Women Entrepreneurs

I think women in our country and I can only speak for our country, over the last two decades have gone through an amazing phase of denying who they are to being extremely proud of who they are. And the first part of that is recognising and accepting the fact that you are a woman.

The exposure levels which we went through versus others in that generation, my mother and uh were very different. The value system was probably the same, but the upbringing style, the exposure levels, the accessibility to the world at large, today world is one.

My mother’s generation was the first generation post independent India. The social fabric did not encourage women to go out there and work. We were perhaps the first generation of women CEOs who have made a mark for themselves and we’ve opened up the society to make attitudinal changes.

I grew up in an environment where I was entirely comfortable and had no itching under my skin or wanting to be superior to anybody. I just knew as a given that I was brought up in an environment where being a woman was not a disadvantage and being a woman was not an advantage. We simply had to do what you had to do as a person and accept.

Temples of Learning

In times gone by, India was known all over the world as a country of great learning. There were several university towns and Agrahara villages that anticipated the modern university campus. Great philosophers and scientists, men like Aryabhatta and Nagarjuna flourished within a tradition of fiercely independent intellectual inquiry. The world’s largest democracy is engaged in the exciting task of preserving and enhancing this great tradition in its contemporary temples of learning. The father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi,emphasized that reducing human sufferingwas the noblest mission that any individual or institution could pursue. This ideal inspired the timely creation of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. AIIMS, as it is popularly known, epitomizes India's determination to provide standard health care to all its people. The sheer volume of work provides the students an in-depth clinical experience that is probably unparalleled in the world. It treats 1.5 million outpatients and 80,000 inpatientsand conducts 98,000 operations every year. The interns may be exposed to as many as 3,000 open-heart surgeries conducted annually as compared to 700 in an average medical college in the United States. AIIMShas  given support and direction to the entire Indian medical community. It has emerged as an institution where all the components of health care from bench research to bedside care, from policy-making to program evaluation is geared towards meeting the ultimate goal of eliminating human suffering.

The Changing Face of the Indian Countryside

The past fifty years have witnessed tremendous change. The villages are not isolated and secluded as they were fifty years ago. Thanks to new roads, bridges, rail tracks and transport system, they have been interwoven intoa more homogeneous unit. Adaptability to change is yet another feature of today's rural India.  And these changes are not only adapted to lifestyles but are even tailored to suit the rural requirements. No doubt, electricity has changed the lifestyles of rural India. Power failures apart, a large number of Indian villages do have electricity today.  Electric poles have been erected and wires drawn across the length and breadth of the country. Even the remotest of Indian villages today enjoy the fruits of modern banking. While these banks assisted in replacing the traditional money lender and acted as catalysts of growth, noone expected such excellent savings habits from the villagers. The so-called conservative Indian farmers are managing modern-day tools with effortless ease and skill which only comes with practice.  There has been a huge green revolution sweeping the agriculture sector for the past couple of decades. The Indian farmer, using all techniques and tools, has been extracting five to ten times the yield from his land compared to what he was getting about three decades back. Additionally he has also been cropping and reaping not one but two to three crops every year.  He may still be handicapped by natural calamities like flood and drought, but now these do not leave him defeated.  With his untiring endeavor and sustained support from the government, the Indian farmer has been able to keep his aspirations afloat.

Global Information Highway

For more than five decades, the signature tune of ‘All India Radio’ has heralded each new day across the sprawling subcontinent. But today, India is witnessing a revolution in the mode and method of ferrying information. This is the story of India's emergence as a major player in the world of informatics, a new expression that defines the way we gather, refine and disseminate information through a complex maze of computers and satellites. In India, the first telegraph line from Calcutta to Agra, city of the fabled Taj Mahal, was opened by the British rulers as early as 1853. The telephone arrived in India soon after its invention by Graham Bell in 1876. In fact, when Mahatma Gandhi was killed at a prayer meeting in New Delhi in 1948, the news hit Europe even before most of India could know of the catastrophe. Thanks to telephone. Such was the technological prowess with which Britain had sought to secure the most prized colony in its vast Empire. The radio had soon followed the telephone into India, reflecting Britain's eagerness to keep in close communication with the sprawling, if an increasingly restive, subcontinent.

A world of grace and beauty: Islamic architecture of India

Agrawas the imperial capital of Akbar in the mid sixteenth-century.The fort here was one of the most powerful of north India since early times. In fifteen hundred and sixty five, Emperor Akbar ordered the reconstruction of this fort. The fort has palaces of Emperor Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The most prominent amongst all the structures are the white marble buildings of Shah Jahan.  In fifteen hundred and seventy one Emperor Akbar decided to build a new capital city. A magnificent city was built at a site not very far from the previous capital at Agra. It was called Fatehpur Sikri. Fatehpur Sikri is one of the best ordered and symmetrically laid out cities of the entire medieval world.               The Taj Mahal was built in sixteen hundred and forty eight by the Mughal emperor ShahJahan in memory of his beloved wife Arjumand Banu Begum ,known to the word as Mumtaz Mahal.The construction of the Taj Mahal was a stupendous engineering feat. It is built of marble and finely inlaid with semi-precious stones. Twenty thousand workers and master craftsmen laboured for seventeen years to erect this magnificent edifice.

The Shaping of India’s Foreign Policy

In April nineteen fifty five, leaders from twenty nine countries were getting together at Bandung in Indonesia. Their aim: to reiterate their commitment towards world peace and exhibit Afro-Asian solidarity. It had been almost ten years since the end of the Second World War and almost all the participants of this Bandung conference as it was later to be called were those who had won their freedom only recently.

JawaharLal Nehru, then Prime Minister of independent India dominated the session. It was here he articulated, once again, his famous doctrine of Panchsheel, his mantra for World Peace. He had delved deep into the country’s civilization to find this word. It was coined from Buddhist precepts, the noble fivefold path.

After Bandung, Nehru gained recognition as a Statesman and frontrunner of the Afro-Asian world. Nehru’s search for a foreign policy converged with his urge to give independent India the security of self-reliance.

India Infrastructure: An opportunity

India – a nation in overdrive, the world’s fastest growing free market democracy, an emerging global hub of knowledge and technology, a booming economy backed by internationally competitive industrial sectors. This surging group and developments taking place across the economy has thrown up new challenges and opportunities, particularly in the domain of infrastructure. What is the driving force that underlines this constantly growing need for bigger, better infrastructure? Over the last three years, India’s economic growth has been eight percent. Currently, this is one of the fastest growth rates in the world. In terms of U.S. dollars, this translates to a growth rate as high as thirteen percent per annum. From a mere five million landlines in nineteen ninety-one, the country has reached a point where five million cellular connections are added every month. The investment opportunities in this sector are backed by a national telecom policy that aims at encouraging private and foreign investments and overseen by an independent regulator - the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India or TRAI.  In the auto industry, the turnover has grown from twelve billion dollars in 2002 – 2003 to nineteen billion dollars in 2004 – 2005. To attract the investments needed to expand airport facilities, the government has amended the AAI act to provide the legal framework for the privatisation of airports.  Moreover, it has announced one hundred percent tax exemption for airport projects for a period of ten years.