After giving hope to anti-POSCO protesters by putting the project clearance on hold, environment minister Jairam Ramesh has abandoned them again, pointing out that the protestors’ resolutions did not have the requisite number of signatures. On April 15, Jairam Ramesh had announced that he intended to put the forest clearance to India’s biggest foreign investment […]
Mageia Linux, the community fork-edition of Mandriva Linux, has announced the second beta edition of its first ever Linux operating system release. The release, available for download here is the last ‘test’ release before the split-away group releases its final Linux distribution. The development has come six months after most of the senior developers of […]
India has more than the usual quantity of water in its mega dams at the end of April, according to statistics released by the Water Resources ministry. The numbers crunched by the ministry shows that at the end of April, the average water level of 81 of India’s biggest dams is around 60% higher than […]
Info Edge, the company behind Naukri.com and one of the few Indian firms to survive the dotcom bust, has announced a Rs 9 crore investment into group-buying portal mydala.com. The investment is the sixth as part of the Info Edge strategy to invest in internet start-ups. “Online deal sites have now emerged as a platform […]
India’s biggest industry body, the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) has criticized the raising of interest rate by the Reserve Bank today, pointing out that the relentless inflation is caused by factors external to India. The Reserve Bank, in charge of controlling price rise by managing the amount of money pumped into the market, raised […]
Eight international soldiers and one contractor were killed in a fight at the Kabul airport today.Some sources say that six were killed. A gunman wearing the uniform of an Afghani pilot came into an argument with soldiers of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) early in the morning around 11 o clock local time (06.30GMT) […]
Word of God Fellowship Inc, a controversial Christian evangelistic group with a global TV empire, has been given approval today to set up a fully owned Indian company to redistribute TV channels in the country. The Fellowship, led by Christian evangelist Marcus Lamb and his wife Joni Lamb were in the news four years ago […]
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has again opened the subject of interconnection charges, much to the consternation of big operators like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar etc.. Interconnect charges are paid by the mobile operator from whose network a call originates to the mobile operator on whose network it ends, i.e., on whose network […]
The French Asset Management firm Natixis Global Asset Management has sought the government of India’s approval to enter the Pension Funds management business in India. The Government’s foreign investment promotion board (FIPB) on Tuesday deferred the proposal to its next meeting. The investment by Natixis will be done ‘indirectly’ through another company, the FIPB said. […]
India’s top Patent officer, the Controller General of Patents PH Kurian has announced that India will join the Madrid System of Trademarks within one year, setting off a warning to Indian companies to ‘register it, or lose it’ as far as their brand names are concerned. India had been negotiating with the World Intellectual Property […]
Indian IT outsourcing firms, including TCS and Infosys, grew faster than their global peer to increase their share from 4.8% of the global outsourcing market in 2009 to 5.5% in 2010. As a unit, Indian outsourcing firms grew 18.9% in 2010 while globally, IT services industry grew by just 3.1%. Indian firms, however, continued to […]
According to a press release from the United States embassy in New Delhi the US Ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer, has decided to resign from his post due to “personal, professional and family considerations”. He took the responsibility in India two years ago. “When I accepted this job two years ago, I told President Obama […]
World’s top ‘track 2 diplomacy’ institution and New York-based think-tank, the East West Institute has warned of a ‘9/11 type’ of attack on the undersea cables that connect India to the rest of the world. Addressing telecom secretary R Chandrasekhar and officials of the home ministry, the founder of the 30-year-old think-tank, John Edwin Mroz, […]
After waiting in vain for state governments to get their act together on bringing government services to the Internet, the Central government has cracked the whip and brought out a draft bill to force state governments to implement e-governance programs in five years. While the original plan was to have nearly all government services available […]
We’ve all heard of newspapers coming out with April Fool’s stories, but a cable leaked by Wikileaks reveals that even the dour diplomats have a funny bone they let out once in a year. The cable, reproduced in entirety below, was authored by the American Embassy in charge Steven White on April 1, 2008 and […]
Despite the protest by a section of the populace the government has reiterated its determination to go head with the Jaitapur nuclear plant. The Chief Minister of Maharashtra,Prithviraj Chavan, after holding meeting with the Prime Minister, ruled out any rethink on the 9900 megawatt nuclear plant. He however said that the compensation package for the […]
Despite humoring the US concerns on Iran when discussing matters like nuclear proliferation, India very much continued to be a ‘behind-the-scenes’ friend to Iran and Myanmar, according to the latest US cables leaked by Wikileaks. According to the late 2006 cable sent from USA’s Finnish embassy in Helsinki, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh was very […]
Indian IT outsourcing firms, such as TCS and Infosys Technologies, may have to tweak their business plans if Forrester Research’ latest prediction on the evolution of the cloud market turns out true. While the firm has come out with one of the (if not THE) biggest projection for cloud services, albeit by 2020, it has […]
The latest release by whisleblower organization Wikileaks — prisoner stories from the Guantenamo Bay has shed light into the role played by Pakistan in training Taliban militants. Wikileaks started releasing hundreds of prisoner files from the controversial prison set up by the US after it started its attack on Afghanistan ten years ago. “Detainee attended […]
comScore, Inc., one of the top ‘web measurement’ companies, has found that the Netherlands led the world in penetration of mass messaging service twitter and the professional networking service LinkedIn. “The Netherlands is in many ways a nexus of global social networking behavior,” pointed out Mike Read, svp and managing director of comScore Europe. The […]
