Around the World on $48 (or So): How High Can Discount Airlines Fly? As two more major airlines, Delta and Northwest, file for bankruptcy protection, it's the discount carriers that appear to be winning the battle for America's skies. Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, AirTran and other low-fare carriers are poised to capture even more market share at the expense of troubled legacy carriers. But it's not only in the U.S. that discounters are giving the more established carriers a run for their money. Discounters are taking off in Mexico, India, China, Europe and points in between. What kind of competition do these discounters face, from the major airlines and from each other? And what obstacles, especially in countries like China, are governments and regulators putting in their way? The U.S. and Points South In the U.S., discount airlines have been flying rings around the major carriers for years, benefiting from more nimble management, lighter pension loads and the propensity of consumers to give up perks and convenience for significantly lower fares. But eventually, say Wharton faculty and airline analysts, the discounters -- who now control more than 25% of the U.S. airline business -- are likely to face a glut of seats. And that, the theory goes, will force them to compete without the cost advantage that has propelled them ahead of their more established rivals. The result could be a shakeout in the discount airline market. With four of the country's seven major, or legacy, airlines now reorganizing in bankruptcy court (US Airways and United in addition to Delta and Northwest), the time is right for low-cost airlines to strike. "The blood is in the water, but what worries me is that the track record of these new is not all that long," says W. Bruce Allen, Wharton professor of business and public policy. Southwest Airlines, which has not suffered a money-losing year since 1972, remains the company to beat, according to Allen. Older than its current crop of discount competitors, Southwest has already had to cope with some of the difficulties of managing an airline over the long haul. Such difficulties -- ranging from fuel price spikes to aging employees -- have always hampered traditional airline companies. Southwest is "the most impressive," says Allen. "It has personnel who are unionized, but it has kept its esprit de corps and its can-do attitude." Moreover, Allen notes, Southwest has managed to do well even as it expands into larger markets, breaking from its tried-and-true business model of serving second-tier cities with no-frills flights. Remembering People Express While it is one thing to grab share from legacy carriers encumbered by union work rules and expensive pension plans, it remains to be seen if today's discounters can continue to grow, Allen says, citing the case of People Express, which was founded in 1981 and reached annual revenues of $1 billion, but was near bankruptcy when Texas Air acquired it in 1986. "People Express was a darling of the business schools, but it expanded too fast with grandiose dreams and the big guys were able to swat it down." Today, he says, the big operators are less able to quash the new competition. "But what happens when the newcomers are burdened with aging, high-maintenance aircraft and older, more demanding employees?" One scenario is that some of the large players will regroup and rise up to challenge the discounters. "If the large airlines are able to pare back expenses in bankruptcy court, that would level the playing field with the discounter on price and they would still have rich route structures," says Allen. "What do I like about United? Not a lot," he adds. "But it can take me to the Pacific and to Europe. If it came back with a lean and mean model, I'd be interested in flying. I'm a lot more interested in going to Paris than Lubbock." In addition, there is still some value in the familiar brand names, like United and American. "There is a cachet" about them, Allen says. Many travelers are uncertain about the discount airlines and their young pilots: "They want to see a pilot with gray hair." Another reason regional carriers were able to grow is that new airline technology created airplanes that could service smaller markets efficiently. Smaller regional jets have also proved to be a competitive advantage in an era of rising fuel prices, Bailey notes. Traditional carriers have been unable to pass along the increased cost of jet fuel -- a 48% spike in the past year alone -- because of tight competition on fares. Since they tend to fly larger, older planes, network carriers are again caught at a disadvantage compared to the discount airlines. Over the long-term, Bailey predicts that there will be fewer network carriers but also fewer low-fare competitors. "My sense is you are going to have two or three legacy carriers and two or three low-cost carriers," she says. A Focus on Costs, Not Revenues The fundamental difference between the discounters and the well-known network carriers is that the older airlines focused on revenue, while the upstarts have focused on costs, notes Todd Sinai, Wharton real estate professor, who has studied the airline industry. For example, the legacy carriers' hub-and-spoke system brought hordes of passengers into connecting hubs all at the same time. The system was convenient for passengers and drove up volume, but it also required airlines to hire large numbers of baggage handlers and ticket agents for peak times. Then, during off hours, the employees were idle. The newcomers run point-to-point service to smaller markets, requiring passengers to travel at awkward times and wait for connections. "Southwest is reducing costs while not paying as much attention to revenues. A network carrier is maximizing revenues while not paying attention to costs," says Sinai. "Now they are converging. Southwest is looking at revenues and the legacy carriers are looking at costs." Neither strategy is the clear winner, he says. "The Southwest type of strategy really depends on a market of people who put a lower value on their own time and therefore are willing to trade their time for a lower ticket price. Flying a network carrier is less time-costly -- at least in theory -- but more costly in terms of money." As the two models converge, low-cost airlines are attempting to cherry pick the most profitable point-to-point routes, such as JetBlue's successful New York to Los Angeles service, Sinai points out. He notes that Southwest's Phoenix service is beginning to look somewhat like a hub system with passengers transferring there to complete cross-country trips. "Where does Southwest go from here?" he asks. "Flying between tertiary and secondary markets is limited. At some point, Southwest has to tap the big markets in order to grow. Sinai says it is not clear whether there is enough demand to move the entire system to a low-cost, point-to-point model. "It's hard to tell where the world goes from here. There could be enough cities that are large enough so that point-to-point is the wave of the future," he says. "Or it could be that we will continue to live in a hub-and-spoke world. We don't know what will happen." Another factor that is hard to gauge is how well the discount airlines will do in different economic cycles, since the current generation of discounters has expanded mostly in the post-September 11 climate of airline recession. "When demand is relatively low, the network carriers have a harder time making a go of it," he says. "The low-cost carriers do well when demand is below the level to support the network carriers. The tricky thing in looking at these models is that they are successful in different times. Report Card on Low-Cost Carriers Of the discounters, Southwest and JetBlue seem most likely to prevail, says Terry Trippler, an analyst with cheapseats.com. Privately held Sun Country, based in Minneapolis, is also doing well, he says, while Independence Air, based in Washington's Dulles airport, is probably the weakest low-cost carrier AirTran, he notes, has successfully competed against JetBlue on its Atlanta to Los Angeles route, indicating it has a good chance to be among the survivors in a discount airline shakeout. Spirit Airlines has been able to fend off competition from Northwest and Southwest in Detroit. The merger of America West and US Airways will also be interesting to watch, he notes. "It's like David acquiring Goliath." Allen says he is concerned that the two airlines are focused on either end of the country with little in common. "I don't see a lot of synergies that they claim exist. If there were duplicative services, they could economize and get load factor up and run fewer aircraft and cut costs, but it's like two ends of a barbell."
Continued.... Baby Boomers Flying into Retirement According to Becker, not that many cities can support the low-cost, point-to-point travel; those that do exist are already spoken for by Southwest, JetBlue and what remains of the legacy carriers. "If you are new, like AirTran, there are only a few markets to fly to. You're not going to fly Erie, Pa., to Los Angeles; you're going to fly Chicago to Los Angeles, New York to San Francisco, or Boston to Seattle. As the new start-ups expand they are going to start running into each other." Another problem, says Kasper, is energy costs. "The price of jet fuel is squeezing all carriers including the low-cost carriers," says Kasper, although he notes that Southwest has successfully hedged against rising costs for the next few years. "It's very difficult for any airline to be profitable when oil is at $60 a barrel. If oil were $40 a barrel the industry would be very, very profitable." If you look back, "2000 was the last year of the big airline boom," Kaspar adds. "Traffic is now above pre-9/11 levels, costs are down and capacity is down. Yet, as a whole, airlines are losing money. If oil were $40 or $45 a barrel, they would be rolling in dough." On the plus side, Netessine points to future contracts for aircraft delivery as a sign that the low-cost carriers will continue to grow beyond their current 30% market share. He says Jet Blue is adding planes, Southwest has added 100 planes over the past two or three years, and AirTran has said it will add one plane a month until 2008. "It will take a few years for the network carriers to restructure and approach low-cost carriers in their costs." Netessine agrees that "even low-cost carriers have to start thinking about differentiating themselves from one another." He points to America West, which offers a first-class section with wide leather seats, and JetBlue's satellite television system. European discounters, he adds, are sticking more closely to the no-frills model than their American counterparts. So far, with the exception of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin flights from London, discounters have not made any headway in international travel, largely because it is expensive to fly those routes, and U.S. treaties governing landing rights at foreign airports still favor the established carriers. "The big guys seem to think this is the way to go because they don't have to compete against the discounters," says Allen. However, according to a report in the September 20 Wall Street Journal, the discount airline skies are about to get a bit more crowded. Two new airlines are planning to offer all business-class service between New York and London. Eos Airlines will sell luxury seats at business class prices, and Maxjet Airways is expected to offer all business class seats at big discounts. If successful, the two start-ups will launch additional trans-Atlantic routes. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is also developing discount air carriers. In Mexico this year, the government is selling the two national airlines, Aeromxico and Mexicana, and authorizing up to five budget airlines to begin operations. Opportunities and Obstacles in Europe The low-cost skies of Europe are dominated by three companies: Ryanair, the pioneer, which transported 24.6 million passengers last year; easyJet, which carried 24.3 million passengers, and Air Berlin, which carried 12.037 million. Valls adds a fourth player to the list -- Germany's Hapag-Lloyd Express. The three largest low-priced carriers share a bit more than half of the low-cost market in Europe. Overall, some four dozen airlines are involved in the competition. According to Valls, the low-cost market has already started to undergo a cleansing process, as shown by the 2004 bankruptcy of Volare, the Italian airline. The big companies are "consolidating their positions while the small ones are disappearing because they don't have what it takes to compete," Valls says, adding that it is not easy for new players to navigate the market because of major barriers to entry. Vueling, the low-cost carrier based in Barcelona, is one of the latest companies to arrive, and it did so "thanks to the extraordinary amount of funding" behind it. A "Black List" in the E.U. In Valls' opinion, traditional legacy carriers should not compete exclusively on the basis of price. "That's what the low-cost airlines do, and it is very hard to take market share away from them," he says. "Conventional carriers should focus more on providing services over the Internet, and on trying to attract those web users who buy low-cost tickets online from airlines." Beyond that, he suggests, conventional carriers "should consolidate their strengths by using strategies of differentiation and specialization." They should take advantage of their long experience providing customers with high-quality service. For example, they should look for ways to reduce waiting times at airports and shorten the time spent at baggage claims. "Airlines are losing their ability to provide value," he says, referring to the low quality of in-flight service. Growth prospects for low-cost airlines remain very promising. These days, 40% of all European passengers fly on low-cost carriers. Valls disagrees with the notion that the only people who go this route are travelers who have less money to spend. People choose an airline depending on the flight schedule and destination. It has nothing to do with how much money they will be spending when they get there, he says. In fact, many executives opt for low-cost airlines. Low-cost Carriers in China: A Hard Game to Play Over the last six months, China's airline industry, which for a decade hadn't registered any new members, showed sudden signs of growth. Three private airlines -- Okay Airlines, Spring Airlines and United Eagle Airlines -- made their debut. Even more notably, Shanghai's Spring Airlines became the first carrier in China to offer low-cost airfares. On July 18, the opening day of the carrier, a flight from Shanghai to Yantai cost 199 yuan (about $24). The move by Spring Airlines -- which is owned by Shanghai Spring Travel Agency, the largest privately-owned travel agency in China -- stirred discussions in the media about low-cost airfares. In April, Thailand's Asia Airline opened its China flights and charged 99 yuan ($12) for a ticket from Xiamen to Bangkok. The move marked the first step by foreign air carriers to launch low-cost services. The flight run by Spring Airlines has 180 seats, none of them first class. Passengers are offered bottled water, but they don't get free meals (although meals are available for purchase). Carry-on luggage can weigh no more than 15 kilograms. The ticketing system is not linked to China's air information system, but developed by the company itself, and the airline plans to use only one type of airplane, which makes pilot training and maintenance easier -- a strategy also followed by America's Southwest Airlines. Indeed, Spring airlines has adopted a number of measures used by Southwest. Spring chief executive Ge Xuejing estimates that such measures can save the carrier 20% in total costs. At the same time, he says, "If we maintain a capacity rate of 85% and the airfare remains at a discount rate of 50%, we are able to break even." A substantial number of airline costs are subject to changes in the international markets. For example, aircraft are imported from the U.S. or Europe, and fuel prices fluctuate with world oil prices. Rising oil prices have already heavily burdened airlines all over the world. Southern Airlines, one of the three largest state-owned carriers in China, recently said in its semi-annual report that rising oil prices have caused a jump in its operating costs. The airline posted a loss of 843 million yuan for the first half of 2005. Citing the same reason, Eastern Airlines recorded a loss of 410 million yuan. At the same time, tight government controls limit Chinese airlines' ability to reduce costs. For example, because China Aviation Oil Holding Co. corners the aviation oil supply, Chinese airlines have to pay more for aviation oil than they would in the international market. In the Asia Pacific region, the fees charged by China's domestic airports are higher than every other country except Japan. And the government's control of routes also makes it very difficult for airlines to reduce costs by offering more flights. In addition, the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China has specific restrictions on the hiring and firing of pilots. The costs over which airlines have control represent about 30% of the total. Given the limited amount of flexibility and the highly restricted operational environment, it's anything but easy for low-cost carriers to compete with their more traditional counterparts and differentiate their services, industry insiders say. In addition, they add, another important characteristic of China's airline industry is that 70% of the business comes from 30% of the market, which includes Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and a dozen mid-sized cities. It's very difficult for new airlines to compete in those markets, yet opening other markets depends not only on an individual airline's strategy but also on government policies and the economy.
That which does not kill the boss of Apple seems to make him stronger
ONE morning, about a year ago, a doctor told Steve Jobs that a cancerous tumour in his pancreas would kill him within months, and that it was time to start saying his goodbyes. Later that night, an endoscopy revealed that the tumour could be cut out. But for one day Mr Jobs, the boss of Apple Computer, as well as Pixar, the world's most successful animation studio, stared death in the face.
The experience seems to have invigorated him. Last week, gaunter but otherwise undiminished, he was on a stage in San Francisco, putting on a show (for that is what Apple product launches are) that was as flashy and dynamic as any as he has ever thrown. When businessmen try to rub shoulders with pop stars, the effect is usually embarrassing. But Steve had arranged to have his pal, Madonna, pop up on screen and kidded around with her with panache. Does she have an iPod? Of course she has! That's so duh, said the superstar playfully. Then Mr Jobs segued into his announcementsa new mobile phone from Motorola that has iTunes, Apple's music software, pre-installed and that represents a beachhead into the world of phones; and the iPod nano, a new digital music-player that is thinner than a pencil, but still holds 1,000 songs.
For Mr Jobs, the product launch seemed mainly to be an opportunity to drive home the message that his hold on downloaded and portable music now seems overwhelming. iTunes sells 2m songs a day and has a world market share of 82%Mr Jobs reckons that it is the world's second-largest internet store, behind only Amazon. And the iPod has a market share of 74%, with 22m sold. For a man who helped launch the personal-computer era in 1976 with the Apple I, but then had to watch Microsoft's Bill Gates walk away with, in effect, the monopoly on PC operating systems (Apple's market share in computers today is less than 3%), this must be some vindication.
The odd thing about near-death experiencesliteral or metaphoricalin Mr Jobs's life is that he seems actually to need them sporadically in order to thrive. Mr Jobs himself suggested as much when he addressed the graduating class at Stanford University in June. Until he turned 30 in 1985, Mr Jobs led a life that fits almost every Silicon Valley clich. He dropped out of college (like Bill Gates and Michael Dell); he started a company with a friend in a garage (like everybody from Hewlett and Packard to the founders of Google); he launched a revolution (the PC era). Big deal. The interesting event occurred when he was 30 and got fired from his own company, after Apple's board turned against him. He was devastated. His career seemed dead.
Characteristically, though, Mr Jobs bounced back, once he realised, as he said at Stanford, that the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. He did something uninterrupted success might have made impossible: he became more creative. In 1986 he started two new companies, NeXT, a computer-maker that was always too far ahead of its time, and Pixar, an animation studio that went on to have a series of box-office hits. A decade later, ironically enough, NeXT was bought by Apple, and Mr Jobs was brought back to run the company he had founded.
Mr Jobs, a pescatarian (ie, a vegetarian who eats fish) with a philosophical streak and a strong interest in the occult, interprets these reversals as lessons. As befits a man who grew up in California in the 1960s, he proclaims his belief in karma and in love. Not necessarily love of his employees, apparentlysome of whom have found working for him a nightmarebut love of one's ideals. Always do only what you love, and never settle, he advised the students at Stanford. His brush with cancer, in particular, seems to have focused his mind. Death is very likely the single best invention in life, Mr Jobs told his young audience. All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failurethese things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Do not get the impression that Mr Jobs is now hugging strangers in random acts of kindness. He is still testy, irascible and difficult; he is still prepared to sue teenagers who publish Apple gossip on their websites for alleged abuses of trade secrets. But the reminders of mortality have changed him. He was already softened after his public humbling in 1985, says Bruce Chizen, the boss of Adobe Systems, a software company that is a long-time partner of Apple's. After the cancer, he says, he's even softer and, Mr Chizen reckons, even more creative.
New toys on the way Mr Jobs's rivals may feel the same way. The digerati in Silicon Valley, Redmond (Microsoft), Tokyo (Sony), Seoul (Samsung) and other places now simply take it for granted that Mr Jobs has a top-secret conveyor belt that will keep churning out best-selling wonders like the iPod. What could these toys be? A portable video player is rumoured. A new and cooler sort of television is possible. A user-friendly and elegant mobile-phone handset would be nice, perhaps called something like iPhone.
Hollywood and music studios are also increasingly frightened. The music studios, which barely took him seriously when he launched iTunes in 2001, are sick of his power and are pressuring him to change his 99-cents-per-song flat rate for music. Slim chance. Disney, a long-time partner of Pixar whom Mr Jobs broke with when he got tired of its former boss, is now trying to worm its way back into his favour.
In short, Mr Jobs currently seems vivacious by anybody's standards. There are even rumours that he might run for governor of California (as a Democrat, presumably; Al Gore is on Apple's board). For somebody famous in large part for a spectacular defeatto Bill Gates and Microsoftall this must feel like a new lease of life, in every respect.
This may be your only crack at the job, so don't get waylaid by some of the oldest and most useless gambits around
It isn't much fun being a corporate human resources person, but the job offers one treat: You get to dream up outlandish interview questions to throw at job candidates, then watch them squirm. Some of these goofy questions are time-honored -- they may not be useful, but they've become an HR tradition. Others are hot off the press. Here's a tour through the world of wacky queries -- so you'll be prepared the next time you're hit with one in an interview:
Where do you see yourself in five years? This is the great-granddaddy of goofy questions, and I give you permission, if you have any misgivings about a job opportunity, to walk out the door when you hear it. It's such a time-waster that only the most hidebound interviewers will utter it, but it lives on.
Here's why it's dumb. No company will guarantee you a job for five years, much less a career path. To construct such a plan for yourself, you'd have to make predictions about industries, companies, and your likes and dislikes that could only serve to constrain your choices. And in any case, why is it so all-fired important to have a dang career plan in mind? Every successful entrepreneur and many top corporate people will tell you their key to success: I did what I felt driven to do at the moment.
So when you get asked this question, you can say: "I intend to be happy and productive five years from now, working at a job I love in a company that values my talents" and leave it at that. Or you can give the expected answer and say: "I hope to be three levels up the ladder, here at Happy Corp." Or you can say: "I hope to own this company," just to shake things up.
But for an interviewer to ask the question at all is a bad sign. Come on, people! There are millions of thoughts in the human brain. Can we change the ones we use in job interviews every decade or so?
If you were an animal/a can of soup/some other random object, which one would you be? This is a question typically asked of new grads, because it's considered cute. It's supposed to test how people think. But it's asinine. You can pretend to think about your answer for a moment (eyes to the ceiling, chin resting on hand) and then come up with something. Or stare blankly at the interviewer and say, deadpan: "Are you serious?" Or try one of these answers:
(Animal) "Oh, any crepuscular animal would do well for me -- a rabbit or a bat, perhaps." (Crepuscular means most active during dawn and dusk, so you'll get to show off your extensive vocab.)
(Soup) "Probably the low-sodium chicken broth." Fix the interviewer with a penetrating gaze -- she won't know whether you're mocking her imbecilic question or are deadly serious.
What are your weaknesses? By now, such a large percentage of the job-seeking public has gotten clued in on the politically correct answer to this one -- which is, "I'm a hopeless workaholic" -- that the question's utility is limited. But it's also offensive.
This is a job interview, not a psychological exam. It's one thing for an interviewer to ask you what you do particularly well. It's another thing to ask what you don't do well and expect to get a forthright answer -- in a context where it's clear to both parties that you're being weeded in or out. The most honest answer might be this: "That's for me to know and you to find out." But that won't help your chances.
So if you can't bear to repeat the "workaholic" line, I'd say something that is true of yourself but also terribly common -- like the fact that you get bored easily, or prefer numbers to people or vice versa. None of these is actually a weakness, but that's O.K.
What in particular interested you about our company? Now, on one level this is a reasonable question. If you say: "I'm interested in this job because it's three blocks from my apartment," you might not be the world's best candidate. But the disingenuous, and therefore offensive, aspect of this question is that it assumes that you have unlimited job opportunities and have pinpointed this one because of some dazzling aspect of the role or the company.
I mean, please. Most of the job-seeking population is living on the lower two-thirds of Maslow's pyramid, where the most appealing thing about any job is that you got the darned interview. Why am I interested? Because you guys called me back. But you can't say that, so you have to rhapsodize about the company's wonderful products and services and the world-class management team and so on.
Now, it's important to show that you know a lot about the company. But you have lots of ways to demonstrate that in an interview (and lots of ways for the interviewer to ask you to do so) without pretending that the company had to fight every employer in town to get an audience with you. Everybody involved knows the company is shredding 10 times the number of rsums it's reading, so let's not pretend it was your breathtaking credentials that got you the interview. It was the fact that the company responded to your overture, unlike 90% of the employers you contacted.
Below the director level or so, where it might be reasonable to assume you sought out the company for particular job-hunting attention, it's not necessary to pretend that you carefully chose it from a raft of others pursuing you. So unless you approached the outfit in the absence of a posted job opportunity, it's just silly to ask: "Why us?"
Rather, the interviewer can say: "When you saw our ad on Monster.com, what made you respond?" And, of course, the logical answer is: "Because I know I can do the job that was posted." Duh. No one said job-hunting was easy.
What would your past managers say about you? This is a fine question, but it's not a true interview question. It's an intelligence question. It's like the question on one of those "honesty" tests that are becoming more and more popular in the hiring process (to add insult to injury, they're often called Personality Profiles): "Do you think it's O.K. to steal from your employer?"
These are intelligence questions because you have to have the intelligence to know the answer in order to be smart enough to go and get a job.
The trick here is to say something sufficiently witty or pithy to make you stand out from the crowd, because the standard answers are so tired: My managers would say that I'm hard-working, loyal, reliable, and a great team player. Snoozeville.
Why not try: My past managers would say that I was an outstanding individual contributor who also supported the team 100%. Or: My managers would say that I came up with breakthrough solutions while never losing track of the bottom line. You can probably dream up something better.
The point is, this is a softball: Don't think too much about it. It says more about the interviewer (who lacks the moxie to think up unique or penetrating questions) than it ever will about you.
The secret of good job interviewers is that they never ask traditional, dorky interview questions. They don't need to. They jump into a business conversation that does three powerful things in a one-hour chat:
a) Gets you excited about this opportunity (or, as valuably, makes it clear that you and this job are not a good fit) b) Reveals to the interviewer how you'll fit into the role and the company, based on your background, perspective, temperament, and ideas c) Gives you a ton of new information about the job, the management, the goals, the culture, and what life at this joint would be like.
If any of this doesn't happen, it's a problem. If you're lukewarm on the job when you leave the interview, or if you don't feel you've had a chance to show what you know and how you think, or -- worst of all -- if the interviewer used your time together to satisfy his need for more information about you while sharing almost nothing about the job, that's an enormous red flag.
And if you get called back for a second interview while you're still information-deprived, say so. "I'm interested in learning more about the opportunity before a second interview," you can say. "Would a phone call with the hiring manager be an effective way to help me get up to speed?" That kind of suggestion respects the hiring manager's time and won't waste yours on a second, no-new-data interview.
Try it. You might save yourself some aggravation -- along with some extra time you can use to work on your five-year career plan and on tackling those pesky weaknesses of yours before the next interview.
hi! tis is the frst time i visited tis thread and for sure i shud say tht teesra banda the job ur doin is gr8 n for sure tis thread will help me a lot in knowing about the present scenario n the status of various companies.gr8 work dude.keep them cumin
one more thing buddy please make the font a bit bigger as it stains the eyes,i dunt know its a problem with others or not but really will be very helpful for me. regards sameer
hi! tis is the frst time i visited tis thread and for sure i shud say tht teesra banda the job ur doin is gr8 n for sure tis thread will help me a lot in knowing about the present scenario n the status of various companies.gr8 work dude.keep them cumin
one more thing buddy please make the font a bit bigger as it stains the eyes,i dunt know its a problem with others or not but really will be very helpful for me. regards sameer
I think making fonts a bit bigger will use more of space(screen space) for same content and anyway u can copy paste it in word and make fonts as big as u want.....Still will keep ur suggestion in mind while posting. If they dont look obscenely big, will increase the fonts.
The Real Reasons You're Working So Hard... ...and what you can do about it
Honk if this sounds like you: While much of America is watching Jon Stewart, Letterman, or Leno, you're stumbling out the office door into a car-service Town Car or groping for the clicker to the BMW in the company parking lot. Once home, you slug down a beer or the last of a bottle of white wine on the door of the fridge, stuff some leftovers in your mouth, and collapse into bed beside your sleeping spouse. A half-dozen hours later, you crawl to the shower, throw on a clean shirt, pour some coffee down your throat, maybe drop a kid or two at school, and jump back on the frenetic work treadmill that you can't shut off
The good news -- if there is any, time-challenged amigo -- is that you are not alone. More than 31% of college-educated male workers are regularly logging 50 or more hours a week at work, up from 22% in 1980. Forty percent of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, reports the National Sleep Foundation, up from 31% in 2001. About 60% of us are sometimes or often rushed at mealtime, and one-third wolf down lunch at our desks, according to a survey by the American Dietetic Assn. To avoid wasting time, we're talking on our cell phones while rushing to work, answering e-mails during conference calls, waking up at 4 a.m. to call Europe, and generally multitasking our brains out.
This epidemic of long hours at the office -- whether physically or remotely -- defies historical precedent and common sense. Over the past 25 years, the Information Revolution has boosted productivity by almost 70%. So you would think that since we're producing more in fewer hours, such gains would translate into a decrease in the workweek -- as they have in the past. But instead of technology being a time-saver, says Warren Bennis, a University of Southern California professor and author of such management classics as On Becoming a Leader, "everybody I know is working harder and longer." And the long-hour marathons aren't a result of demanding corporations exploiting the powerless. Most of the groggy-eyed are the best-educated and best-paid -- college grads whose real wages have risen by more than 30% since the 1980s. That's a change from 25 years ago, when it was the lowest-wage workers who were most likely to put in 50 hours or more a week, according to new research by Peter Kuhn of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Fernando A. Lozano of Pomona College.
With so many managers and professionals stuck at work, there is a growing consensus among management gurus that the stuck-at-work epidemic is symptomatic of a serious disorder in the organization of corporations. The problem, in a nutshell-to-go is this: Succeeding in today's economy requires lightning-fast reflexes and the ability to communicate and collaborate across the globe. Coming up with innovative ideas, products, and services means getting people across different divisions and different companies to work together. "More and more value is created through networks," says John Helferich, a top executive and former head of research and development at Masterfoods usa, a division of Mars Inc. and the maker of such products as M&Ms.; "The guys who are good at it are winning."
Unfortunately, the communication, coordination, and teamwork so essential for success these days is being superimposed on a corporate structure that has one leg still in its gray flannel suit. Without strict gatekeepers (read secretaries), Tom, Jane, and Harry feel free to plug themselves into your electronic calendar. You and a colleague in another part of the company may dream up a great idea for a new product -- but it takes months to get approvals from your boss, his boss, and their boss. Or the corporate bigwigs order you to join a taskforce that is supposed to promote collaboration and innovation -- but it ends up taking a big chunk of your time. And no matter how many layers of management were supposed to be taken out, there always seem to be more people on the e-mail distribution lists. You are not imagining things. Despite years of cutting corporate bloat, managers are a much bigger share of the workforce than they were 15 years ago. "We've added a new set of standards without fully dropping the old," says Thomas H. Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson College and author of the new book Thinking for a Living.
That helps explain why time pressures seem to be getting worse. Globalization and the Internet create great new opportunities, but they also ratchet up the intensity of competition and generate more work -- especially with the existing corporate structure still hanging on tightly. "Nobody wants to give up their territory or their control," says Shoshana Zuboff, a former professor at Harvard Business School. Adds Lowell Bryan, a McKinsey & Co. director: "Professionals are still being managed as if they were in factories, in organizations designed to keep everybody siloed. At less well-run companies, you're struck by how frustrated people are. They work like dogs and are wasting time."
Make that lots of time. Fully 25% of executives at large companies say their communications -- voice mail, e-mail, and meetings -- are nearly or completely unmanageable. That's according to a new McKinsey survey of more than 7,800 managers around the world. Nearly 40% spend a half to a full day per week on communications that are not valuable. Other surveys echo similar results. "We're making our people compete with sandbags strapped to their legs," says Zuboff.
A Digital Spine There is hope, however, and the promise of at least partial liberation from the tyranny of time constraints. Why? Because the long-term interests of individuals and smart companies are aligned. To compete, successful corporations will have to make it easier and less time-consuming for their employees to collaborate. They will learn how to live with fewer time-sapping meetings and unnecessary feedback loops -- or find themselves outrun by more nimble competitors. The eventual result: less frustration for knowledge workers.
Moves in this direction are already under way as savvy companies analyze their internal social networks and identify bottlenecks. Intel Corp. for example, sees an opportunity in creating technology that lowers the time cost of teamwork. And others, such as Eli Lilly & Co., are providing more corporate support for both internal and external networks. "It's a new mental model for how you run a company," says McKinsey's Bryan. "The winners will be those who can handle more complexity."
At the same time we may see a rise in new forms of Web-based organizations where people can contribute without having their time eaten up by existing hierarchy. Blogs, collaborative online databases (called wikis) and open-source software development all use the Net to handle much of the coordination among people rather than relying on top-down command and control. Such a shift to a digital spine could eventually lessen bureaucratic time burdens on overworked professionals, especially those in such high-cost industries as health care.
If history is any guide, the stuck-at-work epidemic will turn out to be a transitional phase. Historically, as countries and individuals get richer, they work less. Look at the late 19th century, when the U.S. was still a relatively poor country, with a per capita income about equal to that of China today. Back then the typical male household head had precious little leisure time, perhaps only about 1.8 hours a day, on average, after subtracting time for work, chores, and meals. The average factory worker put in about 60 hours a week, with only one day off. Indeed, the first May Day labor demonstrations, in 1886, were driven by the demand for an eight-hour day. Over time, as U.S. productivity and incomes rose, work hours dropped and leisure time increased. It was no coincidence that the five-day work week was first introduced in 1926 by Henry Ford, a decade after he pioneered high-efficiency, mass-production methods.
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By 1970 the 40-hour workweek was the norm. And, at least until recently, European and Asian countries have followed the same trajectory of declining work hours. Since 1991 average annual work hours have dropped by 11% in Japan, 10% in France, 6% in Germany and Britain, and 5% in South Korea. Meanwhile, average monthly work hours in Taiwan are down by 7% over the same stretch. Even work hours in China, while still much higher than in the U.S., may be coming down. "Asians are poorer and still working like crazy," says Alberto Alesina, a Harvard University economics professor who has studied international work hours. "But as they get richer, they are taking more leisure." The one real exception to the rule has been the U.S. Since 1991 the U.S. has grown substantially faster than Europe and Japan. Nevertheless, average annual work hours are down by less than 2%, and that includes all the low-skilled workers who are in less demand today. Interestingly, there are signs that global competition is forcing Europeans to start moving away from their tradition of shorter work hours. The number of Germans working more than 40 hours a week rose sharply last year, to 5.3 million from 4.7 million. Siemens , DaimlerChrysler , Deutsche Bahn, and many smaller companies have been able to increase work hours without corresponding increases in pay. French workers seem to be putting in more hours in the past year or two as well. European executives are sounding more and more like their American counterparts. "Ten years ago, if I was on a business trip, I'd get to my hotel in the evening, and there might be a message or two from my secretary and a couple of faxes," says Philippe Midy, a Paris-based executive at McDonald's Europe who travels extensively around the Continent dealing with supply and logistics issues. Now there's a deluge. "Sometimes I'm answering e-mails at 2 a.m." Companies have been willing to pay big bucks for those longer hours. Over the past 15 to 20 years, people working a 40-hour week received virtually no increase in real pay, according to research by Kuhn and Lozano. Yet employees putting in a 55-hour week saw their real pay rise by 14%. The implication: The gains of two decades of growth have mainly gone to ambitious -- or fearful -- Americans who are working longer hours. But even high pay can't compensate for unrelenting time pressure. Top managers have to realize that encouraging networks and collaboration demands as much attention and resources as supervising and measuring performance in traditional ways. Most companies have built up large human-resources departments, but few have a department of collaboration. "Most managers don't manage social networks effectively," says Babson's Davenport. At Intel, the drive to reduce the time spent sharing knowledge and collaborating is an outgrowth of efforts to better coordinate far-flung operations that stretch from Israel to India. One idea being pursued by Luke Koons, director for information and knowledge management, is "dynamic profiling" -- technologies that automatically summarize areas on which a researcher or a manager is focusing, based on the subjects of their e-mails and Web searches. Such a regularly updated profile could make it less time-consuming to locate potential collaborators and resources, an especially daunting prospect in a large, innovation-minded company such as Intel. Equally important, dynamic profiling doesn't force individuals to spend hours manually updating their profiles as their focus changes. The Off Switch There's plenty of demand for new technologies that more efficiently foster collaboration, such as software that allows virtual meetings, where everyone doesn't need to be present simultaneously. "Our communication tools are woefully inadequate," says Alph Bingham, a top executive at Eli Lilly who is vice-president of e.Lilly. "We are still relying on sticking everyone in a room and hammering it out. It's untenable globally." Another time-eater: all the meetings and e-mails required to manage details of a collaboration or partnership. "Organizations need to recognize that when you engage in collaboration, there's another level of complexity," says Bingham. Part of the solution is to hire people for a new type of position devoted to facilitating or managing networks and relationships. Lilly, for example, created a new internal group -- almost like ombudsmen -- to manage communications among Lilly scientists and myriad outside partners. "This allows the scientists to dedicate less of their time to the collaboration," says Bingham. To reduce time pressures -- and hike productivity -- the number of low-value interactions must be cut. "The usual assumption is that more collaboration is better," says Rob Cross, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce who also runs Network Roundtable, a research group whose members include Schlumberger Microsoft, Intel, Merck, and BP. "But it's important to ask not just where we need to build and connect but where do we need to let go?" By having workers fill out a 15- to 20-minute online survey, Cross can chart who people communicate with, how much time is spent preparing for which meetings, and where the bottlenecks are. "Then I ask executives: 'What decisions are you making that others can make?"' says Cross. "Are there aspects of your role that you could let go of?" Masterfoods used this methodology to map out how its product development, packaging, and process-development staff spent their time. The results were surprising. "When we looked at the data, it turned out that it was too hard to do business internally," says Helferich, then head of Masterfoods' R&D.; People had to talk to 30 or 40 other people just to get their jobs done, which took away from their time to work on new ideas. Notes Helferich: "We were high-density on task and low-density on innovation." Now Masterfoods is in the process of redesigning the workflow of the packaging group to eliminate a lot of the extraneous steps that took up time. If you are high enough in your organization, you can simply choose when to make yourself unavailable. Bryan, one of McKinsey's top consultants, says he has given up cell phones and computers, letting others handle his communications. "I never had time to think," says Bryan. "It's amazing how much you can get done if you don't spend all your time interacting." Many of the most overloaded managers are not yet at a level where they have the luxury of controlling their schedules or dispensing with unproductive e-mails, pesky voice mails, and interminable meetings. But in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time. "The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough death," says Babson's Davenport. "Even today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many hours they are in the office." Of course, there's one shiny new example of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog entry -- all that's seen is the final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on how many hours they log. Reclaiming Your Life The web model may give a glimpse of a less overloaded way of life that lets people take charge of their time while still making a decent living and a real contribution to society. Take Ted Husted, a 46-year-old freelance software consultant who lives in a Rochester (N.Y.) suburb. These days he consults 32 hours a week, remotely, for the Oklahoma Environmental Quality Dept., down from 40 as recently as this summer. But he also spends 10 to 15 hours a week as a major contributor to the Apache open-source software project. Now he has time on weekends to watch his kids play sports. He goes out to lunch with his wife, Barb, every Monday. And he even has time left over to contain the fast-growing maple trees on his corner lot. Meanwhile, his work on the open-source project garners him visibility and respect among his peers. "I think I can keep this pace up indefinitely," says Husted. "But I have to have discipline about it. Now I make sure there's at least one day when I don't even touch a keyboard." Few people will ever make a living as a blogger or a contributor to an open-source software project. But there is pressure to find new ways of organizing work, from both corporations and overworked individuals. "In terms of hours, I keep thinking we're on the verge of a backlash," says Babson's Davenport. Try telling that to Ken Middleton, director of convention sales for Houston's Convention & Visitors Bureau. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he has been putting in grueling 70-hour weeks hustling to find space for meetings that had been scheduled for New Orleans. Even in normal times, though, he works 55 hours a week, including four to six hours on weekends. Does he feel overworked? "Absolutely -- but doesn't everyone? My wife says I need to get a hobby and stick to it. There isn't time for that right now." Who has even a moment for a backlash? Source : BusinessWeek
Oil's well that ends well In Russia's biggest-ever takeover, Gazprom, the country's gas monopoly, agreed to buy a 72.7% stake in Sibneft, an oil firm, for $13.1 billion (its total stake now stands at 75.7%). Gazprom made the deal with Millhouse Capital, Roman Abramovich's investment firm. It marks the last divestment of a major Russian business by Mr Abramovich, who is based in London but is one of Russia's wealthiest business "oligarchs". ---------- In another big merger among America's health insurers, WellPoint announced a $6.5 billion takeover of WellChoice, a smaller rival based in the New York metropolitan area. Analysts have been expecting WellPoint, the country's largest health insurer, to make a large acquisition following UnitedHealth Group's purchase of Pacificare Health Systems in July. ---------------- UBS said it was negotiating a SFr272m ($210m) stake in Beijing Securities, a mid-sized brokerage that operates across China. Earlier, the Swiss financial group announced that it will also take a 1.6% stake in Bank of China for SFr645m BoC's third investment deal with foreign institutions since mid-August. --------------- Equitable Life came under pressure from policyholders to explain last week's decision to drop a negligence claim against Ernst & Young, the firm's former auditor which it blames for its near-collapse in 2000. The litigation has cost Britain's oldest mutual insurer at least 30m ($54m). Equitable was also reportedly close to cutting a deal with 15 former directors with whom it is in dispute. ----------------- In the driver's seat Porsche wants to increase its stake in Volkswagen to 20%. The German luxury carmaker hopes to shield VW, which supplies it with components, from hostile takeovers. But the deal, worth around euro3 billion ($3.6 billion), was viewed with scepticism by some who questioned Porsche's wisdom in tying its fortunes closer to VW's. Porsche's share price fell by 10% after the announcement, although it later rallied. ----------------------- DaimlerChrysler outlined a plan to offer redundancy to 8,500 workers at its Mercedes division in Germany. The carmaker said the move would cost euro950m ($1.1 billion), which it would recoup in efficiency and savings gains. -------------------- Union leaders at Boeing recommended that its members return to work after the terms of a new contract were agreed on. Around 19,000 machinists and auxiliary staff have been striking over proposed changes to benefits, but Boeing now says it will boost pensions and not increase the costs of health insurance. ---------------- US Airways officially completed its merger with America West Airlines and began trading as a single company after a year of restructuring so it could emerge from bankruptcy. Coming soon after Delta and Northwest sought bankruptcy protection and amid high fuel-costs, the event provided welcome news for America's carriers. ---------------- The Stringer show Investors took a dim view of Sony's revival plan, unveiled last week. The company's share price in Tokyo fell, wiping out recent gains. Moody's said it was reviewing Sony's credit rating over concern that the potential for low profits in its electronics unit would stymie the proposed turnaround. -------------------- Sony also suffered a blow in its prominent backing of the much-touted Blu-ray technology for the next generation of high-resolution DVDs. Both Intel and Microsoft backed Toshiba's rival HD-DVD format as the industry standard. --------------- Britain's economy has been weaker than statisticians previously thought. Revised figures indicated that GDP grew by 1.5% in the year to the second quarter, the slowest pace for 12 years. -------------- Lester Crawford resigned as head of America's Food and Drug Administration, less than three months after he was confirmed in the job. The FDA has come under intense criticism recently for approving the sale of Vioxx, and faces a potential political storm over a delayed decision on access to morning-after contraceptives. ---------------- Oil prices traded at around $65 per barrel as oil companies in Texas said that Hurricane Rita had a limited effect on their refining capacity. Separate reports indicated that widespread damage to oil rigs in the Gulf coast could affect production. Meanwhile, George Bush urged Americans to cut back on the use of their cars in an effort to save petrol. -------------- SOURCE : Economist
On August 24, 2005, the Lok Sabha unanimously passed the domestic violence bill, 2005, except a caution about the rights of other women and problems of implementation. Significantly, the news was hidden in the inner pages of the national newspapers. This is one of the several bills relating to women, such as sexual harassment at the workplace, reservations in the legislature, amendments to the Hindu Succession Act, etc, that were lined up for discussion in the monsoon session of Parliament. The moment is reminiscent of the 1980s when a slew of legislations were made addressing issues of violence, obscenity, trafficking, etc. While this golden decade of legislations materialised in response to large mobilisations around those issues, the present moment cannot definitely boast of such a context. No wonder this time round, the bills have not evoked much response in the public domain. If we carefully scrutinise the national or local newspapers in the last two months, except the bill on womens reservations, there have been few discussions on these bills/laws.
On domestic violence, we have had many bills making the rounds in the last decade. The 2002 bill, introduced during the NDA regime, attracted criticism from womens groups due to its regressive features such as a narrow definition of domestic violence; a self-defence clause for husbands; mandatory counselling and ill-defined jurisdiction of the courts. The criticism led the bill to be refereed to a parliamentary committee. The current law is a revised version, incorporating many of the recommendations.
A plausible explanation for the loud silence on the run up to this law could be a certain commonsensical notion of domestic violence that has taken root in todays discussions and media reportage. Most reports on such violence in the popular media tend to invoke sentimental or emotional responses in the readers about victims who are at the receiving end. Quite often positions/statements/reports of womens groups have also contributed to this state of affairs. Undoubtedly, these thick descriptions have served the purpose of unearthing the extent of violence within the home, the importance of which cannot be underestimated. Over the years, however, they have also resulted in certain predictable assumptions about this violence, the victim woman and the efficacy of the law in combating it better and effective laws will prevent such violence.
There is a need to problematise these assumptions by foregrounding the complex history of the engagement of the womens movement with the law; the difficult relationship of women with public institutions and the ways in which the focus on violence tends to depoliticise contestations in the family.
Shifts in the Discourse of Law Reform
Campaigns around law reform were a central feature of the contemporary womens movement that began in the 1970s. Certain sets of laws came under scrutiny for their patriarchal biases while some new laws were demanded to address those injuries specific to womens lives. Section 498A was the first law in the Indian Penal Code that specifically recognised violence against married women in homes. While Section 498A addressed physical and mental violence, Section 304B, the dowry death section, penalised the husband if the death of the wife occurred within seven years of the marriage and if there was a demand for dowry preceding the death. These changes in law were criminal in character, thus penalising the perpetrators of domestic violence who included the husband and his family. In addition to new laws, there was also a demand for courts and police stations that would be sensitive to women. Women police stations, family courts and women criminal courts began to mark their presence, especially in the cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
What emerged during implementation can be read in many ways. Womens groups across the country had to strive hard to get these laws implemented protests, training police, lawyers and judges, popularising the legal changes through legal literacy programmes, etc. Several reports of the implementation of these laws in the 1980s pointed to lacunae at various levels, especially the poor rates of registration and conviction and stereotypical notions of victim women in the legal system. It became evident by the first half of the 1990s that the process of actualisation of womens rights as citizens would be a difficult one. In the police stations or in the courts womens rights were predominantly getting interpreted in relation to their identities of wives, sisters and mothers. Moreover, the terrain of criminal law was holding out so little for womens complex needs in the family. A jailed husband provided little or nothing for struggling women.
While one was grappling with these problems, there emerged another impasse that was even more significant best illustrated by the familiar icon of Shahbano, the Muslim woman whose claim for maintenance brought into debate an entirely new set of questions for feminist politics.
The Supreme Court while upholding Shahbanos claim for maintenance directed that the state should draft uniform civil laws so that all Indian women could have similar legal provisions for the dissolution of marriages, maintenance, custody and so on, as opposed to separate personal laws for religious communities. Underlying this directive was the position that (a) Islamic laws were arbitrary and discriminatory as compared to the revised Hindu laws, and (b) Muslim women needed progressive laws to liberate them from their oppressive patriarchy. Such a position played itself directly into the agendas of the Hindu fundamentalist parties and placed Muslim women in a precarious position. Against this violent political configuration, womens groups who had hitherto lobbied for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) found the project of gender justice a complex one.
The judicial response to Shahbanos claim for maintenance demonstrated that womens demands for their rights were not only adjudicated through the lens of their familial roles but also through that of their religious communities. No wonder there was a relative lull and weariness in proposing reforms of personal laws. However, it did not mean that attempts at changes and reforms in laws had stopped altogether. With the experience of UCC, the project of law reform began to be imagined in terms of specific incremental changes as opposed to overarching umbrella legislations. An emphasis was also placed on court room litigation as a mode of establishing progressive precedents in the law for women.
Contents of the New Law
The efforts to draft a law for domestic violence in some sense drew on experiences with law reform: the limited use of criminal law; the long drawn nature and diversity of personal law remedies; and the need for clarity in the definition of domestic violence to name a few.
The salient features of the new law and the departures it makes from the existing laws are: (i) The recognition of the second wife and other womens rights. So far, the law (except Muslim law) recognised only monogamous marriage and the rights of only one wife. Protection, property and maintenance got accorded only to this wife. (ii) The recognition that domestic violence can be physical, psychological, sexual, verbal and economic. This is to contest the prevalent notion that violence is physical and related to dowry alone. (iii) The enunciation of the right of women to live in their marital homes. This constitutes the clarification and consolidation of a right that has hitherto been put to use by few women. (iv) The provision of ad interim protection orders. This is again an existing right not widely used for protection of women in the family; it is necessary to provide speedy relief. (v) The creation of an official cadre called protection officers and recognition for NGOs as service-providers. This is to facilitate access to the judiciary by creating auxiliary services around it. (vi) The provision of positive entitlements maintenance, protection from future violence, the right to custody over children, as opposed to mere penalisation of the husband.
The claims under this law would be adjudicated in the magistrates courts. These courts, being located at the sub-district level, will enable a large number of women to access them. Some of these reliefs already exist in law, but are dispersed over civil, criminal and personal laws, forcing women to appeal to various courts. More importantly, they can be used by women from all religions. It fulfils, at least on paper, many of the hopes that women have articulated over the last several years. Indeed, it is the first comprehensive legal acknowledgement of domestic violence.
continued... Locating Womens Battles in the Narratives of Violence
Optimism in the efficacy of any new legislation, however, is difficult to hold on to after two decades of experiences with laws in our country. Even for those of us supporting the enactment of such a law, it may be difficult to predict how it will fare in the actual bids for justice in the courts.
But posing the issue in terms of the efficacy of the law may erase what domestic violence signals. An understanding of violence as cruelty perpetrated on hapless victims would require us look for measures to: (a) prevent its occurrence, and (b) protect its victims. Increasingly, it is becoming evident that such a narrative is too simple to describe the gender dynamics in the family. Despite the number of women dying and greviously injured, women are using various kinds of formal and informal spaces to grapple with gender dynamics. Moreover, they do so repeatedly, over a period of time, perhaps on different kinds of issues that may give rise to conflict and abuse in the family. By focusing on violence alone, we may be missing the critical details of actual battles.
A look at the nature of demands that women are articulating in these formal and informal spaces provides an opening into the terrain of this battle. Accounts of women approaching various agencies for help have shown that punishment of their perpetrators is not necessarily a priority for them. A close look at the appeals that women have made in relation to the domestic violence law 498A in the last two decades shows that they are seeking reliefs which extend beyond those that can be offered by courts and police stations. Women are seeking responsible husbands, a role in decision-making, self-respect and a dignified family life, which in itself often contributes to the violence they experience. In turn the justice they seek when they approach a court or a police station, is not necessarily an appeal to a punishing arm of the law. The law does not form an end in itself for these women, but rather, a continuation of the struggles they have initiated in their homes.
Considering that domestic violence emerges in a context where women are objecting to conform to the given roles and seeking to change them, to what extent can legal intervention empower them in their struggles? Despite the violence women experience, very few women opt to live outside of their marital family. Rather, many women fight to retain their marital space and stake out their claims there. It is here that domestic violence should be placed and understood. Women have always instrumentalised (to the extent possible) the natal family, caste and community elders as important networks in negotiating domestic spaces. Indeed, womens groups and the corollary appeal to laws that they have generated, is a relatively recent entrant into these negotiations.
What is of concern is that the current perspectives that focus on violence and victimhood are not able to capture these strategic battles of women. More importantly, such a focus also seems to prevent us from seeing the nature of current contestations in the family. For instance, in the last 10 years, a spate of reports on the institutional responses to domestic violence have focused on: (a) the inadequacies of laws and institutions; and (b) documenting the extent of violence and classifying it. This has fed into several campaigns aimed at increasing the visibility of such violence in the public sphere. An important agenda of these campaigns has been to lobby for a comprehensive law on domestic violence. This seemingly natural response of looking to law for resolutions, we feel, is a problematic move. Such an enclosure in the legal realm individualises the woman into a case and leads to a depoliticisation of the discussion of womens battles in the family. Is it this closure, which is producing the silence that we are noticing? The campaigns around law should be able to stimulate further discussions about the contemporary reality of changing notions of what it means to be a wife or a mother. While the very mobilisation around the making of laws challenges the existing norms about gender relations, the actual laws, after they are made, also begin to set up new norms. In this sense, the actual laws may not work in the courts and police stations but may have effects in other spheres. As we have tried to point out, the process of translating the complex realities of womens lives into the logic of law is a difficult one. Whatever may be the outcomes of the law, women will continue to struggle for a better status in their families, with support that is precarious and ambiguous. The ensuing battles may take place in various locations and intersections courts, court corridors, police stations, panchayats, or the family.
Formal talks are about to begin on Turkish membership of the European Union. Within Turkey and outside it, there are questions about the predominantly Muslim countrys readiness for Europebut also encouraging signs BARRING last-minute upsets, never to be ruled out as the diplomats continued haggling this week, Turkey is on the brink of realising its fondest national dream: on Monday October 3rd, formal talks will begin on Turkish membership of a European Union at whose gate it has been waiting for 40 years. But as so often happens, the settlement of one questionshould Turkey step all the way into the EUs ante-room?has quickly given rise to a host of others. People are already asking how long rapprochement with the EU can be sustained, in the face of opposition in Europe to Turkeyand in Turkey to Europe.
Scepticism over the Turks surfaced again this week. Austria's government continued to insist that Turkey be given an explicit alternative to joining the club: a privileged partnership that falls short of full EU membership. As a result, European diplomats were unable to agree a common negotiating framework on Thursday; an emergency meeting was called for Sunday evening, to try to break the deadlock before the Monday deadline. The Austrians are not alone in their scepticism. This week, legislators in the European Parliament, while endorsing the start of talks with the government in Ankara, balked at ratifying Turkeys inclusion in a customs protocolon the grounds that the ships and aircraft of Cyprus, an EU member, are still barred from Turkish ports. Dominique de Villepin, the French prime minister, had earlier said that Turkey must recognise Cyprus in order to join the EU. Nicolas Sarkozy, a popular Gaullist who is well placed to win the French presidency in 2007, opposes Turkish membership. So does Angela Merkel, who is favourite to take Germanys chancellorship following its recent elections, which ended in a hung parliament. Overall, just 35% of EU citizens support Turkish membership, according to a recent poll by Eurobarometer. Europeans are queasy about the idea of taking in a big Muslim member, and of hordes of Turkish job-seekers overwhelming the EU's current members. But the other part of Turkeys Euro-question is even harder: how much resistance will there be among the Turks to the changeslegal, economic, and above all culturalthat the EU is demanding? For Turks who want a European future, there was a dollop of hope last weekend, when brave historians managed to hold a conference in Istanbul to discuss the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. It was the first time Turkish pundits were permitted to challenge publicly the official line, holding that the mass deportation of Armenians in 1915 did not amount to a conspiracy to kill them. As participants read out letters between the Young Turks then ruling the empire, a rapt audience was left with no doubt that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deliberately slain. Planned originally for May, the Armenian forum was called off then at the behest of Cemil Cicek, the justice minister. It was nearly scuppered anew last week, when an Istanbul court used a technicality to order its cancellation. This time Mr Cicek offered a way outchanging the venue. And Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, condemned the court ruling: the first time an elected leader had so publicly rebuked Turkeys courts. It was also the first time that Mr Erdogan had so clearly given a lead to public opinion instead of pandering to populism. The establishment media fell in behind him, decrying the noisy nationalists who pelted the conference delegates with eggs. Cynics, who recall Mr Erdogans earlier moves to appease conservatives by criminalising adultery, see his recent outburst of liberalism as a last-ditch effort to clinch the October 3rd date. Be that as it may, people close to the prime minister insist he has pinned his political fortunes on further reforms, with or without the EU. He cant compete on nationalism with the ultra-nationalists, so its in his interest to keep on reforming, says a western diplomat. This may explain some other recent moves by Mr Erdogan: he dared to admit, in a speech in the Kurdish stronghold of Diyarbakir, that Turkey had erred in its dealings with the Kurds. These frank words enraged nationalists, including some members of his own party. In the country as a whole, nationalism has been bubbling: it has been rising since June 2004, when the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ended a five-year truce.
Chauvinism has surfaced in ugly ways. There have been attempted lynchings of Kurdish civilians outside their native south-east region. A recent poll shows the jingoistic Nationalist Action Party, which failed to enter parliament in the 2002 elections, would gain seats today. As well as countering this dark mood, Mr Erdogan must cope with foes in the army who fear that rapprochement with Europe will reduce their powerand who see in Turkeys internal conflicts a chance to restore that influence. But Mr Erdogan has rebuffed army demands to re-introduce a draconian anti-terror law. Solving the Kurdish problem requires more democracy, not repression, he insists. He may have to take further risksfor example by endorsing, despite army opposition, a deal that would coax 5,000 PKK fighters from their mountain strongholds, both in northern Iraq and within Turkey. The coming year will be a big test of Mr Erdogans leadership. Austria takes over the presidency of the EU in January and will doubtless continue to promote its idea of a partnership between Turkey and Europe, instead of full membership. Next year will also see the retirement of General Hilmi Ozkok, a liberal chief of the general staff. His likely successor is the land-forces commander, Yasar Buyukanit, a more old-fashioned type of soldier. It is to keep such secularist hawks at bay that Mr Erdogan has ignored some demands from his pious voters, such as boosting religious education and easing curbs on the headscarf. Another challenge, in his dealings both with sceptical Europeans and his own voters, is to honour his claim to be giving Turkey its first clean government. Charges of irregularity in the sale of shares in the state refinery, Tuprasand also in a tender for the operation of Istanbuls Galata porthave weakened that claim. Unless he deals with sleaze, Mr Erdogan may lose the trust of his own citizens and his European partners. That would be a pity, when the prime minister has risked so much for Turkeys European future.
Unpeeling Apple's Nano Researcher iSupply took a look inside the latest iPod to find out how much Apple is making off it and who supplies its parts
Rumors swirled for weeks that Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs had a product up his sleeve that would upstage the long-awaited ROKR music-playing phone. The speculation was confirmed on Sept. 7, when Apple unveiled with fanfare the iPod Nano. The ultra-thin digital music player has been met with mostly rave reviews, and it stole the limelight from the ROKR, developed with Motorola Now that the Nano is on the market, attention has turned to more practical questions. Among them: How fat are Apple's margins on it?
Market research firm iSuppli set out to satisfy the curiosity by buying the $199 2-gigabyte version of the Nano and tearing it apart. The verdict? It costs Apple $90.18 in materials to build the unit and $8 to assemble it, leaving a profit margin before marketing and distribution costs of about 50%. That's consistent with the margins on earlier iPod versions and serves as a reminder of what a profit machine the iPod family of products has become for Apple since it was introduced in 2001.
Margins on the computer-maker's other products tend to be slimmer. An iSuppli teardown of the Mac Mini found the cost of material and manufacturing on that computer to be about $283, leaving a gross margin of 44% before marketing and distribution costs.
WINNERS AND LOSERS. "Historically, Steve won't accept anything less than 20% gross margin on any product," says Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin. "In the rare cases when the gross margins have dropped below that, it has been a fluke." Apple has sold some 16 million iPods in the first nine months of fiscal 2005, and 21 million since its inception. Thus far in fiscal 2005, the iPod has brought in $2.6 billion in revenue, accounting for about 25% of Apple's total.
Another set of questions answered by iSupply's exercise: Who supplies Nano's components -- and who got cut out of the pie? The analysis found San Jose (Calif.)-based Cypress Semiconductor to be a big winner, at the expense of Synaptics . Synaptics specializes in touch-sensitive technology that forms the basis of the click wheel used to navigate between songs on previous iPods.
But Santa Clara (Calif.)-based Synaptics lost out to an Apple-designed click wheel that has contains a 55-cent chip from Cypress, says iSuppli analyst Chris Crotty. The Cypress chip appears to save Apple about 45 cents on a comparable Synaptics chip, which costs about $1, says David Carey, president of Portelligent, a research firm that has analyzed other iPod models.
CHIP LEADERS. Snagging the chip inside the Nano is important for Cypress, says Crotty. The coup is likely to boost interest in the company's programmable system-on-a-chip family of components that are used widely in products ranging from lamps to exercise equipment, he notes.
The Nano also marks the return of longtime iPod audio-chip supplier PortalPlayer in Santa Clara, Calif., which has supplied the audio chips for most of Apple's iPods over the years but missed out on the iPod Shuffle, released in January. For that product Apple used a chip from SigmaTel , based in Austin, Tex.
Crotty says SigmaTel's chips have often been the favorite of companies building MP3 players that store music on flash memory chips, which consume less power, while PortalPlayer has been favored by companies whose players use hard drives. Before the Shuffle and Nano, all iPods used hard drives for storage, so PortalPlayer was a natural fit.
MEMORY HOG. Now, Apple's decision to use PortalPlayer for the Nano shows it's making inroads with customers whose devices rely on flash memory. "PortalPlayer ruled with hard-drive players, and Sigmatel ruled flash players," Crotty says. "Now, we're seeing them invade each other's turf."
Apple's choice of memory supplier is making perhaps the biggest waves. Having tied up 40% of the so-called NAND flash memory output of South Korean chipmaker Samsung Crotty estimates that Apple is paying $54 for 2 gigabytes worth of memory. That would cost any other manufacturer $90, giving Apple a discount of about 40%.
The arrangement not only makes it tough for other manufacturers to compete on price but will also cause them huge supply headaches, since Samsung is the world's biggest flash memory vendor. "How do you compete if you can't get the memory you need?" Crotty says. "And even if you can get it, you're not able to sell the volume needed to negotiate a better price."
NARROWING THE FIELD. Giving Apple a break -- and in the process squeezing other MP3 player manufacturers -- also benefits Samsung's own MP3 player business, Crotty says. "The market is heading toward consolidation, with its own big three, Apple, Samsung, and Sony," he says.
As of 2004, the top three manufacturers of flash-based players were iRiver, Creative Technologies and Samsung, according to IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian, with Sony lagging far behind the pack. Other companies in the business include Dell and Matsushita , which sells players under its Panasonic brand. Still, some are feeling heat. D&M; Holdings, owner of the Rio brand, recently announced it was getting out of the business.
All in all, it looks like the Nano may have extended the iPod's reign -- and given a major boon to select suppliers. SOURCE : BusinessWeek
Software: Can software really predict the outcome of an armed conflict? IN DECEMBER 1990, 35 days before the outbreak of the Gulf war, an unassuming retired colonel appeared before the Armed Services Committee of America's House of Representatives and made a startling prediction. The Pentagon's casualty projectionsthat 20,000 to 30,000 coalition soldiers would be killed in the first two weeks of combat against the Iraqi armywere, he declared, completely wrong. Casualties would, he said, still be less than 6,000 after a month of hostilities. Military officials had also projected that the war would take at least six months, including several months of fighting on the ground. That estimate was also wide of the mark, said the former colonel. The conflict would last less than two months, with the ground war taking just 10 to 14 days. Operation Desert Storm began on January 17th with an aerial bombardment. President George Bush senior declared victory 43 days later. Fewer than 1,400 coalition troops had been killed or wounded, and the ground-war phase had lasted five days. The forecaster, a military historian called Trevor Dupuy, had been strikingly accurate. How had he managed to outperform the Pentagon itself in predicting the outcome of the conflict? His secret weapon was a piece of software called the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model, or TNDM, designed by the Dupuy Institute, an unusual military think-tank based near Washington, DC. It was the result of collaboration between computer programmers, mathematicians, weapons experts, military historians, retired generals and combat veterans. But was the result a fluke, or was the TNDM always so accurate? Bosnia was its next big test. In November 1995, General Wesley Clark asked the Dupuy Institute to project casualty scenarios for NATO's impending peacekeeping mission, Operation Joint Endeavour. The resulting Bosnia Casualty Estimate Study, prepared using results from the TNDM, stated that there was a 50% chance that no more than 17 peacekeepers would be killed in the first year. A year later, six had diedand the Dupuy Institute's reputation had been established. The TNDM's predictive power is due in large part to the mountain of data on which it draws, thought to be the largest historical combat database in the world. The Dupuy Institute's researchers comb military archives worldwide, painstakingly assembling statistics which reveal cause-and-effect relationships, such as the influence of rainfall on the rate of rifle breakdowns during the Battle of the Ardennes, or the percentage of Iraqi soldiers killed in a unit before the survivors in that unit surrendered during the Gulf war. Analysts then take a real battle or campaign and write equations linking causes (say, appropriateness of uniform camouflage) to effects (sniper kill ratios). These equations are then tested against the historical figures in the database, making it possible to identify relationships between the circumstances of an engagement and its outcome. All of this is akin to working out the physical laws that govern the behaviour of the atmosphere, which can then be used in weather forecasting. But understanding the general behaviour of weather systems is not enough: weather forecasting also depends on detailed meteorological measurements that describe the initial conditions. The same is true of the TNDM. To model a specific conflict, analysts enter a vast number of combat factors, including data on such disparate variables as foliage, muzzle velocities, dimensions of fordable and unfordable rivers, armour resistance, length and vulnerabilities of supply lines, tank positions, reliability of weapons and density of targets. These initial conditions are then fed into the mathematical model, and the result is a three-page report containing predictions of personnel and equipment losses, prisoner-of-war capture rates, and gains and losses of terrain. What is perhaps even more surprising than the TNDM's predictive accuracy is the fact that it is for sale. The $93,000 purchase price includes instruction classes, a year of technical support and a subscription to the TNDM newsletter, although subsequent updates to the software cost extra. Organisations that have acknowledged buying the software include the defence ministries of Sweden, South Africa, Finland, Switzerland and South Korea, along with the aerospace giant Boeing. Such customers rarely divulge the uses to which they put the software. Rather than simply buying the TNDM, most clients contract the Dupuy Institute to produce studies that combine the software's predictions with human analysis. The institute is currently preparing a secret forecast of the duration and intensity of the Iraqi insurgency for the Centre for Army Analysis, a Pentagon agency. Leader of the pack The TNDM is not the only war-forecasting system. Many other systems have been developed, primarily by armed forces, government agencies and defence contractors in America, Australia, Britain, France and Germany. A survey of American war-forecasting systems by the Dupuy Institute found that very few are for sale or hire, and officials in charge of government models are often unwilling to share them with rival agencies. The simple availability of the TNDM has favoured its growth, although technology-transfer laws not surprisingly restrict its sale to certain countries. Another attraction of the TNDM over rival models is the Dupuy Institute's independence: it has no weapons to sell, is not involved in internecine competition for budgetary funding, and has no political stake in military outcomes. Software developed primarily for, or by, a contractor or a branch of the armed forces often favours certain hardware or strategies, says Manfred Braitinger, head of forecasting software at IABG, a Munich-based firm that is Germany's leading developer of war-forecasting systems. The Air Force and Army models differ widely, for example, in their estimates of how easy it is to shoot down planes. Systems with a wide customer base, like the TNDM, are regarded as more credible, since they do not have such biases. The TNDM's reliance on real combat data, rather than results from war games or exercises, also gives it an edge. Another forecasting system, TACWAR, was used by America's Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Like many models, it was largely developed with data from war games. As a result, says Richard Anderson, a tank specialist at the Dupuy Institute, TACWAR and other programs based on laser tag exercises tend to run hot, or overestimate casualties. Real-bullet data is more reliable, because fear of death makes soldiers more conservative in actual combat than they are in exercises, resulting in fewer losses. Yet another factor that distinguishes the TNDM from other war-forecasting systems is its unusual ability to take intangible factors into account. During NATO's air campaign above Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, for example, the Serbs built decoy tanks out of wood and tarpaulins and painted trompe l'oeil bomb-holes on to bridges. Microwave ovens, modified to operate with their doors open and emit radiation, were used as decoys to attract HARM missiles that home in on the radar emissions of anti-aircraft batteries. The Concepts Evaluation Model (CEM) developed at the Pentagon's Centre for Army Analysis, provides an instructive example. While testing the model, programmers entered historical data from the Battle of the Bulge, the German offensive in 1944 against American forces in Belgium. The CEM predicted heavy German losses in the initial attack, yet German casualties were in fact light. The probable error? The model overlooked the shock value of launching a surprise attack. Analysts duly recalibrated the CEMusing an early version of the TNDM. The Dupuy Institute is renowned for its ability to take into account such non-material factors: the effect of air support on morale, fear engendered by attack with unexpected weaponry, courage boosted by adequate field hospitals. The mother of all intangibles, within the TNDM model, is initiative, or the ability of lower-ranking soldiers to improvise on the battlefield. Armies from democratic countrieswhere people are empowered to make decisionsbenefit by giving their soldiers some scope to change tactics in the midst of a firefight. Maintaining the accuracy of the TNDM means feeding it with a constant stream of new information. The Dupuy Institute's analysts visit past battlefields to augment their statistical data, follow the arms industry closely and cultivate contacts with government defence procurers. In countries where access to military archives is limited, the Institute surreptitiously pays a handful of clerks to provide photocopies. The next challenge will be to expand the TNDM's ability to forecast the outcomes of asymmetric conflicts, such as the Iraqi insurgency. To this end, the Dupuy Institute is hoping to get its hands on the Vietcong archives, as Vietnam opens up. Insurgencies rarely leave much of a paper trail, but the Vietnamese kept detailed records of their struggle against the French and Americans. The resulting papers provide the world's most extensive documentation of guerrilla fighting. SOURCE : Economist
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India - China Economic Competition Historical Perspective
This competition began when Mao Zedong took control of China in 1948 and announced to the world that it will achieve economic prosperity second to none in the world. In addition it will undo all economic and political treaties forced on weak China in the nineteenth century by the colonial Europe and the US . Its first shot was fired with the Chinese entry into the Korean War and very nearly defeating the Americans. Second and third shots were to rush economic progress by adopting the Soviet economic model and challenge US influence in East Asia ( Taiwan & Vietnam ). When Mao took over in 1948, China had been an independent nation since the 3rd century BC. It had a well-developed system of government and a prosperous economy. A hundred years prior to the Communist take over in 1948; the US and the European colonial powers had signed a host of unequal treaties, which allowed their direct control and access to the coastal areas of China . . Later the Japanese came and set about dismantling the European and US influences and rule Civil war ensued which brought the communists to power. None of the powers, either the West or the Japanese could destroy its economic system. It stayed intact and at times it progressed. Until the outbreak of civil war in 1925, Chinese were self sufficient in food, general everyday products and services. Result of the Western treaties was that the Industrial Revolution had missed China . This suited the colonials fine, as business was good without it. In 1950, Chinese statistics of that time stated that Chinese population was about 500 million and an economy was about $75 billion.
India had lost its independence a thousand year prior to 1947. The Muslim hordes from Central Asia did a job on it until the British took control of Bengal in 1757 (and rest of India in 1857). For the next two hundred years, the Brits set about killing the industry and commerce in India to provide work for the factories in Manchester , Birmingham , Sheffield and service industry centered around London . Economically it devastated the nation. From 1757 till 1947, it has been estimated by the British Colonial Office (present day Commonwealth Office) that India transferred roughly a billion dollar a year to England , which otherwise would have gone to upgrade industry and commerce at home. This is a huge amount, sucked out of an unwilling nation. In present day context it is equivalent to about seven trillion dollars transferred to England over two hundred years. At the time of independence in 1947, India had 370 million souls and a $45 billion economy. Other $20 billion component of the economy had been transferred to East & West Pakistan. Politically the 800 years Muslim rule was harsh and murderous. Economically the British took away every thing of value, which India had.
In short the Chinese and the Indian started their new self-government roughly at about the same time in 1948 & 1947 respectively. The Chinese economy was a bit ahead both in terms of its size and its infrastructure. India suffered the indignity of being ruled by a foreign power and its infrastructure was designed to serve the colonial masters to collect and transfer money to England . China stayed politically independent except for trade and commerce, which in the coastal areas was in the hands of the colonials. India suffered the additional indignity of being divided into India and Pakistan .
Economic System from 1950 to 1965
Both India and China opted for the Soviet model of central economic planning and five years or seven year plans to usher new era of prosperity. Money was scarce for development hence foreign aid was needed. India received some but its association with the Soviets was a stumbling block. Soviets had no big surplus of money hence they could not spare much. Whatever money they had, initially they preferred to give it to the Chinese. Hence, India 's economic progress in this period stayed mediocre. India built dams to irrigate the land for agriculture and generate electricity. Steel mills were built to supply raw materials to the factories. Famines were averted but not much else could be done as the West promised aid and then withdrew it ( US withdrawal of Steel mill help at Bokaro).
China received all of its development related money from the Communist Soviets. In addition Communists in Beijing confiscated all the private property, hence were flush with cash to fight Korean War and build a huge military machine. This also resulted in their economic resurgence. Premier Chou En Lai boasted of food self sufficiency in 1956 (true or not is unknown). The industrial production was supposed to triple from 1957 to 1962 in what is today remembered as "The Great Leap Forward". This later turned out to be a net waste of money.
There is one area that China always had which India never had i.e. British colony of Hong Kong . It was the Chinese window to sell their products to the rest of the world. The Chinese who left mainland China were welcomed in Hong Kong . It was a duty free heaven. There, they set up businesses, which exported Chinese made products. It is estimated that about $5 billion dollars a year of Chinese made products were sold to the world during this period. In other words the Communist Chinese, using Hong Kong as a gateway, exploited British ingenuity of trade and export. Hence Chinese had no need for borrowing money elsewhere, they had their own. It allowed them to break free from the Soviet influence by 1960. Chinese have always overstated their food production. It suited them well.
India from 1954 to 1965 struggled. Grossly mismanaged industry never delivered. Power plants, never produced the rated amount of electricity. Bureaucracy and the politicians were greedy and inexperienced to run the economy. Hence when the famine visited India in 1965, there was not enough power being generated to make up for the deficient monsoon. Benevolent America stepped in with shipment of huge amount of food to India .
At about 1965, the master bureaucrat in China , Chou En Lai, was stating repeatedly that China had made a major breakthrough in economic and military areas. They now possessed the atomic bomb and had the muscle to tussle with the US or the Soviets. At about year-end 1965, India was in the grip of famine; whose effects lasted two years. Comparatively, China was under the influence of a Cultural Revolution, which was devastating food and industrial production.
Economically Chinese economy had grown in size from $75 billion in 1950 to $140 billion in 1970 with 750 million mouths to feed. Indian economy had grown to about $90 billion with about 550 million mouths to feed. Economically, advantage to the either side was not huge. The difference in per capita income did not change much, since 1950. The Chinese had a bigger economy, but had too many mouths to feed. The Cultural Revolution upheaval had brought negative growth both in industrial and agricultural sectors. This trend continued well into the early seventies.
New Era in Chinese economy begins in 1970s
The Cultural Revolution failed in China . Mao Zedong and his coterie's power had been weakened and he was looking for outside help. US were looking for allies in the Soviet backyard to encircle them. The marriage of US interests and the Chinese interests was just a matter of time. The then government of Pakistan facilitated the dialogue. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited China secretly, followed by President Nixon's visit in 1973. No joint pacts were signed but indirect understanding was stuck in which US agreed to economically help China , if Chinese maintain military pressure along Soviet border. It was a match made in heaven. Mao readily agreed, but then President Nixon resigned. Other presidents after Nixon took some steps but not enough to open the money and technology floodgate. Change took place when strongly anti Soviet President Reagan got elected in 1980. He was going to do everything to undermine the Soviets. Helping the former enemy China became buzzword of that administration. Afghanistan war of early eighties helped President Reagan to get all the US Congressional approvals.
Money in large sums did not arrive in China until 1982. Prior to this both Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai had died and a more pragmatic leader had taken control of the Chinese destiny. In this period Hong Kong maintained the primary role of providing an outlet for the Chinese products, duty free. Rest of the world viewed the US - China co-operation as a positive development. Oversees Chinese Diaspora started to invest heavily in the Chinese manufacturing sector. Direct US business investment followed. Indian economy after suffering an agricultural setback during 1965, recovered a bit. Bangladesh war placed a heavy burden but a newborn confidence of its victory at Dhaka and exploding of nuclear device in 1973 brought a fresh focus of India 's economic capability. Desire for food self-sufficiency resulted in tremendous resources being placed for agricultural management. A new government 1975 removed some barriers to the economic development. Result, economy recovered. Performance of the Indian economy from 1970 to 1980 was a bit better.
In the context of India - China , Indian leaders could not read thru the fine print of China US rapprochement. In fact they missed the point that this relationship is a political statement to keep the Soviets busy in the East while the West makes gains in the Europe . In return China will be developed to equalize Soviet power in the East. By the end of the seventies, Chinese economy was $180 billion and 980 million mouths to feed. This performance was poor. Political turmoil had taken a huge toll. But by the mid seventies a new pragmatic leader had taken control in Beijing . He was willing to do anything to get US money and technology Indian economy maintained 5.5% growth path throughout seventies. By 1980, it was $150 billion economy with 700 million mouths to feed. Interestingly, per capita economic gap had been narrowed a bit in India 's favor. China had reeled under its political uncertainties.
