All Posts

Showing all 286 posts
Celebrating Diversity is Unity
India My Land

Celebrating Diversity is Unity

However even while this angst for the new Indian identity continues in some quarters, everything else is going in the reversing direction. Television is getting more and more determinedly regional, as are the movies. In fact a look at all the serials and soaps on TV show that having distinctive sub communities in which the story is set works – some watch it because they identify with it and others like me because we are curious about how they live. Mata ki Chowki has a cast of a different kind of Indians than Baa Bahu Aur Baby. And it isn’t about religion either. Obama said that his was a country of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Moslems and non believers. Ours is an infinitely more complex fabric – the Tamilian Muslims and Tamilian Hindus have more in common than the Tamil Muslim and the Bihari Muslim. And it isn’t about community of […]

March 8, 2010
More Than Just a Glass Ceiling
India My Land

More Than Just a Glass Ceiling

Most of the Indian women we know, even in GenNext, have grown up with subliminal messages about being a “good girl”, i.e. of behaving in a manner that conforms to society’s stereotypes and prescriptions of what success for a girl looks like. A venerable aunt used to hold up as an example worth emulating a girl who had a PhD in nuclear physics and an amazing job, but “when she walked in to the room you would never know that-she was so simple and ordinary in everything she did and said”. It took many years before we picked up the courage to ask, “But if she was so wonderful, what was the matter with her that she made no waves?” If you are from a middle class family in Tamil Nadu, as one of us is, you have probably been raised with a variety of wheedling voices asking you to […]

March 8, 2010
Inside the Mind of Young India
India My Land

Inside the Mind of Young India

The sampling methodology and the survey instrument have been explained in detail, and the field work relatively recent, done in mid 2007. Not meaning to be xenophobic, it was still a bit sad to note that such a study got done because Konrad Adenauer Stiftung initiated and commissioned (and presumably funded) it. It is true that in India, we generally have trouble finding adequate funding for regular studies of this kind which tell us more about ourselves. If the quantum of data were proportionate to the quantum of our usage of the term demographic dividend, we should have had several more and larger youth studies in the public domain. One is not referring to country wide studies done for private companies that measure cola consumption or media habits or advertising preferences of young India; but of public domain insights on how young people think and feel about issues like those […]

February 8, 2010
IIM Review Committee
India My Land

IIM Review Committee

However, competition is about to explode. Top management schools of the world will soon be in India, many are already here in some form or other. Singapore, China and Dubai are aggressively attracting campuses of the world’s best management schools. The IIMs, with their current level of wide ranging government control and interference on their operations and very limited degrees of strategic freedom could end up being marginalized. The poor pay scales and continuous attempts to “regulate” faculty activities, lead to difficulty in attracting high caliber new faculty. The poor quality of infrastructure relative to the newcomers, the severe controls and constraints in internationalizing their footprint of knowledge etc., needs to be addressed. This report focuses on each of these problems and suggests a way forward. On autonomy and accountability The best way to enable the IIMs to survive and seize the opportunity ahead is, to empower their present boards […]

February 7, 2010
Danger: A Vulnerable Consumer Base
Consumer Trends

Danger: A Vulnerable Consumer Base

Why are car sales zooming? Here’s an explanation. Because it is only the rich who buy cars – car penetration is a bit over 20% in the topmost quintile of Consumer India (i.e. the richest 20% of India), and 5% or less in the remaining quintiles. Car sales also come out of corporate pockets as much as out of consumer pockets in this segment of income. and Rich India is actually back to feeling comfortable – the stock market is back up again, and everyone is feeling secure looking at their NAVs climbing back. Banks are lending for car purchases again, corporate profits have been very good and tax planning time is near The economic typhoon seems to have mildly hit and then gone away, adding to an increase in level of this consumer’s confidence. Pragmatic consumption is back again, and a new car with a bank loan is a […]

December 13, 2009
Tales From Modern Consumer India
Consumer Trends

Tales From Modern Consumer India

An earlier set of columns discussed how India changes in insidious and tricky ways: it morphs, slowly changing from within, and keeps reshaping itself just like an amoeba. With each bit of outside matter it ingests, it changes shape a wee bit and, before you notice it, there is a whole new shape. The last column reflected on what modern Indian goods and services were looking like. This one is about consumer insights gleaned from a trip through Uttaranchal to Badrinath-Kedarnath, and one to Kolkata and Jamshedpur. The realisation from the Uttaranchal trip was that religiosity, cell phones and Maggi Noodles are three things that hold modern India together. Since the latter two are not part of our ancient heritage, we can heave a sigh of relief that we are evolving and not stuck in the past! The Kolkata-Jamshedpur trip had flight cancellations on account of an airline expanding too […]

November 30, 2009
Thinking out of the Dabba (India and Global Affairs)
Corporate Governance

Thinking out of the Dabba (India and Global Affairs)

He makes the case that that the large number of poor people that exist in the world actually represent an enormous and lucrative potential market, which businesses can profitably address, if they think innovatively about their business models and business economics. The message of “profit from the poor” has caused a storm of protest in certain development sector circles, leading to debates about whether the poor should be thought of as mere consumers or also as producers. The answer of course is that thinking of the poor as consumers does not preclude them from being thought of as producers. Some micro finance institutions see themselves as operating on both sides of the “poor as producer, or poor as consumer” equation. Their financial and business assistance enables the poor to be economically productive. And as they get economically productive, they can afford to pay for other things that they need, provided […]

September 17, 2009
Process Obsessed and Customer Hostile
Corporate Governance

Process Obsessed and Customer Hostile

We know of a person who got a call selling him life insurance from a company from whom he already has a policy. He asked whether the caller knew that he was already a customer, and she said she had no idea. She was presumably following the process laid out for her – get a bunch of cell numbers in this manner and call them and proceed using this script. Viewed from the customer’s side, he was really hassled. These were the folks who were supposed to pay lots of money immediately to his wife, if he died suddenly. And they didn’t even know he existed. The company’s response to this was to say “in a cold calling customer acquisition process, it isn’t really possible to control this duplication”. Anything more, like for example feeding the number and name into a computer and getting a call – don’t call verdict […]

September 14, 2009
allpostspage

© 2026 Rama Bijapurkar, All Rights Reserved.

Website maintained by BillionApps