

The birds are bred in captivity by the breeders here who set up nesting boxes or nesting pots in the cages of the breeding pair.

A Rosella breeding pair may deliver two or three lots of babies, each lot having at least five to six baby birds. Eight breeding pairs can make up to Rs two lakh on an average per year.

The birds bred in Bengal are sold across the country, from Uttar Pradesh to Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu to Rajasthan, Orissa to Assam.

The weather conditions here can be a problem at times as these birds originally belong to Africa, Australia, the West Indies and other Islands across the world, but being bred in captivity, their adaptability is much better.

For many in rural areas, the exotic bird breeding business is yielding huge profits in comparison to poultry or cattle, but the government’s ambiguous stand is creating problems for the breeders.

Pronab Mitra, who has founded an organization ‘Bird Breeders and Lovers’ Association of Kolkata’, said, “In states like Tamil Nadu and Delhi, huge breeding farms have been set up. But in Bengal, which probably has the largest number of small-scale breeders, the government has done nothing to promote the industry or even to allow the breeders to carry on working peacefully.”

The breeders’ say even the business of rearing exotic fishes has found official sanction, but there is lot of confusion and wrong propaganda regarding breeding and trade of exotic birds.

They claim that because of availability of these colourful exotic birds, pet lovers are now not buying Indian birds like Tia and Chandana, bringing down the illegal trade in Indian birds and helping in their protection.

The government cannot even make an argument against breeding birds in cages. Experiments are on to rear vultures in cages after facing extinction in the wild.

The exotic bird business has thrived against all odds. It requires little investment but yields good profit.

Most breeders run this as a side business with help from their families in caring for the birds.

A lit bit a support in the proper direction could generate self-employment to thousands more in the future. (ANI)