Recently Sam Pitroda recently mentioned that - "too much focus on engineering and medical education has created a situation in India where liberal arts really did not get the kind of attention it deserved." He said: "A good liberal arts education is important to produce leaders. India has now begun to recognizse that we need not only world class engineering education, we also need world-class liberal arts education. And, we agree that the model we have in (University of) Chicago or Harvard is a model that we need to look at , but it needs to be Indianised - it has to be of a local context." Clearly, Pitroda is talking about the skewed model of having competitive exams for professional courses only which has created a void in liberal arts education in India. Unlike US system, Indian universities do not have a uniform SAT for admission across disciplines – so while for entry to professional courses like engineering and medicine we rely on AIEEE/SEEE and PMT/CPMT’s bu...

"It was his child - the bank, how could he let it die?" - these were the thoughts which reverberated in Gopaldas's mind on that cold winter morning as he sipped his morning tea before readying himself for office .... for the last time, he thought. But had it not been for him, the Bank would have been sold out long ago. Samaj Uday Cooperative Bank was an ailing bank and so small in its operations that apart from its own depositors and borrowers, hardly anyone knew about the Bank. Started in the early years of Indian independence by a group of small traders along Gandhian principles - the Bank's main aim was to provide credit to small traders and businessmen. Gopaldas had joined the Bank in September 1962, the month he remembered so precisely because it was the month India went to war with China. He had joined as a junior clerk but his diligence in the early years saw him rise fast and become an officer by the time he got married. By 1984 he was among the senior managem...

Having been personally associated with an attempt to create a 'personalized' news reader, it was amusing to read views of Eric Schmidt on the subject. Bang on target – Eric steered clear of what a personalized news reader should be, and just highlighted that the increase in the personalized (also mobile) devices which we use to consume info will automatically lead to need for personalizing the content itself. However, looking at personalized news from someone else's eyes, I for the first time am realizing that for all the good efforts of the geek world – humans may not need personalized news after all ! By personalized news I mean, the news which I as an individual am interested in. For example some ways to determine the classifications for such news are: All News from sources chosen by me Any News related to the topics which I am interested in (Sports / tech etc) News being read by people in my network (colleagues, friends, family) News which relates to any entity i...

Continuing the chain of thought from my previous post , I got thinking as to whether the changes in the Indian economy since 1990's have been top down and visionary or merely reactionary and ad-hoc. The conclusion which I have reached has been that they are a combination, but above all - they are based on a Groundswell from the masses. While multiple sectors - IT, Retail, Financial Services and even manufacturing - have contributed to rise of the Indian Tiger; to illustrate my point, I would concentrate on the Financial Sector [ related post ]. Pre-liberalization, there were many shackles, like license raj, on the Indian financial services sector. But more gruesome were the factors of immature or absent regulatory supervision and resulting power of large investors to manipulate the free markets. The Banking sector meanwhile was dominated by PSU banks which were slow, bureaucratic and customer unfriendly. Starting the 90s there were many top down reforms starting like Dematerializ...

I have previously pointed a lot of links [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]to Atanu Dey's blog, also praising his RISC model for development of Indian rural/semi-urban areas. However, this comment on his blog (by someone with an alias Human Blasphemy ) sets out some very pertinent doubts on this model - reproducing it here: Dear Atanu, I heard you during your session on RISC at XIMB. One of the members asked you a question whether Rural Infrastructure can be developed through people’s participation and through microfinance. Which according to you is not possible, because large infrastructure projects have to be completed at one go. But the problem is that why will any private company invest in rural infrastructure? You only said that i dont know how it will be possible. I believe you will agree that in future Microfinance will not remain microfinance it will become SM-finance [Small and medium finance. We have already seen the examples of increased limits of credit in Andhra Pradesh, where Mf loans ...

I was reading this GigaOm piece on augmented reality when I realized that we may be very near towards making the Zipcode (or Pincode as we know it in India) completely redundant in the next 10-15 years. The article talks about how location aware application - Layar delivers ATM locations, restaurant information and available jobs on the phone’s screen as users point the camera at their surroundings. This innovation is a combination of 3 technologies coming together - GPS (location awareness), persistent connection (ability to extract information on the move) and image recognition (point the camera and the phone knows where you are). The latter is probably a complicated and expensive technology to build everywhere, but the former two are now almost ubiquitous. As I have written earlier , mapping services are improving every day in India - already maps to smallest detail are available for most Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities in India. With ISRO's project Bhuvan , imaging information should ...

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Reshaping for future success What's next for Private Equity in India This report, based on research conducted in the second quarter of 2009, examines the impact of the global financial crisis on private equity in India and the prospects for the market in the near and long-term. The research, undertaken by KPMG in India in conjunction with Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center includes a detailed survey of 40 General Partners (GPs) and Limited Partners (LPs) active in the Indian market. I hope that Thought Leadership update will prove to be a valuable resource for you. Regards,   Download Report (2,029 KB) Privacy & Disclaimer © 2009 KPMG, an Indian Partnership and a member firm of the KPMG network of independent member firms affiliated with KPMG International, a Swiss cooperative. All rights reserved.

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I was Googling for some information on Financial regulations in India, when I chanced upon a few old news items from the early 2000's [ 1 ][ 2 ]. While reading those new items I realized how the Indian Financial sector has undergone a rapid transformation in the last decade or so. India's financial sector has undergone a very rapid phase of transformation in the last 10-15 years. While scam ridden 90's brought in multiple regulators like SEBI and other related organizations such as NSDL and NSE, the private banks which grew brought in newer leaner ways of banking and infusion of technology - Core Banking Systems and Straight-Through-Processing. However, it was only in the new millenium that these changes as an aggregate started hitting the psyche of the common man and the government / regulators together. This trigerred massive national level initiatives - many of these fueled by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Some of these were the introduction of Electronic Clearing (EC...