Category — Education

The CEO of the McGraw Hill Companies, Terry McGraw interviewed on CNBC at the Davos Economic Forum talking about doing business in India. He is the curent chairperson of the Washington, DC based US India Business Council. (My firm is a member of USIBC).

The city where I was raised is now home to the largest circulating newspaper in the world. The “Daily Awakening” or Dainik Jagran is a Hindi language newspaper whose circulation is buoyed by India rising literacy level, rising incomes and rising population. Equally newspaper circulation is buoyed by the prestige factor (reading a newspaper for a poor person is an inexpensive of declaring that they have begun the unshackle themselves from India’s past).

The Economist has a great story this week where is says, ” ..the number of paid-for Indian daily newspaper titles has surged by 44% to 2,700. That gives India more paid-for newspapers than any other country.” Additionally Indian papers are generally profitable, which is more than most Western newspapers can say today.

This phenomenon has significant implications for advertiser and marketers of any kind as they seek to expand their presence or sales in India. It creates an interesting dynamic as the lower socio-economic strata in India experience change in every aspect of their lives on an accelerated basis (cell phones. FM radio, television, you name it).

Although India is  noted as producing some of the best creative technologically-oriented talents in the world today, too few young professionals concentrate their education toward civil engineering. This bottlenecks the nation from realizing its full economic potential. India is challenged by inadequate roads,  as well as an electric  power system that creates the need for individual office buildings to install their own generator-powered electricity.

Money is not really the problem since the government has plans for a $500 billion infrastructure investment through 2012 and more beyond. The problem stems from a lack of qualified home-grown civil engineers. During the British Raj and for years later, civil engineers were among the most respected tecnical professionals in India.  The first engineering college in India, now known as IIT Roorkee was established primarily to educate “overseers”, highway engineers, dam builders, soil specialists and all the flavors of civil engineering.

This once-enviable profession  no longer pays as well as writing software programs for the world’s leading companies.  So, what’s a modern-construction yearning society do do?

The Indian government acknowledges a critical shortage for civil engineers. Therefore, India has set on a path creating an additional 30 universities and is examining permitting foreign educational institutions to set up campuses in the country.

Foreign investment in India’s current infrastructure needs is also being called upon since no amount of emphasis upon home-grown talent will be appropriate. Kamal Nath, minister of road transport and highways, recently said the government plans to finance a highly ambitious road-building campaign through raising capital from overseas investments that include soliciting pension plans as well as securing long-term investments.

Kamal Nath, Union Cabinet Minister of Road Transpost & Highways

Plans are also underway soliciting foreign construction company participation in development projects that have been compared to the post-World WarII U.S. Highway construction boom.

This bodes well for American, British, Canadian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese engineering and construction companies if they can invest the time and effort to understand how India functions

One of the great myths for foreign companies entering India, is that Indians speak English, just like them. The implication is that somehow foreign entrants will be able to perform in India with little adjustment to their good old (American, British, Australian, Canadian) ways.

This myth hurts many executives. First of all, less than 15 percent of the Indian population speaks any English at all.  So if you are selling soap, cell phone services, or televisions, you had better speak many of India’s 23 languages. In fact Western Union (which makes more money in India, than almost anywhere else), advertised almost exclusively in local languages.

Second, the segment that does speak English, has their own dialect of “Indian English“.  So an Indian may “pre-pone” a meeting, the reverse of postpone. They may refer to an annexure to a document (an appendix or attachment) and they may tell you that they will “revert” when you make a request of them; this means that they will get back to you or will reply to you later.

North India’s leading English Language Paper, the Hindustan Times,  just carried a story on my company’s Indian-English Dictionary, entitled How to ‘do the needful’ in India with tashan

Engineers in India, working for Indian and foreign companies, are starting to produce innovative products and technologies that have impact beyond its borders.

One such development is a system that uses thermal sensors and algorithms to calculate the number of people entering a store at a given time and when they are likely to leave. The system, designed at Tesco plc’s Service Center in Bangalore, helps managers keep an efficient number of cash registers open so check-out lines do not get too long.

Another invention, called Multipoint, targeting the classroom,  gives multiple students a mouse cursor to use on one computer screen. Previously, the result of one computer in a classroom, even at a rural school, was one student, usually an upper-class male, using the computer more than the rest of the class. Microsoft Research is now considering the system, , for commercial development.

These stories are becoming more and more prevalent; it is an encouraging sign for anyone considering opening or expanding an India R&D center