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 Tiger Hunting in Bangalore
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Posted on 12-18-06 10:41 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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India

Tiger-hunting in Bangalore

Dec 18th 2006
From Economist.com


Our American business editor fears for his job

Monday
I RETURN to Bangalore after three years expecting much to have changed. Even so, it is a surprise to find the place has a new name. City leaders want it called “Bengalooru”, a dictate ignored by most locals I meet.

The traffic congestion was bad enough last time. Now it is worse. There is the standard Indian chaos of cars, three-wheeled tuk-tuk taxis, bicycles and nonchalant cows―with the crucial difference this time that no vehicle seems to be moving. Last time I was here the journey to Electronic City, home to many of the city's top information-technology firms, took about half an hour. Now it takes an hour or more. Doubling your expected journey time proves to be good rule of thumb, though one I have learnt only after being late for most of my meetings.

My hotel bill has not (quite) doubled, but it has risen to a sum that would not seem out of place for a similar room in London or New York. The consensus here is that another 3,000 rooms are needed, fast, to bring down prices to an acceptable level. Infosys, one of the “Bangalore tigers” that are shaking up the global tech services industry, has built a hotel of its own in Electronic City equipped, as rumour has it, with a French cordon-bleu chef.

Office buildings and corporate campuses are sprouting everywhere, as are luxury residences, not too far away, for the executives. Last time I visited the campus of SAP, a German software giant, its bucolic address, “White Field”, made some sense. Now there are buildings and cranes as far as the eye can see. Then, SAP had 500 employees here. It has since added 1,000 a year through a recruitment process of daunting scale. In 2005 it had 125,000 applicants for jobs in India, of whom 25,000 were short-listed and 13,000 interviewed. Infosys, which is far bigger here, apparently received 1.25m applications last year.

Paradoxically, although the best firms are inundated with job applications, the biggest challenge facing every company in Bangalore is how to hang on to workers after hiring them. The firms I speak to mostly claim attrition rates of around 10-15% a year, which they say is well below the industry average. Peter Yorke, an entrepreneur here, says every software engineer has at least three job offers at any moment. Across India, he says, the market will get even tighter, at least in the next few years: “looking at the students now in college, studying the right sorts of things, there will be about 250,000 fewer than needed graduating in 2008”.

To address this shortage, colleges are appearing that aim to teach quickly the skills most wanted by the market. Cherian Philip shows me around Biozeen, his new college-cum-consultancy that trains students to do outsourced drug trials―an industry now starting to boom. Infosys has spent $350m building an in-house university. For Infosys and others training has become a crucial weapon in the war for talent, a way of giving workers a reason to stay.

The trouble is, once someone has been trained, they are even more attractive to a rival employer. A no-poaching agreement struck among local outsourcing firms soon fell apart. Some of the big IT firms have introduced a bonding system: workers pay the company if they leave within six months of being trained. In effect, this “golden handcuff” passes the training cost on to the new employer. And there is talk of a database to identify “no shows”―people who accept many job offers, and don’t bother to let the places they decide not to work at know they are not coming.

Mr Yorke predicts that Indian firms will soon be outsourcing their own least skilled jobs to China. I too am struck by how rapidly the Bangalore firms are moving upmarket. Three years ago call centres were very much at the heart of things. Now real decisions are being taken in Bangalore and higher-value-added work is being done here. SAP’s local boss, Georg Kniese, says his campus is already becoming a powerhouse of software development for the company. I visit Thomson Financial, which is hiring local journalists to provide stories to the world. Reuters has outsourced some journalism here, and Bloomberg is expected to follow suit. How long before my own job is being done, for a fraction of my scarcely adequate salary, by an Indian in Bangalore?
 
Posted on 12-18-06 10:43 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Source: Tiger Hunting in Bangalore

(Doing my bit there for google's search algorithm ...he he)
 
Posted on 12-18-06 12:33 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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If you are thinking of going back to Nepal, hopping over to India and getting into the hotel business there might be something to think about :)

More on the subject from the International Herald Tribune



The atrium of the 355-room Hotel Le Méridien in New Delhi. India has about 110,000 rooms, about as many as are available in the metropolitan New York region. ( Mustafa Quraishi/The Associated Press )

In gold-rush India, hotel rooms are scarce and expensive
Hotels are expanding at breakneck pace


By Anand Giridharadas
Published: December 18, 2006

MUMBAI: With its ultrachic restaurant and sweeping views of a 16th-century tomb, the Oberoi in New Delhi is a hotel of choice for the pinstriped deal makers pouring into India.

But unless you planned your trip months ago, do not even think about getting in. Its 279 rooms and suites are fully booked almost every night until April at prices that start at $345 a night, breakfast not included.

Demand for hotel rooms is soaring in India as its economy blossoms. Foreigners are flooding in to cut deals, attend conferences or just discover the caves of Ajanta and the sands of Rajasthan. The rise of low-fare airlines is also bringing domestic air travel within reach for more Indians, who, until recently, had little chance of ever boarding a jet.

Yet for all those travelers, India offers only 110,000 hotel rooms. China has 10 times more, and the United States 40 times more. The New York metropolitan region alone has about as many rooms as all of India.

The shortage is pushing peak season rates for basic rooms into the stratosphere, by Indian standards, and attracting some of the world's best- known names in hotels — Accor, Hilton, Wyndham, Pan Pacific — to invest heavily in India.

"There's enormous potential here," said Dennis Oldfield, the general manager for the Indian branch of Accor, a French group with 4,100 hotels worldwide, and with plans for up to 200 hotels in India within a decade.

In the meantime, business travelers are trying to cope.

Two female Indian employees of a top management consultancy based in New York were recently forced to share a bed in a company apartment because there were no hotels available in the city they were visiting, according to one of their colleagues, who did not wish to be identified.

Microsoft is using its own Live Meeting videoconferencing technology to cut down on business trips, said Ravi Venkatesan, chairman of Microsoft India.

In Bangalore, rooms are so costly that traveling salespeople and other professionals often commute from as far away as Mumbai, 1,000 kilometers, or 620 miles, away.

"They are making you fly to Bangalore every day in the morning and fly back every night because it's cheaper than paying the hotel bill," said Saurabh Gupta, an industry analyst in the Indian office of HVS International, a hospitality industry consulting firm.

Infosys, an Indian software giant with 66,000 employees worldwide, has built a 500-room, in-house hotel next to its headquarters in Bangalore. By June, it expects to have 15,000 company- owned rooms across India — an eighth of all the rooms in the country and more than any Indian hotel chain.

One night for an employee staying at its Bangalore campus costs Infosys $15, three-star treatment that would normally cost $150.

"It's much more efficient in India to do it yourself," said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys.

The high prices are all the more striking in a country like India: At a $500 rack rate for the five-star rooms favored by business travelers, it would take a hotel employee earning minimum wage here about a year to buy one night in one of these hotels, versus two weeks' work for an American earning minimum wage.

And even though the Chinese earn twice as much as Indians on average, India has the more expensive rooms, according to a recent edition of Travel Business Analyst, an industry newsletter. Comparing rooms of similar quality, a room in Delhi cost $187 on average this year, versus $122 in Beijing; a room in Mumbai was $178, versus $150 in Shanghai.

High prices turn away leisure visitors with a wide choice of destinations, industry experts say, and the shortage, along with other infrastructure woes, offers one clue as to why a country with the petal-covered lakes of Kashmir and the palm-lined shores of Kerala lags behind in tourism.

Compare India, a country of 1.1 billion people, to New York, a city of eight million: New York attracted 6.8 million foreign tourists in 2005; India attracted 3.9 million. Visitors to New York pumped $22.8 billion into the local economy, or about $2,850 per New York resident; visitors to India pumped in $6.7 billion, or about $6 per Indian resident.

Recognizing that hotels employ 180 people for every 100 rooms, by some industry estimates, the Indian government is now scrambling to expand supply. It recently paid for half-page advertisements in Delhi newspapers that urged families to convert their homes into bed-and-breakfast operations, which can charge about $35 a night. The government's goal is to approve enough homes turned hostels to offer another 10,000 rooms in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010.

Article continued here...
 
Posted on 12-18-06 12:45 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Cappy,
U r never into light stuffs...always serious sensible talks!Anyways u r around ...that is enufff for me....even if I don't understand any ABC of ur postings...Have a great day!
 
Posted on 12-18-06 12:48 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Capt.
Person of the year was pretty funny though...Loote kukur..person of the year?? He must be kukur of the year hoina ra??
 
Posted on 12-18-06 1:03 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Cleo - actually got a bit tired of the lighter stuff, so thought I'd fire up a few minds (mine included) by talking about something exciting :P Alas, I seem to be the only one thrilled by things like these ...he he he.

SNDY - I honestly thought he deserved it! Unfortunately, he seems to be running low on energy or something these days - isn't as prolific - maybe needs some Boost and Horlicks! he he he. Or is he just biding his time I wonder? :P

:)
 
Posted on 12-18-06 1:22 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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I too think he deserves it though..:)..
 


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