Small-Scale Businesses Forestall a Green India
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FARIDABAD, India -- Ashok Gupta's modest plastic-packaging factory is the oldest in town, and its age shows. The root of all his problems is electricity.
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For decades, India focused on its domestic economy and grew more slowly. But all that is starting to change.
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Indian software companies, which have been busy conquering the world and neglecting their backyard, should not continue doing so. This is because the domestic market is going to grow into a huge opportunity
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The Karnataka state government is trying to slow growth in Bangalore by encouraging new investors to set up their facilities in new townships.The concept of satellite towns is not new to Bangalore. While companies moved to these satellite towns because of the relatively cheap real estate, they did not provide housing there. As a result, employees had to commute from their homes in Bangalore to townships like Electronic City.Karnataka will now insist that companies establishing facilities in the new townships should also provide housing for their employees, said M.N. Vidyashankar, secretary for information technology in the state government. The township at Bidadi will be self-contained with schools, malls, and a direct link to an international airport under construction, he added.Besides the new townships, the government is also trying to reduce migration from the hinterland into Bangalore by trying to route new investments in IT, call centers, and business process outsourcing (BPO) facilities to other towns in Karnataka like Belgaum, Hubli, Bellary, and Mysore. The government has acquired land in some of these towns to be developed in partnership with the private sector.To get access to new staff pools, as well as to cut costs, Indian outsourcers are looking at smaller towns where they can set up their new facilities, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI) in Houston. Some outsourcing companies like Infosys already have operations in towns around Bangalore, like Mysore and Mangalore.Some of these small towns are centers for education, and hence good places to hire staff, Pai said. The only drawback so far has been poor connectivity by road and air, which the government should try to solve, he addedWith a population of over 6.5 million, the Indian city of Bangalore is reeling from too much growth at too fast a pace. The city houses the services delivery centers of top Indian outsourcers like Infosys Technologies and Wipro, and multinational companies like IBM, Dell, and Oracle.The traffic jams, high cost of housing, and shortage of staff in the city has not, however, slowed down new entrants to the city. In August, the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, cleared 52 new investments in the area of IT, said Vidyashankar.IT, call center, and BPO facilities in Bangalore employ 480,000 direct staff, apart from providing indirect employment to over 3 million other people, according to Vidyashankar. These sectors contribute to 36 percent of the state&#39;s GDP (gross domestic product), which is expected to increase to 50 percent of GDP by 2011, he added.
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Some small farms, faced with stagnant income and mounting expenses, are opening up their operations to nonagricultural activities just to survive.
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Business & money: Campaigners sceptical about companies' new-found enthusiasm for environment.
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Eco-friendly shopping may be fashionable, but critics argue it wonât reduce global warming.
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For much of his life, Viroj Dedsongprak paid little attention to the mangrove forests that surrounded his Thai village. He thought nothing of it when neighbors chopped down trees for firewood or plowed them under for shrimp ponds.
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Green tech financiers share tips for spotting sustainable start-ups.
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Concern at the distance 'green' produce travels.
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Many efforts to curb climate change pay little attention to conservation or the world's poor, a think-tank warns.
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India's efforts to show a face of shining prosperity to the outside world are bad news for the tens of thousands that sleep on the streets of its capital
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By Steve Kuchera, Duluth News-Tribune, Minn.  Sep. 19--.   In Indian belief, things flow in circles. So it isn't surprising that some American Indians would embrace recycling.
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A growing number of home-based business are no longer trying make their small operations look bigger.
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Business & money: Two 'green' stores will include a series of eco-features aimed at reducing their carbon footprint.
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From budget airlines telling us how to "fly greener" to oil giants developing cleaner fuels the corporate world is pushing its eco-credentials, often tying up with well-known environmental groups.
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Blog: Money is pouring into clean tech start-ups, but recent reports examine longer-term issues.