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Tata small car set to offer 25 km per litre (Latest: Tata ranked world's 3rd most accountable group )
It’ll Be An Eco-Car That Meets Euro-IV Norms(By ET)
RATAN Tata and the Tata group have, for months, zealously kept a tight lid on the details of the mystery Rs 1-lakh car that is slated to roll out of Tata Motors’ Singur factory in June 2008. But, on Tuesday, the shroud came off in singular circumstances. “It’s an eco-car with a 25 kmpl mileage on petrol, meets every international standard and specification, including Euro-4 norms. Acceleration wise, it’s the same as a Maruti 800.” That’s exactly how Mr R A Mashelkar, former CSIR director general, who is now an independent non-executive director on the Tata Motors board, chose to describe the Rs 1-lakh small car on Tuesday. He was recounting his recent ride on the prototype at the Tata Motors’ Pune plant. “It’s a tool for inclusive growth,” Mr Mashelkar said in Kolkata on Tuesday. He was speaking here on “Resurgence of Innovative India: The phenomenon and the Consequences,” organised jointly by East India Pharmaceutical Works and The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. Mr Mashelkar also revealed how the Tata small car concept first struck the mind of Ratan Tata. “You know how Ratan (Tata) thought about this small car. He talked to me on several things. One day, he was going on the road and saw a family of four getting soaked in the rain. That was when he decided to create a small car for all,” he fondly remembers. “Just a month ago, I was at the Tata Motors’ factory in Pune, talking to their engineers and their fantastic team there. It was there that I had the privilege of sitting in that small car — that Rs 1-lakh car that they plan to roll out at Singur. It is incredible,” said an excited Mr Mashelkar.‘Spacious both in front & rear’“I SAT in that car, by the way, and it was amazing,” he repeated. “I am a six-footer and it’s spacious both in the front and in the rear. In terms of acceleration, it is equivalent to a Maruti 800 and has an incredible design finished by indigenous Tata Motors’ engineers,” Mr Mashelkar added. Talking on the potential of economics of this car, the top-notch scientist said: “It will create a paradigm shift in lowcost transport and the whole world is looking forward to a car that efficiently runs 25 km on a litre of petrol and offers international specifications. These kind of fuel-efficient cars will be in demand as pollution is on the rise, climates are changing and fossil fuels are running out. People are looking at a new global eco-car and I have a feeling that this can be the new eco-car not only in the country but elsewhere — in other countries. I feel a sense of pride that it will be manufactured in India.” “In a bid to reduce the weight of the car, Tata Motors’ engineers have used more plastics. The car does not use too many bolts which also helps in reducing weight. Instead, it’s a new kind of welding — a new technology altogether,” said Mr Mashelkar when asked on the specifics of the design. “I got into a prototype and they had asked me to drive it but I was a little scared as I have not been driving all these days. They wanted to show me their innovation as I am involved in innovation, this being a project extremely close to my heart,” he added. Mr Mashelkar added: “Every other company manufactures products for the top-of-the-income bracket and I am concerned about the middle, lower middle and the bottom of this pyramid. The issue is how do we create products for them and, therefore, the Rs 1-lakh car is like the dream as far as I am concerned.” About the general scepticism that the car would initially be priced at Rs 1 lakh which could later be raised, Mr Mashelkar said: “The way their engineers have been able to design it and style it to meet specifications — it is absolutely incredible. It does not look like the Indica and they have styled it differently, it has a sloping front. It can bring a transformation in lowcost transportation around the world. These days, people are looking for products that will meet standards, safety norms and still offer comfort. With great concerns on climate change, depleting fossil fuels and pollution, more green and clean products will come from India. Products that meet performance standard and price expectations will succeed.
No Sholay In This Aag Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag, the remake of India's biggest hit, the 1975 film Sholay, was the biggest disappointment of 2007. The film was criticised in almost every department.

Main Hoon Na Kaun Banega Crorepati II brought unprecedented popularity to brand SRK who easily slipped into the shoes of Amitabh Bachchan, who was the host of KBC1.


Reigniting The Old Flame Farah Khan hugs actor Shah Rukh Khan as Deepika Padukone looks on during the music release of Om Shanti Om in Mumbai. The movie, a throwback on the 1970s Bollywood, narrates the love story of a junior artist fascinated by the biggest star of the era.

She's Back November 27, 2007 Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit at a press conference to promote her film Aaja Nachle in New Delhi.


Sanjay Dutt Convicted July 31, 2007 Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt, who gave the country one of the biggest hits of the year Lage Raho Munnabhai, was convicted in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case.

The Voice Of India Abhaas Joshi, one of the strongest contenders of Star Voice of India, during a stage performance. Abhaas later replaced Shaan as the host of Star Voice of India Chote Ustad.


Sexiest Of Them All November 19, 2007 Dusky damsel Bipasha Basu was voted as the sexiest woman in Asia in a poll done by British magazine Eastern Eye.


Nagpur Man Is City's BossCitigroup Inc named investment banking head Vikram Pandit as chief executive and acting CEO Win Bischoff as chairman on December 12. Citi had been seeking a replacement for former CEO Charles Prince, who left on November 4 under pressure from shareholders frustrated by the performance of the largest US financial services company. Citi shares have fallen by about a third this year, and the company has taken massive write-downs for mortgage-related holdings. Born in Nagpur, India, and with three degrees from Columbia University, Pandit's unit at Morgan Stanley consistently performed well. Pandit's career has included heading investment banking and capital markets at Morgan Stanley. Pandit quit Morgan Stanley in April 2005. He joined Citigroup five months ago when the bank bought his year-old hedge fund firm, Old Lane Partners, for $800 million. Citi made Pandit head of a small unit for alternative investments, but from the start he was considered a likely successor to Prince.


Pachauri, Man With Mission December 10, 2007

Nobel Peace Prize winners Al Gore, left, and RK Pachauri, the UN climate panel's chief scientist, hold with their medals and diplomas at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at City Hall in Oslo. They accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm over global warming and spreading awareness on how to counteract it. Gore shared the coveted award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was represented at the awards ceremony in Oslo by its leader, Rajendra Pachauri. Each Nobel Prize includes a gold medal, a diploma and a 10 million Swedish kronor cash award. The Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, are always presented on December 10, the anniversary of the death of their creator, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

Mittal Most Influential

March 24, 2007 Industrialist Lakshmi Mittal arrives for the convocation ceremony of Institute of Management Technology in Ghaziabad, UP. The London-based Indian billionaire industrialist is not only the fifth richest person in the world (with a personal fortune of $51.0 billion according to Forbes whom the Financial Times named its 2006 Person of the Year), but In May 2007, he was named one of the "100 most influential people" by Time magazine.

Mukesh Ambani Is 'Richest' October 29, 2007PTI File: Chairman of Reliance Industries Limited Mukesh Ambani (Left) and Chairman of TATA Group Ratan N Tata (Right) with Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia during the US-India CEO Forum Infrastructure Investment Conference in Mumbai.Mirror, mirror...Is Mukesh Ambani the richest man alive? Yes, according to a report by the Press Trust of India, which pegged his wealth at $63.2 billion (almost Rs 2.49 lakh crore). He has reportedly overtaken Carlos Slim of Mexico and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, whose personal assets are $62.299 billion and $62.290 billion respectively. The calculations take into account Ambani’s holding in Reliance Industries and Reliance Petroleum through Reliance Industries, apart from stakes in Reliance Industrial Infrastructure Ltd.

UN Lauds India A state-of-the-art toilet system on the show at a global event. The United Nations has appreciated the Sulabh International for its recent efforts in tackling the sanitation and water problems in India. On the occasion of the launch of the International Year of sanitation 2008 at the UN headquarters recently, the world body lauded the Indian government and Sulabh International for the positive results of “Total Sanitation Campaign” (TCS).
Jindal Does Us Proud Bobby Jindal became the first Indian-American Governor by being elected Governor of Louisiana.
Football triupmh

Adobe Looks To IndianAdobe Systems Inc, the world’s fifth-largest software company, on Nov 13 named Indian-born Shantanu Narayen as its next chief executive officer (CEO), marking the latest of top-level appointments of people of Indian origin in one of the world’s hottest companies. Adobe is the company behind popular software like Acrobat that creates the popular pdf documents and Photoshop for photographic editing. It now also owns the popular Flash and Dreamweaver software that powers Internet animation and visual content after it acquired rival Macromedia. Its latest offerings include online video editing software.Narayen, who is also a keen researcher who holds patents, was president and chief operating officer and replaced CEO Bruce Chizen from December 1

Dola Does India Proud

India's ace archer Dola Banerjee won the grand final of the World Cup in Dubai in November. The event, where the world's top four archers participate for honours, saw the Indian triumph over her Korean opponent, Choi Eun Young. Dola won the match 110-109. In a nail-biting final, the Indian was trailing in the first three rounds, but came back to win the final round by two points and take the title by a point. After this achievement, Dola sits on top of the world as the event is the culmination of the four world cup editions that are held during a year. Dola had won one of the editions, at Dover, earlier this year.


Taj Tops 7 Wonders ListTaj Mahal, the 17th century monument of love, was on July 8, 2007 declared by Bollywood star Bipasha Basu in Lisbon as one among the new seven wonders of the world. Taj had in fact topped the list. The seven wonders list was compiled through a global poll in which at least 100 million voters participated, casting their votes through internet, telephone and SMS. While the contest was on, this man in Agra was campaigning for the Taj Mahal

Sensex Kisses 20K October 29, 2007The BSE Sensex hit the 20K mark for the first time in the history of Indian bourses on October 29, 2007.
Chak De IndiaShah Rukh Khan strikes gold in moulding a women's hockey team that no one has any faith in. The King Khan candidly admitted later that a film like this was missing from his CV.

The Wedding Of The Year
On April 20, 2007, Aishwarya Rai got married to Abhishek Bachchan in a private ceremony in Mumbai. Details of the celebrity wedding dominated media coverage in the country.

India's Cup Of Woes
Australian bowler Glenn McGrath was rightly named player of the World Cup. He was the leading wicket-taker in the tournament with 26 scalps from 11 matches and helped Australia to an unprecedented hat-trick of World Cup titles.No show for IndiaIn one of their worst-ever Cup outings, India suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of minnows Bangladesh in the Caribbean on March 17 that saw their campaign end at the preliminary round.

India Win Asia Cup Hockey
Indian hockey players celebrate their win against Korea after the final match at the seventh Asia Cup Hockey in Chennai.

The Murali Magic
Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan celebrates taking the wicket of England's Paul Collingwood to become Test cricket's leading wicket-taker with 709 wickets during the third day of first Test cricket match against England in Kandy.

ICL Is Born
Former Indian cricket captain and Executive Board Chairman of the breakaway Indian Cricket League, Kapil Dev speaks during a press conference in Mumbai. The ICL will run parallel to the leagues run by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).


Anand Rules Boardgame
World chess champion Vishwanathan Anand is the first non-Russian after Bobby Fisher to hold the top rank and the world title at the same time. Anand is an Indian chess grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion. Anand is one of four players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list and he has been among the top three ranked players in classical time control chess in the world continuously since 1997.

Indian cricket players celebrate after beating Pakistan during the final Twenty20 World Championship Cricket match between India and Pakistan in Johannesburg, South Africa. The win came as an icing on the cake, as before beating their arch-rivals, India had crushed the mighty Aussies in the semi-finals. Before the tournament, even the die-hard Indian fans had not given MSD's men any chance. Before new captain Kumble disproved his critics against Pakistan series, eyes had been rivetted when MS Dhoni was made India's one-day captain but Dhoni lived up to selectors' expectations.Sixy Yuvi: If anything, India's T20 World Cup campaign will also be remembered for Yuvraj Singh's six sixes off Stuart Broad that ushered India in the semis.
Posted by phr at 5:46 AM 0 comments Labels: 2007 year end review, Super 2007: The Year That Was, Tata small car set to offer 25 km per litre Tuesday, December 11, 2007Face to Face with Palagummi Sainath
Face to Face with Palagummi Sainath
Platform for the poor- By Ashok Mahadevan
For a newspaper reporter who normally keeps a low profile, Palagummi Sainath was unusually visible in the media just before he talked to Reader’s Digest. A fortnight earlier, he had received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature and the creative communication arts. Then he sparked off a row after criticizing Union Textiles Minister Shanker Sinh Vaghela and Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilas Rao Deshmukh for disparaging Maharashtra’s cotton farmers-a charge both politicians predictably denied.
In fact, we were lucky to find Sainath in his Mumbai home because he travels upto 10 months a year, chronicling the travails of India’s poor. He’s been doing this for nearly a decade and a half, and his reports reveal a country far different from the “India Shining” of the mainstream media. The economic reforms that began in 1991, Sainath says, while bringing unprecedented prosperity to the middle and upper classes have only deepened the misery of the poor.
Sainath, 50, comes from a distinguished family-his grandfather, V. V. Giri, was the fourth President of India. After a master’s in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Sainath became a journalist in 1980. In 1993, thanks to a fellowship from The Times of India, he investigated living conditions in the country’s ten poorest districts. The articles he wrote during this period were collected in a best-selling book called Everybody Loves a Good Drought. Sainath, now rural affairs editor of The Hindu, continues to specialize in writing about the poor because, as he puts it, “I felt that if the Indian press was covering the top five percent, I should cover the bottom five percent.”
Apart from the Magsaysay, Sainath has won many other awards for his work. The economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has described him as “one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger.”
Reader’s Digest: Given your background, you could have had a very conventional and comfortable career. What prompted you to become a student activist when you were young and then a journalist covering the poor?PS: I come from a very political family. We didn’t grow up with this middle class notion of politics bad, politicians bad. Because of my grandfather, we met people across the political spectrum.
Many other members of my family were also involved in the freedom struggle. Our approach to society was interventionist-you did not wait for things to happen, you participated in them.
In India the press is the child of the freedom struggle. All the nationalist leaders also doubled up as journalists. Mahatma Gandhi founded journal after journal and wrote for them every day. Nehru founded newspapers. Bhagat Singh bombarded newspapers with letters to the editor. Ambedkar’s journalism has enduring appeal.
RD: So you see yourself in that tradition?PS: I am very rooted in the Indian tradition of journalism. It’s a very humane tradition in which the illiterate masses create the space for journalistic freedom, not the elite. Whether in 1857 or now.
In 1857, the great merchants of Kolkata and Mumbai held public prayers for British troops to prevail over their countrymen. When Tilak was arrested for sedition in 1908 it was not the great household names of Mumbai who protested. The textile workers of Mumbai came out, and 22 of them were left dead in the streets when the police opened fire.
During the Emergency the people of this country brought back freedom. There has always been an organic link between Indian writers and the Indian masses. But it is a link that has been very severely eroded in the last 15 to 20 years.
RD: What are the main areas in which the Indian state has failed its people?PS: Who are the Indian poor? About 40 percent of them are landless agricultural labourers. About 45 percent are small and marginal farmers, mostly people with less than one hectare, many with less than half a hectare at that.
The problem of 85 percent of the poor is connected to land. But barring Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, we never addressed the issue of land reform. Which government in the Centre for the last 20 years has had land on its agenda?
We have not addressed the issues of water and lack of forest rights. These will create hell in the coming years. We have not tackled basic structural inequalities in ownership of resources.
In addition, there are disparities of gender-women are poorer in every category-caste and region. The middle class has simply closed their minds on the issue of caste. It is not that there are no poor Brahmins or no poor upper-castes, but the poor are predominantly at the lower end of the caste spectrum.
There are twelve regions in the country where 80 percent of the poor are concentrated and the gap between those regions and the rest of the country keeps growing with the solitary exception of Kerala, which has bridged its development gaps. We also never set a fair national minimum wage which was a living family wage. That is one of the spurs to child labour. We severely disadvantaged agricultural labourers by classifying agriculture as unskilled labour. There is no more skilled and more important activity of the human race than the production of food. It’s more risky than manufacturing software.
RD: What are some of our successes?PS: We are an extremely innovative, vigorous electoral democracy. A live democracy where people are searching for answers. It is not the chattering classes who vote in India. The poor value their vote as the one weapon they have to discipline their leaders and they use it. A vigilant public of that kind is a treasure
RD: What do we need to do to be not just a political democracy but an economic and social democracy too?PS: Follow your constitution-you have been in serious violation of it for the last 15 years. Nobody ever talks about the Directive Principles in the Indian Constitution because they are not enforceable legally. The Directive Principles are the vision of your society.
RD: A vision no one seems to be interested in following?PS: It is not in the interest of the ruling elite to follow it. But thousands of people daily address the issues in the directive principles-for example when they say, “Don’t throw me off my land.” Incidentally, I never claim to speak for the poor; I think the poor are fully capable of speaking for themselves. My role as a journalist is to report what they are saying. It is in the interest of us all to listen to them.
RD: What do you think of the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme that the government started last year?PS: There are only three things that this government has done that are of value. The first is that it significantly lowered the communal temperature prevailing in this country in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Another is the Right to Information Act. And the third thing is the Rural Employment Scheme itself.
RD: Do you think the RTI has been used sufficiently?PS: No. But it has opened up spaces. It will work differently in Kerala than in Kalahandi [Orissa]-the societies are different, the circumstances are different, the quality of governance is different.
RD: What about the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme-the third thing of value?PS: That was something the government fulfilled kicking and screaming and now they will kill it by underfunding. One way of killing the scheme is by not publicizing or popularizing it amongst the people. In Andhra in 2004, within the first seven days of the announcement of the scheme, 27 lakh people stood in queues and applied for it. The Maharashtra government did not popularize the scheme, yet lakhs of people applied, showing the desperation of the rural poor. I found people with six and seven acres of land standing in the queues because they wanted work. Unlike a chief minister who thinks his farmers are lazy, people are demanding work; they are not demanding pity, they are not demanding a dole.
RD: Are they getting work?PS: First of all it is restricted to 100 days for one person per family. In the 2007 budget the number of districts covered went up 40 percent but the money allocated went up only six percent.*
It is a despicable lie to say that there is no money for it. It would cost about Rs25,000 crores* each year to run your minimum modest rural employment guarantee program. See the defaulters’ list of the central board of direct taxes (CBDT). With the dues of the giants on the defaulters list you could run the program for a very, very long time. Just two of the defaulters according to the CBDT owed them Rs31,000 crores. Shake their pockets loose!
RD: Are the people who enrolled in the scheme getting their salaries on time? Are they getting the Rs60 a day they are supposed to?PS: No. They might be getting Rs45. But before that they were getting nothing, many of them. Please note that the purchase of grain went up massively when this program came into being because people have just that little bit more purchasing power. In 2000-01 the government was boasting of a 63 million tonnes surplus of food grains. But there was a surplus of hunger, not of food. Purchasing power had collapsed. The moment people got some purchasing power, the government had to import wheat.
The availability of food grains has plummeted in the last 15 years. In 1991, when the economic reforms began, per capita availability of food grains was 510 grams per Indian. By 2003 it was down to 437 grams.* This has incredible implications.
RD: Wouldn’t it imply that far more people are starving?PS: It implies that the hunger of far more people has become far more intense. By 2001 the average poor family of four was eating one hundred kilos less of food grains than it used to ten years earlier.
RD: People are a lot hungrier than before?PS: We will never understand the deprivation of Indians if we do not understand the prosperity of other Indians. If you belong to the top 15 to 20 percent of urban India or the top 10 to 12 percent of rural India, you are experiencing standards of living that you never dreamed of in your lifetime. If you belong to the bottom 40 percent you are experiencing levels of deprivation that you never dreamed of in your lifetime.
Thousands of people in urban centres are rushing to weight loss centres. Millions of other Indians are trying desperately not to lose any more weight.
RD: You are not a great proponent of non-government organizations. You think they give the government an excuse to duck its responsibilities to the poor. But in your book, you wrote favourably of one NGO, the Arivoli Iyakkam [Light of Knowledge] Movement in Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu. Can you talk a little about it?PS: When the government launched the National Literacy Mission in 1988, there already was a vigorous activist movement in Pudukkottai. The government offered people who were working for the state or for public sector organizations to go on deputation to the movement without loss of seniority or salary. So a lot of very progressive people volunteered.
They used extremely creative methods. They found, for instance, women teachers were needed to approach conservative women. To go to the villages, the women teachers learnt cycling. And they found that the women in the villages were far more interested in cycling than in literacy. So cycling was incorporated as a component of the literacy movement, and a hundred thousand women in that district alone learnt cycling.
There were two implications to all that cycling. The human implication was one of liberation and freedom. The cycle has been a very revolutionary vehicle for human beings. It is a far better indicator of human well-being than an automobile. Poor women said cycling is like flying an aeroplane, it’s like being yourself. You are in control.
The economic gains were very real too. Most of the women in Pudukottai were small producers, dependent on their fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons to get their produce to the market. So their arc of coverage was very limited. But once they had cycles, they could put the vegetables at the back on the carrier, and put the baby in a basket on the front. They could leave any time and come back any time. The markets they could cover increased.
But the women assured me that their major consideration was a sense of freedom. In Pudukottai, I saw a lot of women from very conservative Muslim families cycling, fully clad in burkhas. It was quite something!
RD: Whenever you write about women, you portray them as strong and capable.PS: Society functions because of them.
RD: You see women as the hope of this country?PS: Most agricultural work in this country is done by women. Have you ever seen a guy doing paddy transplantation? It is a horrible job. You stand shin deep in muddy water that has disease and insects and God knows what other stuff. You strain your back-the highest number of birth miscarriages occurs in the paddy transplantation season.
But women are banned by custom from ploughing. That allows the male to keep control. We have to move beyond the old slogan of “Land to the tiller,” to “Land to those who work on it.”
RD: When well-meaning middle class people think about India’s poverty, they often feel despair. What do you feel?PS: Anger. Despair produces nothing but despair. The character, quality, and resilience of the Indian people ought to be a source of optimism. They have done incredible things. They brought an empire to its knees. Bhagat Singh said they will make the deaf hear and the blind see. I am very optimistic.
RD: Will things get better?PS: Yes, but they will get a lot worse first, because of the track we are on now.
*Since this interview was recorded, the scheme was extended to alldistricts in India, but funding has not been proportionately increased.