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It is a peculiar real-estate sale, an airport is up for sale in south India. Yes, the Sri Sathya Sai Airport, sited in Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, has been put up for sale. The airport’s owner, Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, which manages the religious and philanthropic assets and work of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, has invited global bids for the same.

The base price has been fixed at Rs.600 crore. The prime reason for the existence of the airport was to enable devotees of Sri Sathya Sai Baba to easily visit his ashram - Prashanthi Nilayam at Puttaparthy. Now, that the Bangalore International Airport is coming up at Devanahalli, only 70 km away this airport can be used as a getaway to feed the southern sector and the trust feels that this should be done by a professional entity.

In a recent court judgement America proved itself once again that it wont tolerate any racism in the country. An engineer of Indian origin who was fired by her employer, a multi-billion dollar corporate, after she complained of her senior’s racist conduct, was awarded US$ 5.5 million by a San Francisco federal jury.

The individual in the eye of the storm is Kiran Pande, a Ph.D in petroleum engineering from Stanford University. Pande was employed by petroleum behemoth Chevron, in its research unit from 1989-2003. The jury found Chevron guilty of wrongful termination and retaliation and ruled that Pande be given roughly US$ 3 million for past and future economic losses, and US$ 2.5 million in punitive damages.

Pande is a person of Indian origin and is a petroleum engineering research scholar from Stanford University. She signed up with Chevron as a research engineer in 1988. Everything was fine till 2001, when she was fired by Chevron in late 2003 after 15 years of employment with the company because she complained against her immediate superior Rex Mitchell, for having made racist and insulting comments about her.

Pande’s immediate superior Rex Mitchell, started making racist remarks and discriminating against her. Mitchell has since then been promote and is currently the company’s chief compliance officer. Pande suffered silently till March 2002, and when she couldn’t take it any more she lodged a complaint with Mitchell’s supervisor, James Johnson, about the former’s conduct or rather misconduct. But Johnson did not investigate, on the other hand he alleged that she had the choice of leaving the company or leaving the group or try to get along with Mitchell for the next 18 months.

Infuriated and hurt Pande lodged a formal complaint against Mitchell with a company ombudsman and in United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

After a three-week trial, the court examined the incidents that occurred between September 2000 and December 2003 and conducted its inquriries. At the end of the trial the jury found that Chevron retaliated against Pande after she complained about discrimination and fired her for reasons that violated a public policy and hence the company had to pay damages to Pande.

This is one of the pioneering balanced judgements which are reinforcing to the world that the era of racism is over and now everyone irrespective of their colour, caste, creed, religion or nationality is equal in front of law and humanity. A concept that is yet to sink in, into the minds of Indian citizenry where people are fighting for backward, scheduled caste/ tribe status on one hand and continue to suffer discrimination based on caste of birth on the other.

It is time Indian judiciary started recognising these incidents and penalising the guilty so as to create an equitable society in the country.

Stanley O’Neal the infamous CEO of Merrill Lynch, under whom the company faced huge losses has announced his retirement on Oct 30. The company’s board announced that O’Neal would give up his chief executive and chairman’s posts following Merrill’s announcement last week that it is going for an $8.4 billion write-down.

The company board has elected director Alberto Cribiore as interim chairman and he would search for the company’s next CEO. The front-runners for the post include Laurence Fink, chief executive of investment manager BlackRock and John Thain, chief executive of NYSE Euronext.

However, a new CEO could not set Merrill Lynch’s house in order easily. It will be a daunting task of managing the huge losses the company underwent under O’Neal, specially whether the firm is still willing and is able to engage in high risk, high reward proprietary trading.

O’Neal had shifted the focus of the firm from its traditional brokerage business to proprietary trading on the lines of rival firms Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. The method worked for a while with net income rising to $7.5 billion in 2006 from $1.7 billion in 2002. However, credit crunch soon hit the firm with credit crunch hitting the bottom at $9.7 billion in the second quarter of 2007 up from $8.2 billion in the second quarter of 2006.

Analysts feel that Merrill will never be able to match the huge returns garnered by Goldman Sachs from propriety trading. It will now have to rely mainly on its retail brokerage business where it is the largest in the US.

Source:business week
Image:portfolio.com

The Indian Institutes of Management are globally renowned as transformers of bright young students into enterprising adults capable of promoting, running and leading their businesses to success at world level. There have been several examples of IIM Alumni who have succeeded in India and abroad. Graduating students from IIMs often find themselves being offered multiple job postings at top-dollar salaries. While most students opt for such high-profile placements there are few who go ahead and promote their own enterprises.

Here are four young alumni from the highly rated Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) who passed out in 2007 and promoted their own dotcom company who are returning to the campus, this time to recruit. When they rejected their placement offerings of Rs.80 lakh - one crore salary packages people were surprised, but the team was confident of breaking out into the market and making it big. And now the proof of the pudding is in the fact that they are back in the campus recruiting. They want highly talented, enthusiastic and hardworking business savvy IIM-A grads to take their company to new heights.

The quartet include Vishal Prabhukhanolkar, Bhusan Davir, Vineeta Singh and Debashish Chakravarty who grouped together to promote ‘ten-a-day’, an online website which offers coaching for the CAT examination, the gateway to the IIMs and several other B-Schools in India. The venture operational online @ www.tenaday.co.in, has attracted over 22,000 fully registered users in just a year since promotion. According to the promoters the ventue needs more heads to make it big and none but IIM alumni will do.

In less than a year the website has become the largest online CAT training and education preparation platform. The modus operandi of the website is simple, registered students are required to answer just 10 questions every day and generates a daily percentile rankings of the student. This is one way to monitor the students progress on a daily basis. This will enable students to know where they are lacking and work on the areas in which they are weak.

The explanations and ten questions a day are free. But the detailed analyses of the answers and rankings and advising students on the areas they need to work to succeed in CAT are charged. Fees range from Rs.210 onwards and is very affordable compared to other institutes across the country whose courses are priced anywhere between Rs.5,000-14,000 for similar services.

The annual CAT entrance test is written by nearly two lakh students every year. This number is poised to grow to six lakh in the next three years and sounds fantastic business opportunity for those who offer quality and effective training to students desirous of getting the coveted IIM seats.

The Beijing Olympics might still be some months away but the controversy over broadcasting rights have already started to crop up. Such controversies are not that uncommon in a global market where lucrative sponsorship deals and collaborations with top global companies form the bulk of funds. But the strange thing is that Communist China too seems to have been caught in the trap.

In 2005, Sohu lashed out a reported $30 million for the rights to set up the Games website for the Beijing Olympics organizing committee and to use the logo of the event. That multi-million pouring out came as a huge surprise in a country where the media usually serves rather than challenge the government, where human rights are still a matter of debate and where the Communist government is the ultimate decider of everything.

Now two years down the line, the financial tug-of-wag has raised its ugly head in the fastest growing economy in the world. The Chinese portal company now alleges that along with the website and logo rights, it procured the exclusive rights to host all the advertising by Beijing Games sponsors bearing the official logo.

The entire catalogue of Napster will be soon available for download over the AT&T network. The two companies have expanded their existing partnership, which would see more than 5 million full-tracks currently in Napster’s library being made available for over the air downloads, sometimes in mid-November.

European regulators declared on Monday that they have secured an agreement with Microsoft that will bring the company into compliance with the European Commission’s 2004 ruling on the company’s anticompetitive practices.

Pressure had been mounting up on Microsoft to arrive at an agreement with the Commission since September, when a European court ruled in the favour of the regulators on important issues in their case against the company.

The agreement recognises three changes in Microsoft business practices that will bring the firm into compliance: competing software developers will be able to access and use Microsoft’s interoperability information; royalties for use of the interoperability information will be reduced to a nominal payment of 10,000 euros ($14,348); and royalties for a worldwide license for use of its product, including patents, will be reduced to 0.4 percent from 5.95 percent.

Image: akamai

A growing number of industries based in India are realizing the importance of linking up with educational institutions and sponsoring their academic and research activities. In all first world economies, it is not the government that funds universities and institutions of tertiary education but the ‘industry’.

Businesses fund research and academic activities and ensure that college graduates are employable and become productive from day one at workplaces.

On October 12, software giant Microsoft Corporation’s Indian research operations Microsoft Research announced its decision to enter into a collaborative sponsored research programme with Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The aim of the research project is to enhance computational power in scientific and engineering investigations.

Sony has finally sealed the deal with it’s rival Toshiba over the chip manufacturing plant. The manufacturing plant located in Western Japan (Nagasaki), will be handed over to Toshiba soon enough. The production facility makes graphics chips for the Playstation 3 game console.

Nokia is expanding its business by acquiring the world’s leading provider of mapping software, Navteq. Nokia announced that the company is ready to but Navteq for about US$8.1 billion in cash.