Posts from — April 2010

The Indian market is too important to U.S. business interests to be treated casually by top U.S. officials.  President Obama needs to focus his cabinet on their trips to India.

See my article in Business Week on this subject, click here.

BestIndianSites.com has named my company, Amritt,  among the top India consultant sites on the web, click here for their page.  (My book continues to rank highly among business books on India, when you look at Amazon.)

In a bid to enable India’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises to import technology and equipment from the USA, the Export Import (Exim) Bank of India has signed a Master Guarantee Agreement with the Exim Bank of USA, an agency of the U.S. Government.

“We have signed a Master Guarantee Agreement with the US-Exim Bank which would enable the Indian MSMEs to import technology and equipment from the USA, said India’s TV Rao, director of the bank. He was speaking at a workshop on ‘Institutional Initiatives for MSMEs‘, organized  by Exim Bank of India in Orissa.

Foreign Multinationals’ Patent Apps to be challenged
Indian Pharma Industry gets aggressive

Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) Secretary-General D. G. Shah says that the Indian industry has decided to collectively challenge frivolous patent applications filed by multinationals.

According to Shah, 86 patents granted to multinational corporations by India for pharmaceutical products since 2005 were not breakthrough drug inventions, but only a minor variation of existing products. Under Section 3(d) of the Indian Patent Act, intellectual property claims related to modified versions of known substances are only permissible if it can be proved that the variation has significantly enhanced efficacy. The IPA claims that foreign companies

are filing these applicaitons only to extend the period of patent, commonly known as evergreening, by tweaking the molecules a bit.

MasterCard Inc of New York named Indian American Ajay Banga, as its president and chief operating officer, as chief executive. Banga spent 13 years at Citigroup, including a stint as the chairman and chief executive of its international global consumer group.

His brother, Vindi, recently resigned from the board of Unilever PLC, after being passed over for the role of Chairman.