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| Tuesday, May 16, 2000, Chandigarh, India  
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Operators reject
government's view on revenue sharing
Mohali institute
session from September LIC, IDBI to get stake in Power Trading Corporation
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Bio-technology to shape 2nd revolution Bank of Punjab in Mastercard tie-up Institute to train
insurance agents
Operators reject
government's view on revenue
sharing NEW DELHI, May 15 (PTI) — Private cellular operators today rejected outright the idea of revenue sharing to be treated as a vehicle for raising budgetary resources for the Union Government saying it would go against the interests of consumers. “The Government can increase resources in an otherwise healthy telecom sector through interconnection charges, sales tax on handsets, services tax, import duties and revenues from fixed line to mobile service (and vice-versa),” T.V. Ramachandran, Director General of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said. Participating at an open house discussion on issues relating to cellular mobile service organised by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Ramachandran said, “TRAI is neither obliged nor suited to undertake such an issue as it is beyond the scope of its sectoral mandate.” TRAI Chairman M.S. Verma said that the final recommendation with regard to cellular mobile services in areas of revenue sharing percentage, conditions for the third operator’s entry and licence conditions would be submitted within a few weeks. The regulator has invited comments from subscribers, operators and bodies till May 22. Verma said that it was necessary to hold an open-house discussion in view of the changed scenario in terms of reduction of Customs duty on hand sets, reduced tariff rates and in view of clear indication that capital investment would be lower. On the issue of determining revenue sharing percentage, some of the operators argued for only 5 per cent of the revenue to be shared with the Government saying higher percentage would translate into higher tariffs. Verma promised “neuteral and balanced” views with regard to issues relating to the telecom sector. “We would consult all parties before taking a final view with regard to any issue,” Verma told reporters after the open house discussion. On a proposal that TRAI should issue “tentative recommendations” and invite comments on them before giving the final verdict, Verma said that TRAI would take a view on the proposal and added that “the process is consultative and not participative.” Asked about TRAI’s views on the Calling Party Pays (CPP) regime, Verma refused to comment and said that the issue was not on the agenda immediately. He, however, said that the final recommendations with regard to the opening up of national long distance telephony would be submitted within few days. |
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NEW DELHI, May 15 (PTI) — Esconet, wholly-owned subsidiary of Escorts Limited, today announced a
B2B marketplace portal ‘automatrixindia.com’ in partnership with net market developer Vistaar and e-business solutions provider i2
technologies. The vertical portal, with equity capital of Rs 25 crore, will initially trade in
agro-machinery of Escorts Limited and would be launched in the third quarter of this year, a senior Escorts official told reporters here. UNI adds: The Escorts Group has decided to sell off its entire holding in Escorts Communications Limited (ECL) to Korean Chaebol
It's Communication Arm — IG Information and Communication Limited (IGIC) — over the next three months,
ECL CEO Rajan Swaroop said. “We have decided to exit the venture and just concentrate on our other two telecom businesses —Hughes Escort Communications Limited (HECL) and Escotel,’’ Mr Swaroop told
UNI here. Escorts Yamaha Motor Limited (EYML) is being rechristened Yamaha Motors Escorts Limited following Escorts Group’s decision to sell off 24 per cent stake in the motorcycle making joint venture to its Japanese partner Yamaha Motor Company (YMC). The Board of Directors of EYML will meet on May 26 to approve the new name. “We will be handing over the entire business and management to Yamaha on May 26,” Escorts Group Chairman Rajan Nanda told UNI. The existing Board of Directors would also resign that day and a new board would be constituted. “Even I am not aware of the new board structure, so I cannot give any details on the same now,” he added. |
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Mohali institute
session from September CHANDIGARH, May 15 — Canadian Institute of Computer Sciences and Technology (CICST), which has come up in Mohali’s Phase I, will begin its first session in September with 150 students. The admission is through an entrance test scheduled for May 29. Set up by WWICS in partnership with Georgian College of Canada, the institute offers a three-year diploma course to plus two students with mathematics. The charges — the tuition fee of Rs 1.5 lakh and other expenses of Rs 50,000 or so a year — are claimed to be “25 per cent of the cost of study in Canada.” Giving this information at a press conference here today, Mr Tom Morrisey, Project Director from Georgian College, and Col. B.S. Sandhu, CMD, WWICS, said the CICST diploma of North American standards is recognised worldwide and job placement, though not guaranteed, is no problem. Students have the option to complete the final year in Georgian College, Canada said Mr Tom Morrisey, who is here to conduct the test and recruit the faculty, said a successful student as Computer Programmer Analyst can expect a salary of Canadian $ 5,000 (Rs 1.50 lakh). Mr Davinder Sandhu of WWICS said the Mohali campus is equipped with state-of-art facilities, including computer labs and an audio visual centre, and also offers cooperative programmes to enable students to work while they learn.
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LIC, IDBI to get stake in Power Trading Corporation NEW DELHI, May 15 (PTI) — Financial institutions including IDBI, IDFC and LIC will take 40 per cent stake in Power Trading Corporation, a company promoted by Central Power Utilities for inter-region bulk trading of electricity. LIC and IDFC have agreed to pick up stake worth Rs 5 crore each while IDBI has evinced interest to take higher equity, PTC Chief R.K. Madan said today adding that the corporation was seeking a Rs 16 crore equity investment from the financial institutions this year. “PTC will increase its equity base to Rs 40 crore this financial year to be able to absorb payment defaults of beneficiaries,” he told reporters while pointing out that paid up capital of the corporation now was Rs 6 crore. The remaining Rs 18 crore would come from the promoters — Power Grid Corporation (PGCIL), National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) and Power Finance Corporation (PFC). “We are a zero debt company now but we will take recourse to borrowing from next year onwards to meet our infrastructure needs,” he said while indicating that PTC would require about Rs 800 crore investment by the year 2008. Eventually the company would raise debts to meet up to 60 per cent of fund requirement while the remaining 40 per cent would come through equity route over the next 8 years, Madan said. PTC earned a revenue of Rs 8 crore in the first year of its operations and is expecting to touch Rs 230 crore in the current financial year. “PTC will also focus raising its share in the quantum of power traded in the country from the present 5 per cent to 20 per cent within the next eight years,” Madan said. PTC will handle about 40,000 million units of energy by 2008, he said. Madan said that since PTC was entering into long term contract of 25 to 30 years with the developers and beneficiaries it would not be threatened by any developers entering into direct sale of power. “We are in the process of creating a market trading mechanism for the country as it exists in the West and since all our agreements are for a long period of time we will remain in business for a long time,” he said. PTC will invest more than Rs 50 crore on infrastructure over the next five years for setting up a system control and data acquisition network to do spot trading and assess areas where power is surplus, he said. For trading of power with the neighbouring countries, Madan said that PTC was trading in surplus power from 336 MW Chukha Hydro Power Project in Bhutan and anticipated that Nepal would be able to supply about 150 MW power by December. Power Grid Corporation holds a majority 30 per cent stake in PTC while PFC and NTPC hold 15 per cent stake each, he said.
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Bio-technology to shape 2nd revolution NEW DELHI, May 15 — Bio-technology should be extensively used to produce genetically-modified food to bring about second generation revolution in farms, a study said. Bio-technology techniques must be done in tandem with making grey areas green, for which major support to rainfed areas, especially in eastern and arid peninsular India is essential, said a paper “challenges of food security and export of agricultural products,” brought out by Assocham. Indicating unsettling trends in agricultural growth and employment in the 90s as compared to the 80s, the paper said these trends are characterised by sluggish reduction in rural poverty in the 90s, lower growth of real wages in rural areas; slowdown in the growth of rural non-farm employment; worsening of the quality of employment; lower agriculture growth; increase in regional disparities in per capita income and per capita consumption; faster increase in food prices; and average buffer stock levels being much higher than the optimal in the 1990s. The paper said in view of the emerging prospects, there is need for a relook at the priorities of Indian public agricultural research system. India is currently investing only about 0.3 per cent of agricultural GDP to agricultural research, as against 0.7 per cent in the developing countries. Investment in research, therefore, needs to be increased to be least one per cent of agricultural GDP in the coming years. Private sector research too is important and needs to be given a fillip. Export of agricultural commodities merit special attention by the government since it holds the greatest potential for raising farm incomes, tackling unemployment and earning foreign exchange. Higher growth in agricultural exports can be achieved through enhanced infrastructure support and building up a conducive policy environment. A number of policy changes are needed to make agricultural exports more viable. These include market determined exchange rate policy, lowering of import duties on capital goods particularly for food processing industries as well as easier availability of credit. Under WTO stipulations, the developed countries have to reduce protection to their agriculture. This gives an opportunity for Indian farmers to compete in the international market. While framing policies on trade, food security aspect should be taken into account, the paper added. |
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Bank of Punjab in Mastercard tie-up CHANDIGARH, May 15 — Bank of Punjab has joined the Mastercard Global ATM network which has 5,25,000 online ATMs operating worldwide, including 370 ATMs operational in 46 cities of India. With this customers of Bank of Punjab and Indian Mastercard Credit or Debit or “Cirrus” card holders will be able to use the ATM network of Bank of Punjab. In Delhi the bank plans to install 50 to 75 ATMs including the
satellite towns of Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad. Apart from installing the ATMs at all the Bank of Punjab branches, the bank will also open off-site ATM centres which will have facilities like interactive kiosks, phone banking, Internet banking and customers will be able to do basic transactions from any of ATM centres. Off-site ATMs would be installed at strategic locations, market places, departmental stores, hospitals, railway stations, airports, inter state bus terminals and petrol pumps. |
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Indian owns a goldmine NEW YORK, May 15 —Terming him the Einstein of legacy systems, reputed online magazine Red Herring says Indian American Vivek Wadhwa, CEO of Relativity Technologies, has the edge in the field of transforming old systems to deal with new computers. Decades of credit histories, insurance claims, medical data and property records are stored in outdated computer languages like Cobol and Fortran, Red Herring magazine points out. This has to be converted to new Web-oriented languages like Extensible Markup Language (XML), Java, Visual Basic, and C++. As companies struggle to convert manually (at $6 to $22 per line) and others to hire companies at great costs, Relativity’s RescueWare, developed by a team of former Russian KGB agents, claims it can do it at half the cost. Wadhwa has received significant attention and many kudos over the last six months as the Y2K problem was put in the past and companies began to channel resources to other areas. Forbes Magazine named him among the leaders of tomorrow who will be trailblazers in the year to come in its December 30, 1999, issue and said Wadhwa is sitting on the next technology gold mine. Born in Delhi and brought up all over the world, because his father was in the Indian Foreign Service, Wadhwa, came to New York in 1980 from Australia. He did not go back because his wife, Tavinder, whom he met and married here, did not want to settle down under. The Research Triangle-based Relativity has lots of business to tackle as one estimate by the Gartner group research firm maintains there are some 10,000 mainframes worldwide that contain 200 billion lines of Cobol code and that the market for such legacy systems integration software runs to about $120 billion. RescueWare automatically rewrites Cobol. Relativity’s competitors include International Integration (or I-Cube), Tibco (another Indian American company) and Iona Technologies. But Red Herring notes Relativity has more than just a head start. The company expects to post profits this year after just three years of operation and its customers include Charles Schwab, Shell, the U.S. Air Force and the Russian systems integrator Lanit Holding. It has also come to the attention of top technology investors, raising $12 million from Intel, Noro-Moseley Partners and the Wakefield group, all of which could mean high payoffs as Relativity moves towards an initial public offering. — IANS
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Institute to train
insurance agents NEW DELHI, May 15 — A foundation for research, training and education in insurance has been jointly set up by FICCI and ING, a leading insurance company based in the Netherlands. The initiative is aimed to groom a well qualified band of agents, brokers and actuaries in India. Since the nationalisation of the insurance sector, there was no concerted effort to train people in the insurance related activities, a release said. Most of the actuaries working in India migrated to other countries. With the opening up of the insurance sector, India requires a sizeable number of well trained actuaries to deal with complex nature of computation for risk covers in the insurance sector. The objectives of the foundation are to train and educate people at different levels in all aspects of management in the business of risk coverage, including life and non-life insurance and re-insurance, and to meet the challenges in a free competitive market.
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Glenmark Pharma net up 72 pc Infosys tie-up with Quintessent Ashok Leyland enters e-commerce Hikal Chem declares 1:1 bonus IOC declares 40 pc interim
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Noida airport? Turmeric patent World card Rs 500 note Kshitij Int |
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