Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts

Thursday, January 10, 2013

“India is critical to world’s progress”

In an exclusive interview to B&E’s pathikrit payne, Sir Richard Stagg, British High Commissioner to India speaks about India’s incredible future potential and the positive impact of its outsourcing business...

B&E: How do you look at the transformation of India from the time of Independence to now when it is an emerging powerhouse?

RS:
We view it as an amazing achievement of India. The transformation especially in economy, society and the way in which the country worked in the last 60 years. India has an enormously important role to play in the world. India is a model of how democracy and development can go hand in hand as it has just been shown in the elections, which went off so well. So we view India as a country which has emerged on the world’s scene. It’s now the fourth biggest economy in the world by PPP. It’s critical to almost all critical issues that the world faces, be it trade rounds, development sphere, agreement on climate change, international sponsor to financial crisis. India has put itself in the centre of major issues, which reflects the success of its governance.

B&E: Is there paranoia in the UK about the economic resurgence of India and it becoming an outsourcing hub, as it leads to job losses in UK?

RS:
In the case of India, there’s genuine welcome from almost every political group in UK. UK is very comfortable with the companies using outsourcing as one of the ways to make their business more successful. From our perspective, it makes no sense to constrain the competitiveness of our companies by limiting their ability to outsource. We will not succeed as an economy just by competing for relatively low skilled jobs, which can be done at a lower cost elsewhere. We have to accept that the only way we are going to succeed as a country and as an economy, is by moving up the value chain by doing higher value added tasks. So the government’s challenge is to ensure that as the low skilled jobs leave UK, we provide training and up-skilling to the people affected, so that they can do higher value work in the economy.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

 

Saturday, January 5, 2013

It’s the true world wide ‘web’

Global coordinated action is a huge necessity to tackle cyber crimes

A young man called Jimmy, an Internet hacker, walks discreetly to a Cyber Café in Nigeria to demonstrate his skills of perfidy, fooling perfectly innocent people into his well crafted web of fraudulence. He sends tens of thousands of e-mails congratulating them for winning $6.4 million worth of a sham British lottery. Anybody falling into this trap would be asked to pay ‘fees’ and ‘taxes’ amounting to $5000, which would be pocketed by Jimmy, leaving the respondents in the lurch.

Jimmy is only a tiny fish in the huge ocean of cyber crimes. In UK, internet crime gangs are recruiting students from British universities to join them. Often, these syndicates have developed a cult following among young hackers who are lured by the promise of celebrity status. This kind of recruitment resembles the KGB style of doing things in the heydays of the Cold War. The online fraudulence includes Internet auctions, sweepstakes, lotteries, identity theft and prizes that have despoiled money worth $152 million in the US alone last year. Older people are more susceptible to these crimes; they have being defrauded to the tune of $43 million in 2005. Around 41% of complaints of fraudulence filed by people from the age group of above 50 and received by Federal Trade Commission of US are online crimes. The figure was only 33% in 2002; indicating an alarming increase. As if things were not bad enough for the US, top secret data from Pentagon has been hacked regularly by Russian, Chinese & French hackers, which has kick-started a cyber war with them. Now these hackers are a cause of concern across borders.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Fashionable to eat organic food

It’s almost fashionable to eat organic food, but a new research in UK attempts to crop the growth of the organic food movement... 

So, when someone comes up with a research like this, I get the shock of my life! When your inputs are wrong, which is pesticides and chemicals, how can your output be good?” Mr. Guptaa’s reaction isn’t an isolated one, for the scientists at LSHTM have been flooded with mail lambasting their research.

Regular users of organic food haven’t been moved by the research either. So much so that in Edinburgh, a Little Green Map will be made available from 14th September, which will enable people to directly go to the stores selling organic and environment friendly products.

Most supporters of organic food say the research defies commonsense, and that it seems that some people are trying very hard to protect their market. The LSHTM’s study searched over 50,000 papers, and a total of 162 relevant articles were identified that were published over a 50-year period. “They have included studies from the 50s, 60s and 70s for their research data. And at that time most of the earth was still good, it was not abused. I don’t know who paid for this research, for that is the only doubt that crops in my mind!” exclaimed Mr. Guptaa, resonating thoughts of proponents of organic food all over the world.

The only conclusive point that does come out of this entire brouhaha, is that very little research on organic food has been done till now, and food scientists need to get to work pronto!


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

 
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