Tata Interactive enters school segment with cloud-based solution

E-learning and simulations company Tata Interactive Systems (TIS), a part of Tata Industries, announced its entry into the school segment in India with integrated learning solution CLASSEDGE.

The domestic schools market, with over 10 lakh government schools and over 2.25 lakh private schools presents a supplemental education market of $15 billion (Rs 67,800 crore), according to Mr Sanjaya Sharma, CEO, TIS.

“With integrated IT and telecom capabilities and attractive and quality content generated over 20 years of experience in the space, we will be able to deliver CLASSEDGE to students and teachers at a very reasonable cost, and quickly,” added Mr Sharma.

TIS' Indian education division was launched in 2010. In each school that signs up for CLASSEDGE, TIS will invest around Rs 1 lakh in infrastructure a classroom initially, and connect the school server to a centralised CLASSEDGE server. Each school will pay TIS a monthly fee for the content it accesses through the tool.

Business Line : Today's Paper / INFO-TECH : Tata Interactive enters school segment with cloud-based solution

Innovation- One of mans most distinct characteristics

Innovation- One of mans most distinct characteristics

: ‘Customise HR for young India or lose talent'

With an increasingly young work force driving corporate India, especially people-centric service industries which account for half of the country's GDP, HR practices will have to be re-engineered to meet the aspirations of individual employees, noted speakers at ‘Metamorphosis', an HR Summit hosted at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

Speaking on people challenges in start ups and scaling enterprises, Mr Pankaj Bhargav, CEO, HRMantra Software, underlined the need to keep every employee aligned to the vision. “The younger lot is not ready to accept existing HR systems to evaluate and reward performance. The days of grades and salaries are gone. Whether it is salary expectations or perks, they have their own set of expectations. We need to personalise the HR policy to address individual aspirations,” he said.

Mr Wahid Ansari, President - Operations at security services company TOPSGRUP, said, “The communication aspect internally has to be looked at not just by HR, but by every manager in the system. Organisations need to communicate to the last person in the line, and appeal to individual talents in each employee. Established organisations tend to be rigid with silos and systems. That doesn't work with the younger work force which demands instant gratification.”

Lending perspective to the discussion was Prof. Satyajit Majumdar, Ph.D., from TISS. He noted, “Smaller organisations and start ups are better at adapting. When you have no rigid rules, you can create your own rules.” He added, “This is probably the time to think of competency building at the organisational level. Such competency is lesser mobile than people. The ill effects of people movement can be countered by systems.”

On the need to recognise individual talent, Ms Kalpana Bansal, President, TalentPro, explained the need to explore what is equitable, not ‘total equality'. Mr Ansari said: “Putting a value on the individual employee has become important. It's very difficult to do using existing performance metrics.”

Business Line : Today's Paper / ECONOMY : ‘Customise HR for young India or lose talent'

Wrong approach to food security

Coupons would work better than PDS as a food security mechanism. It is not surprising that the largest support for PDS comes from regions where pilferage is maximum

Business Line : Today's Paper / OPINION : Wrong approach to food security

PE Investment in Schools

“Education and Housing are core needs of India’s emerging consumers. This partnership between two sector leaders will leverage complementary strengths to help address the huge and immediate unmet  demand for K12 education from India’s quality seeking consumers," said Gopal Jain, Managing Partner of Gaja Capital.
There have been several investments in the school managements business since last year. Reliance Equity Advisors, the PE arm of Anil Ambani's Reliance Capital, invested Rs 100 crore in Pathways World School in its debut deal last year. New Silk Route invested up to $25 million in Hyderabad-based Sri Chaitanya Educational Group, one of the largest network of private schools and junior colleges.
India's K-12 segment is a $20-billion market growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14%, said a report by education-focused PE firm Kaizen Management Advisors. Factors like large and growing population, inefficient public system and preferences for private schools and colleges is driving this sector.
Education sector has seen investments of $190 million across 23 deals in the calendar year 2010, according to VCCEdge. This compared to 10 deals worth $128 million in the entire calendar year 2009.

REIT - Real Estate Investment trust

A real estate investment trust or REIT (pronounced /ˈriːt/ rhymes with street) is a tax designation for a corporate entity investing in real estate that reduces or eliminates corporate income taxes. In return, REITs are required to distribute 90% of their income, which may be taxable, into the hands of the investors. The REIT structure was designed to provide a similar structure for investment in real estate as mutual funds provide for investment in stocks.^[1]

Like other corporations, REITs can be publicly or privately held. Public REITs may be listed on public stock exchanges like shares of common stock in other firms.

REITs can be classified as equity, mortgage, or hybrid.

The key statistics to look at in a REIT are its net asset value (NAV), adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) and cash available for distribution (CAD).

What Does Real Estate Investment Trust - REIT Mean?
A security that sells like a stock on the major exchanges and invests in real estate directly, either through properties or mortgages.

REITs receive special tax considerations and typically offer investors high yields, as well as a highly liquid method of investing in real estate.

Equity REITs: Equity REITs invest in and own properties (thus responsible for the equity or value of their real estate assets). Their revenues come principally from their properties' rents.

Mortgage REITs: Mortgage REITs deal in investment and ownership of property mortgages. These REITs loan money for mortgages to owners of real estate, or purchase existing mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. Their revenues are generated primarily by the interest that they earn on the mortgage loans.

Hybrid REITs: Hybrid REITs combine the investment strategies of equity REITs and mortgage REITs by investing in both properties and mortgages.

Sustaining cost advantage

 He points out that having a demographic advantage and the youngest population in which a large number is not educated enough – and even if educated, lacks in employable skills – would not only deprive the corporate sector of manpower but also create conditions for skill shortage, high attrition rate, and exorbitant salaries thereby undermining the low-cost advantage of Indian corporates.

What anguishes Verma is that investments by the government on roads, ports, power, healthcare and education and so on with the potential to catalyse development could come to nought ‘because of the scale of corruption where 80 per cent of investments goes into wrong hands' and because there is no compliance and consequence management, and bureaucracy has a maze of rules and regulations that are enough to drive away the most passionate entrepreneur!

 Be perpetually prepared, be flexible, be innovative, build capacity, manage change, and manage partner ecosystem.
 ability to rebalance and reconfigure. In a classic repudiation of the strategic positioning principles, firms must have the capability to switch segments and operate in a plug-and-play mode to respond to opportunities which typically have
Airtel for its leveraging a network of relationships to bring in the necessary skills, technology, and architecture, making a choice of what it was good at and outsourcing the rest to its partners. “The resounding success of Airtel is a tribute to its capability in transforming its partners to become co-creators
 HR deliverables are therefore business deliverables, he calls for measurable value for HR investments; and demands that performance appraisals be not shorn of the understanding of financial dimensions of people performance such as EVA (economic value added), and CVA (customer value added).

Business Line : OTHERS / ACCOUNTANCY : Sustaining cost advantage

Opinion : IFRS and fair value

Business Line : Opinion : IFRS and fair value

‘A personal brand makes up your reputation, image'

“A brand is more than a logo. A personal brand is the sum of your behaviour, attitudes, action and personal style. It's what you are known for and makes up your reputation and image,”

but it is actually the process of building a better perception of yourself among others. So you need to care about other's perception of you as a brand. Most people also think personal branding is difficult. But if you believe in your skills and ability, it becomes easier to sell your brand,” she said.

“In a nutshell, a personal brand is nothing but who you are and so it becomes important for you to create your persona. To separate yourself from the rest of the crowd, create your own identity that enhances your visibility and preserves your reputation,” she said.

‘Personal branding is about identifying and articulating your unique value position.'

Business Line : OTHERS / STATES : ‘A personal brand makes up your reputation, image'

Indian Accounting Standards (Ind ASs) finalised by the Council of the ICAI

These are the near final Indian Accounting Standards (Ind ASs) finalised by the Council of the ICAI and sent to the National Advisory Committee on Accounting Standards (NACAS). These are subject to any changes, which may be made by the Government before their notification. Any changes in the Ind AS vis. a vis. corresponding IAS/IFRS are given in Appendix 1 appearing at the end of each Ind AS
Ind AS.

An impact study of IFRS

Conventional accounting measures profit on the income statement as an indicator of a company's performance while simultaneously excluding future profits by matching realised revenues against accrued cost. In contrast, Fair Value Accounting (FVA) defines profit on the Balance Sheet as an increase in net assets over a period. The discomforting factor for many is when the fair value of assets is measured by estimated future cash flows; it could include unrealised future profit. The fundamental accounting principle of conservatism would get the short shrift.

FVA can often be driven by different models and estimates which officially have to be determined by the management.

That leads us to a fundamental question — how will the fair value of assets and liabilities be “negotiated” between management and auditors? We may end up with a long chain of professional referencing where professional valuers, management and auditors flourish in an environment where no one is held accountable by the system, while the increased costs are borne by investors.

All this explains why the top honchos in the ICAI are rooting for IFRS but it is indeed inexplicable why Corporate India, especially those who have no need for foreign capital, have not raised their voice on these lines. Similarly, investor forums too have been silent.

Business Line : Opinion : An impact study of IFRS

Faltering steps of toddlers

The 2011 Census is likely to reveal — for the first time — a decline in the country's toddler numbers, mirroring a general drop in fertility rates. Indications of it are there in the United Nations' latest World Population Prospects, which projects a 1.4 million reduction in India's population below four years between 2000 and 2010, and even sharper falls thereafter

With toddler numbers coming down and exerting downward pressure on succeeding age cohorts as well, the ratio of dependents to the working-age population is expected to fall to 56 per cent in 2010 and to below 50 per cent by 2020 — where it will remain for the next three decades .

Business Line : Today's Paper / ECONOMY : Faltering steps of toddlers

A missed opportunity on IFRS

The Indian IFRS are referred to as Ind-AS, and is a substantially diluted version of the IFRS issued by the International Accounting Standards Board. IFRS and Ind-AS differences are caused not only because the standards are diluted
key differences are with regards to accounting of real estate sales, foreign exchange losses, agriculture accounting, investment property, first-time adoption requirements and financial instruments


Business Line : Today's Paper / OPINION : A missed opportunity on IFRS

Where are our inventor-businessmen?

In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. With its advent, a worker, who was earlier able to remove the seeds from only one pound of cotton daily, could generate over 50 pounds of cleaned fibre. The gin transformed the US, so much so that ‘King Cotton', till the 1861 Civil War, was contributing more than half of its exports.
Whitney was an inventor who was also a businessman. So were Cyrus McCormick — whose mechanical reaper in 1831 revolutionised wheat farming — and John Deere, who, with his cast-steel plough six years later, made it possible to work the heavy, yet fertile, prairie soils of the Mid-West.

Articles published in Taxmann

Articles published in Taxmann

Infatuated with big money

What the excision of those reportedly corrupt hides is more troubling: A value code spreading through the interstices of society as the dominant discourse, a world outlook by which an increasing number of Indians are beginning to live, and which threatens (by its very exclusiveness) to divide civil society even more, if not unravel it.
That value code rests on the belief in markets and capital as the defining lights of growth, itself narrowly contained in the idea of volumes where quantity matters more than quality, where the urgency to increase the size of the pie focuses attention, and not just of policymakers, on a set of indicators.
That faith in numbers — manifest in the attention articulate Indians have begun to invest on the GDP, the Sensex, automobiles, the demographic dividend and the growing club of Indian billionaires — flows from a slow but steady acceptance, now increasingly accelerated, of a faith in money as the agent of inversion.

Myth called Indian middle class Ashok Upadhyay

Three years ago when India's GDP growth was astonishing the world, a study by the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that in two decades its consumers would be a force to reckon with. This is how Eric Beinhocker, Diana Farrell and Adil S. Zainulbhai gushed in The McKinsey Quarterly of August 2007: “The same energy that has lifted hundreds of millions of Indians out of desperate poverty is creating a massive middle class centred in the cities.”