Bits & bytes
Mouthful of opportunity
Tooth tourism pushes up demand for dental courses

WITH dental implant technology gaining ground in India, dental tourism is fast turning into a money spinner, a top official of the American Academy of Implant Dentistry (AAID) said recently.

The number of foreigners undergoing dental treatment in India is expected to grow to five to eight per cent from the current figure of 0.5 per cent in the next five years, Academy director Shankar Iyer told newsmen in Chennai.

He said the AAID has been offering a 10-month course on dental implantation in India for the past three years.

Referring to the course, dental surgeon Vijailakshmi Acharya said the AAID-run programmes are becoming popular among dentists. She said the course is being offered so that dental implantation could be made available more extensively at a lower cost. The entire course costs around Rs 2.75 lakh.

The potential is immense because India offers dental implantation at a fraction of what it costs in the US and other advanced countries. "In fact, it will cost one-fourth less than what it will cost in the US," he said.

Awards to gender sensitise workplace

IT software and services body Nasscom will institute awards to honour companies excelling in gender empowerment practices.

"We are hopeful that these awards will serve to showcase the Indian IT sector's focus on this area, in addition to encouraging companies to do more to attract women employees," Nasscom President Kiran Karnik said in a statement recently.

The men to women ratio in the IT industry is likely to be 65:35 by 2007 as compared to 76:24 in 2005.

Successful women leaders would act as catalysts, drawing even more talent into the workforce, Karnik said on the sidelines of Nasscom IT Women's Leadership Summit, 2006, held in Bangalore.

Job fair for differently abled

Over 1,100 differently abled persons from 13 states participated in 'EmployABILITY 2006', the third annual exclusive job fair held in Chennai recently, a CII press release said.

The fair, organised jointly by the Ability Foundation — a Chennai-based cross-disability NGO, integrating and bringing people with disablities into the mainstream, CII and the Lions Club of Padi-Shenoy Nagar, offered employment opportunities to prospective candidates in over 70 companies, including Ashok Leyland, Allsec Technologies, Hewlett Packard, and Ford India.

Candidates from as far as Arunachal Pradesh, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh, holding postgraduate, M. Phil and Ph. D degrees participated in the selection process, the press release said.

Inaugurating the fair, Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said the government would have to take some substantial steps to encourage the employment of differently-abled people.

"We intend to interact with the Ability Foundation and CII to find new ways and means to help the differenly abled," he said.

Jayashree Ravindran, President, Ability Foundation, said that compared to the past two years, this fair had attracted more non-IT companies, constituting over 66 per cent of the 70-odd companies. — PTI