India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by around 8.6% during the year-ending March 2011, while per capital income — an indicator of how rich the citizens are — grew by 6.7% to Rs 3,000 per month per person, according to government’s quick estimates. GDP and per-capita income had grown by 8% and 6.1% during the […]
After sitting on the fence for three years, BBC Worldwide, one of the biggest English entertainment player in the world has decided to launch an India-specific channel. The $1 billion commercial arm of the non-profit British Broadcasting Corporation had added an India entertainment channel to the 41 global ones it already runs. An interview with […]
The year gone by was a gloomy year for the global outsourcing industry when value of new contracts slipped 30%, according to TPI, the largest sourcing data and advisory firm in the world. The biggest fall was witnessed in the BPO space which made up for around 22% of the total publicly disclosed deals tracked […]
Numbers released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India have shown that while many of the new operators have trouble maintaining their newly acquired customers, they have successfully eroded the shares of old operators. The data showed that the new operators faced considerable difficulty in holding on to their new customers. According to the data, […]
World’s biggest anti-virus firm Symantec has warned Indians not to be tricked by new ‘World Cup’ themed viruses. The firm, which routinely monitors trends of how viruses and other ‘malware’ spread, said trick emails urging cricket fans to sign up for free World Cup tickets are best ignored. “One scam that the Symantec Probe Network […]
US politician and Obama’s first ambassador Timothy Roemer, a keen observer of demographic trends, rather dramatically describes the changes taking place in the Indian state of Punjab due to immigration from Eastern India and Bangladesh. Based on his interaction with social and political leaders from the state, Roemer also noted that the Islamic religion — […]
US carrier Sprint Nextel filed a suit rivals against AT&T and the Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile against the former’s bid to acquire the latter on that it would create a ‘duopoly.’ It has come six days after the U.S. Department of Justice today moved to block AT&T Corporation’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA which opposed it […]
Home Minister P Chidambaram’s assent to the formation of a Telangana state in December 2009 showed the Congress party as “weak and feeble.. easily bullied and intimidated by threats,” the then US ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer wrote to Washington on the next day. The Congress Party came was being portrayed as “weak and spineless, […]
MTS India said it has become the first operator in the World to launch a mobile network based on the Phase II of the CDMA EV-DO (Revision B) technology. While that may sound like a lot of gobbledygook to many consumers, what it means is that the speed on the CDMA network can now hit […]
Idea Cellular, the telecom operator part of the Aditya Birla group, has cut its 3G data rates across the country, five months after it launched such services. NOTE: Most of these plans have been withdrawn as of 23 May 2012 While the launch tariffs were in line with the tariffs charged by its main competition […]
Barely a month after Reliance Communications broke the Rs 15,000 price-barrier for a branded 3G tablet in India, Spice Mobile has mounted a strong challenge to the company with its new Spice Mi-720 tablet. Though Bharti group firm Beetel had become the second prominent brand two weeks ago to to enter this category with its […]
While it has always been known that talks between Chinese and US officials are not always cordial, the stormy nature of some of these meetings is revealed in cable written by US embassy in Beijing in October 2007. The cable described the unusually aggressive and blunt feedback from the then Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi […]
The Shiva Sena, one of NDA’s biggest allies and a major player in Maharashtra, has declared its full support to the three demands raised by Anna Hazare. Anant Geete, Shiv Sena MP from Raigarh in Maharashtra, expressed his party’s “total support” to the three points — bringing all bureaucrats under Lokpal, installing a citizen’s charter […]
In this age of super-charged discussions and rallies against corruption, it is perhaps instructive to look back five years when scams were not the stuff of daily news. Hearing the innovative ways in which people rationalized corruption, the then US Consul for Chennai David Hopper wondered if Indians really objected to it at a deep […]
The most impassioned speech in the Lokpal debate in the Lok Sabha today was made by the young parliamentarian from the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Jayant Chaudhary. Chaudhary, the grandson of former Prime Minister Charan Singh and the son of Ajit Singh, was the only parliamentarian to go against the general trend of criticising Anna […]
The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) tried to prevent the emergence of Nepal as a republic in 2008 as it wanted to retain it as the World’s last ‘Hindu Kingdom’, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) felt. Krishna Mahara, a member of the Maoist Central Committee of Nepal expressed the fear in a letter written to […]
Suspicion about “Love Jihad” — an alleged Islamist plot to increase the share of Muslims in the population by incentivizing Muslim men to marry outside the community — is probably the result of the overall paranoia and religious tension in South India, US Consul General Andrew Simkin told his government in February last year. However, […]
Is the famed ‘Kerala Model’ of development — characterized by high government spending on health and education — unsustainable in the long run? Even the state’s then ruling Communists were not sure it was, according to a detailed report of a visit by US officials to the South Indian state in late 2007. The visit […]
Just days after Twitter indicated its interest in the search market, the messaging platform is now spreading its wings towards the social networking scene. Under a pilot project covering a small (lucky) portion of its user-base, it has introduced two new ‘tabs’ that increasingly turns the Twitter experience more ‘Facebookish’. The tabs, that replace the […]
Two German mountaineers missing in Afghanistan since last week found to be killed in the Salang Pass near the capital Kabul. Though the Interior Ministry Spokesperson, Sidiq Sediqi, has not yet confirmed the report, the Governor of the Parwan province,Abdul Basir Salangi, talking to the RTN confirmed the death. He said that the bodies have […]
