India wants to provide its 1.1 billion-plus citizens with ID cards. Infosys co-chairman Nandan Nilekani has been chosen to lead the ambitious citizens’ database project. Saritha Rai in the Indian Express:
Bangalore: Nandan Nilekani has been called the Bill Gates of Bangalore and the face of Brand Infosys, indelibly identified with the company he co-founded and the city it is based in. As he moves on to his new role as head of the Manmohan Singh government’s Unique Identification project, the reactions in the company and the city are a mix of emotional and exultant.
“It is really sad that he will no longer be part of the Infosys family,” said Trupthi Narayan, a 26-year-old software engineer who works at Infosys’s spectacular 80-acre campus in the Electronics City suburbs of Bangalore. “But I’m thrilled that he will use his vast skills and experience to build the India he imagined.”
In the campus, which houses a fifth of the company’s 100,000-plus employees, Nilekani’s compelling presence will be missed. Employees are curious and excited about his new role. “He will be out there pursuing a greater cause,” said Hitesh Sharma, 27, a market analyst with Infosys’s product engineering team. More:
Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, shares his views on open markets and the failure of public systems. From the Guardian:
The man who inspired the slogan “the world is flat” has a small revision to make in the light of recent events. “The world has got flattened,” says Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Indian technology giant Infosys.
The “Bill Gates of Bangalore” – as he became known to star-struck American commentators – first served as inspiration to Thomas Friedman when the New York Times columnist wrote that bible of globalisation, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, way back in 2005. Then, as now, at the epicentre of the Indian IT outsourcing boom, Infosys and its charismatic co-founder seemed the embodiment of the optimistic mood. Soaring world trade, the endless march of the internet and a common language (jargon-inflected English) were ironing out political and geographical divisions around the world.
It all feels an age ago, sitting over a pot of tea in a deserted London hotel foyer. Global trade has collapsed, protectionism is on the rise and the banking crisis has national governments rushing to resurrect control over international business. But Nilekani insists the analysis still holds. “Because the world was flat, we all got flattened: the crisis moved around the world faster,” he says in that enigmatic way that visionary businessmen get away with. Whether he means we were all just flattened to the ground by the financial earthquake at the same time, or irreversibly rolled smooth by the progressive force of globalisation, is left unspoken.
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Niraj Sheth in The Wall Street Journal:
A wave of anti-offshoring sentiment in the U.S. Congress is prompting India’s biggest tech companies to prepare for something unexpected: hiring Americans.
Outsourcing giants Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. — long derided by some U.S. politicians for taking U.S. jobs away — are laying the groundwork to boost the number of jobs they create stateside, mostly to make sure they can still do business if the U.S. passes legislation that restricts their ability to send Indians to the U.S. to work.
As U.S. unemployment rises, such legislation could come soon, observers say. Already, a provision in the stimulus bill signed by President Obama on Tuesday makes it much harder for U.S. banks bailed out by the government to hire foreign tech workers.
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In a world where platitudes often mean everything (“I would like to thank my beautiful wife for all her support,”), the Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murthy come off as a couple deeply, deeply in love with mutual respect, sacrifice and honesty as the main ingredients of their enduring marriage [via The Issue]. If you have a love story to share, do send it to AW via comments.
Narayanan Murthy about his wife Sudha Murthy:
My wife is a happy person with the ability to see the positive in a situation. Her cheerful disposition helps her make friends easily. She is one of the finest managers I have seen, meticulous about completing every task on time with quality and within budget. Sudha was the only female student in her Engineering class at Hubli, a conservative town in North Karnataka. She was a first ranker in all ten semesters in her Engineering degree, winning gold medals in every examination. Besides being a fine engineer, she is a great writer too. She has sacrificed so much for me and the children giving up her job as manager in Bombay in 1981 to move to Pune. Without that sacrifice, I am not sure if I would have been able to found Infosys along with my six colleagues. Her positive way of looking at things, being happy in every situation and her ability to relate to the poor are the things that I admire most in her. When you meet an interesting person like her it is very easy to fall in love.
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Sudha Murthy on her husband, Narayanan Murthy:
It was in Pune that I met Narayan Murty through my friend Prasanna, who is now the Wipro chief, who was also training in Telco. Most of the books that Prasanna lent me had Murty’s name on them, which meant that I had a preconceived image of the man. Contrary to expectation, Murty was shy, bespectacled and an introvert. When he invited us for dinner, I was a bit taken aback as I thought the young man was making a very fast move. I refused since I was the only girl in the group. But Murty was relentless and we all decided to meet for dinner the next day at 7.30 p.m at Green Fields hotel on the Main Road, Pune. The next day, I went there at 7 o clock since I had to go to the tailor near the hotel. And what do I see? Mr Murty waiting in front of the hotel and it was only seven.
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Kris Gopalakrishnan, boss of Infosys, thought he had the British IT firm Axon in the bag – then an Indian rival outbid him. Is the East now carving up the West? Andrew Davidson in The Sunday Times:
And so it goes. Offstage from last week’s main financial dramas, a fight breaks out between two Indian IT giants, both bidding to buy the British tech consultancy Axon. It looks like a sign of things to come.
“One of our strategies is to reduce our dependence on America,” explains Infosys boss Kris Gopalakrishnan, in Indian-inflected English, “and to increase our revenues from Europe and the rest of the world. We also want to do more value-added services, and we want to leverage the customer base. So this acquisition has to meet multiple strategic objectives.”
He might add that western companies are ripe for the picking, as a new breed of heavyweight emerges from the East. Deep in pocket, with cheaper pay scales and market-leading, technological know-how.
But Gopalakrishnan, one of Infosys’s founders, just stirs his tea and smiles.
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In Mint-Lounge, a profile of Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani by Shoba Narayan:
Bangalore: It is high noon and Nandan Mohan Nilekani is doing something he rarely does: drumming his fingers.
He is sitting in a conference room adjacent to his office with six Infosys Technologies Ltd employees. Their goal, which also happens to be Nilekani’s pet project, is to make the computer services giant an environmentally sustainable company.
“How far is Infosys from being carbon neutral? Why are the rooms kept so cold? In Bangalore, we shouldn’t even be using air conditioners, yaar,” says Nilekani as he listens to presentations and fires questions and suggestions.
He listens to an Internet-led carpooling scheme. “But, people should hook up through SMS. Who wants to go online to check if a car is going to Electronic City?” he says.
“What about the water flushed from the urinals? Are we reusing it?” Turns out they are – for landscaping. “What about green accounting?” The woman in charge of that division starts explaining but Nilekani interrupts, gently. “No, no, that’s not it. In green accounting, the numbers will change.”
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The subcontinent’s IT companies are giving graduates soft-skills training to help them deal with working in the West. From The Times, UK:
As if completing a gruelling engineering degree was not enough, a new generation of globetrotting Indian IT workers faces extra schooling on how to deal with British quirks of business.
Most of India’s large technology companies run “finishing schools”, where graduates who are going to work in the West are taught how to dress (no white socks with black shoes), eat (no belching at the table; use a knife and fork, not your hands) and speak (to remedy the habit of young Indians saying yes when they mean no).
Britain can be a bemusing place for somebody brought up in rural India – more so if they have to deal with the foibles of a FTSE 100 chief executive, according to Girish Vaidya, of Infosys, India’s second-largest software exporter.
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Sagarika Ghose in the Hindustan Times says regional chauvanism rather than urban infrastructure is the priority of politicians who control cities like Mumbai and Bangalore
Ah, the great Indian city! The lack of urban infrastructure destroying the infrastructure of the human soul. By 2020 Mumbai will have a population of 20 million. Bangalore, already with 6.5 million inhabitants has seen phenomenal growth. Three hundred million Indians live in urban areas; the figure will spurt by 40 per cent in the next 11 years. Whatever the rural romantics may say, India’s future is irreversibly urban. Mumbai and Bangalore are symbols of the urban Indian dream, the first, whose present chief minister claims will be a new Shanghai, the second, which a former CM wanted to make into another Singapore.
But forget Shanghai and Singapore, which instead are the voices that are speaking the loudest for the Indian city? The new voices that are yelling into the urban skyline are anything but urbane or metropolitan. In Mumbai, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray has declared war on north Indians, mimicking what he calls their strange accents, noisy pujas, nasty civic manners and demanding preferential treatment in jobs for local Maharashtrians. Raj Thackeray wants north Indians out of Mumbai. In Bangalore, as the campaign for the forthcoming assembly elections gathers momentum, another ‘son of the soil’ is also demanding reservations for locals. H.D. Deve Gowda’s political manifesto demands 30 per cent reservation of jobs in the infotech and biotech sectors for local Kannadigas.
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