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Rural India Gets Chance at Piece of Jobs Boom
BAGEPALLI, India — Under harsh fluorescent lights, dozens of heads bend over keyboards, the clattering unison of earnest typing filling the room. Monitors flicker with insurance forms, time sheets and customer service e-mail messages, tasks from far away, sent to this corner of India to be processed on the cheap.
- Region
- South Asia
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World Economic Forum India Summit to Ponder Over Social Issues
Social issues have never taken up so much corporate and CEO attention since the world wars. Income inequalities, public health, labour unrest, climate change, poverty, ethics, values, the role of business ... all that kind of thing. Suddenly, corporate social responsibility has come to acquire a brand new meaning. It’s not about the Gates Foundation any more, it’s about bankers bonuses. It’s about climate change, green technology, social justice. Developmental and beha...
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- South Asia
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B-school is India Shining
Mann Deshi Udyogini is like no other business school. Its students don’t come to the class armed with laptops, the faculty does not moonlight by writing reports for big business groups, companies don’t fall over one another to give its students jobs with fat salaries. In fact, it does not even have campus recruitments. Yet, its strike rate in producing successful businessmen - no, make it businesswomen - is perhaps better than any other B-school. Since inception in 2006, it...
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- South Asia
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World?s Top Biz Thinker Reflects on Global Impact of His Work
With $18 in his pocket, local resident C.K. Prahalad emigrated from India 32 years ago accompanied by his wife and their two young children. $18 was the amount of money he was allowed to take out of India at the time due to government currency restrictions. Fortunately, when he arrived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he had a couple of other things going for him. He had a doctorate in business administration from Harvard Business School that he had earned two years earlier and he ha...
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- South Asia
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Apollo Hospitals: ’We Are Trying to Build 10 Hospitals Every Year’
Apollo Hospitals, the country’s largest healthcare chain, wants to add 10 hospitals a year for providing services to the population at the bottom of the pyramid. The aim is to reach out to a billion people in a decade. In an interview with Joe C Mathew, Apollo Hospitals Executive Chairman Prathap C Reddy says the challenge is not in the funding, but in finding the human resources. Excerpts: Apollo is the first and only hospital in the country to have a stamp bearing its name...
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- South Asia
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MChek Aims to Grow 10-fold in Five Years with Telecom Majors
Bangalore: Sanjay Swamy has hit it off with the big daddies of telecom and banking— Bharti Airtel Ltd, State Bank of India and ICICI Bank Ltd—offering their customers options to make payments over the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone. The cheery Swamy heads Bangalore-based start-up mChek India Payment Systems Pvt. Ltd. Its payment feature comes inlaid on every subscriber identity module (SIM) card issued by Airtel and Tata Docomo, allowing customers to use it through a b...
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- South Asia
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Nokia Launches Its Cheapest Phone Yet for Emerging Markets
Nokia has unveiled the 1280, a mobile phone for emerging markets that is 20 percent cheaper than its predecessor, the 1202. The unsubsidized cost of the 1280 is €20 (US$30), which makes it Nokia’s cheapest mobile phone yet, according to a Nokia blog post . But the prize squeeze won’t end there: The concept of a €5 mobile phone doesn’t seem s...
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- South Asia
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Western Union Tapping the Fortune
Money transfer company Western Union believes in tapping fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. The company is tying up with microfinance institutions (MFIs) and e-governance service providers to facilitate financial inclusion. This marks a shift in its India game plan, to offer money transfer services through MFIs besides its current portfolio of India Post network, banks, retail and finance agents. The Nasdaq-listed company has tied up with e-governance and I...
- Region
- South Asia
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