Niira Radia tapes leaked due to corporate rivalry: Ratan Tata...........!!!!!!!

Niira Radia tapes leaked due to corporate rivalry: Ratan Tata to Supreme Court
PTI | New Delhi | Updated: Oct 26 2013, 08:21 IST
Former Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata today told the Supreme Court that the tapped telephonic conversations between corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and top politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, including himself, were leaked to the media because of corporate rivalry.
"This order for tapping was passed because of extraneous reasons. If corporate battle had not happend, this would not have come out in public," senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Tata, said adding "I do not have any doubt that the original leak happened because of corporate rivalry".Salve told an apex court bench that Tata Telecommunication itself gets around 10,000 to 15,100 requests from the government every year for interception of calls and questioned the Centre for not finding out who leaked the tapped conversation.
"Tata Telecom itself gets around 10 to 15 thousand requests per year for interception of call. The total number of such requests must be around 60-70 thousand per year for all telecom companies," Salve told the bench headed by Justice G S Singhvi.The bench, also comprising justice V Gopala Gowda, said that "in the instant case, recording was done at the instance of the income tax department and at the same time by some service provider at the risk of losing the licence".
Salve submitted there is no proper mechanism to go through tapped conversations to find out the relevant information and destroy those parts which are private in nature. Salve also raised question on the probe agency saying "the investigating agency used the media, which is a very dangerous trend"."We don't know why it (Radia tape) was leaked and to embarrass whom," he submitted.
"The government should keep the relevant portion (of the tape) with itself but should have destroyed rest of them. It is not allowed to keep the entire tapped conversation. People's right to privacy has to be protected," he said. Salve said the review committee is overloaded and it is not possible for it to go through the entire process for all intercepted calls."There are many like the present one which have not come into light. Who is looking at all these cases? Are we allowing the dynamite to be used at different times by not destroying the tapped conversation which is of no use for the government authorities"? he said.
He pleaded an inquiry be done by the Centre into the leak which is completely of "exculpating nature" and there is inconsistency in the affidavit filed by the government "Government has thrown up its hand. Media and petitioners are not above law. RTI is there and governemnt authority is to decide whether the tapped conversation is to be made public or not. We have now RTI structure to bring transparency," he said while submitting that the tapped conversation be not made public.
"Media has the right to probe public affairs matters and law also protects them to an extent. But publication cannot be done on the basis of mere suspicion. Media must do its own follow-up investigation to prove the authenticity of a gossip before publishing it," he said.Salve said the media's justifying the publication of the transcripts annexed with the petition and affidavits in the apex court cannot be sustained.
The documents placed in the courts cannot be inferred to be in the public domain. "What I challenge is the assertion made by a newsmagazine that if something is placed in the Supreme Court, it is in the public domain and there is a right to publish," the senior advocate said.At this submission the bench also said "who took the stand that since it (transcript) is a part of the Supreme Court record, it is in public domain and can be published"."Do they say they got it from the Supreme Court"? The bench said.Responding to the query, Salve said "nowhere" they said like that.
He also said that though the court has ordered a preliminary inquiry by CBI into certain issues arising out of the tapped conversations, it could turn out to be a conversation making out no case.The conversations were recorded as part of surveillance of Radia's phone on a complaint to the Finance Minister on November 16, 2007 alleging that within a span of nine years she had built up a business empire worth Rs 300 crore.The government had recorded 180 days of Radia's conversations--first from August 20, 2008 for 60 days and then from October 19 for another 60 days. Later, on May 11, 2009, her phone was again put on surveillance for another 60 days following a fresh order given on May 8.

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/niira-radia-tapes-leaked-due-to-corporate-rivalry-ratan-tata-to-supreme-court/1187218/0

CSR to make available 50,000 more jobs in the sector: Experts

By PTI | 13 Oct, 2013, 11.18AM IST
NEW DELHI: Compulsory corporate social responsibility is likely to increase the demand for professionals in this field by as much as 50 per cent in the coming years and the industry is likely to see at least 50,000 more job opportunities in the CSR sector, experts say. 
Around 8,000 companies would fall under the Companies Act's ambit and this in turn would open a host of new job opportunities for individuals looking to work in the social development field. At present, the CSR work of a company is mostly done by corporate communications team but with this law, many firms would have to build a strong team of around five-six people for the purpose. 
According to leading executive search firm GlobalHunt MD Sunil Goel, "the demand for CSR professionals will surge 50-60 per cent and we may have to train fresh hands to fulfil this need of the industry". 
Echoing similar sentiments, DLF Foundation CEO Rajender Singh said, "some of the demand for CSR professionals is likely to be filled with internal placement. However, the industry is likely to see at least 50,000 more job opportunities in the CSR sector".
According to experts, the social sector is already a popular option and has low entry barriers and going forward, a lot of people could explore CSR as a career option. 
"CSR should see a spurt in career opportunities. But the real growth would be in effective CSR management agencies which would require a combination of management and CSR experts," Ashwajit Singh, Chairman and MD, IPE Global, a management consultancy company for development sector, said. 
According to Changeyourboss.com CEO Bhupender Mehta: "Big or small, every company makes efforts towards corporate social responsibility with intention of giving something back to the society and with this law, the number of people exploring CSR as a career option will go up for sure." 

Select companies would have spend two per cent of their average profit over the last three years for CSR. 

This would be applicable to firms having turnover of Rs 1,000 crore or more, or with net worth of Rs 500 crore and above, or entities having net profit of Rs 5 crore and more. 
Experts, however, believe that NGO's may not be the target to build the CSR team, and many institutes such as TISS and XISS have trained talent that can be hired through campus placements for the purpose. 
They say people with experience in projects management in organisations like UNDP can also be invited to join the teams. 
"For the companies who will be honestly getting into this for the first time will not poach employees from NGOs, but may look at some sort of tie-ups to avoid the hassles of making the numbers," Prisma Global Executive Director and COO Amitabh Roy Chowdhury said.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/jobs/csr-to-make-available-50000-more-jobs-in-the-sector-experts/articleshow/24082365.cms

Tulip Telecom ...salary dues..????

Tulip Telecom staff intensify protest over salary dues

ADITH CHARLIE

MUMBAI, OCT.10:  

Employees of Tulip Telecom have intensified protests against the company for not paying salaries due for nearly a year.

A section of staffers told Business Line that more than 100 of them have been congregating outside Tulip’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai.A company spokesperson did not comment on the protests but admitted that it has been facing difficulties in making payments. However, she reiterated that a part of the dues have already been paid.

“Tulip signed the master restructuring agreement under the corporate debt restructuring process a few months back but is still awaiting release of funds. While the company continues to clear part salaries, it expects to clear about two-month salaries after release of bank funds,” the spokesperson said in an email response.Tulip had approached 13 of its lenders during October-December last year for recasting its debt of nearly Rs 3,000 crore. The lenders approved of the package and the company will now have to clear the loans over the next 12 years.

In August, Hardeep Singh Bedi, Chairman and Managing Director, said the company would begin the process of clearing the dues of its 4,500-odd employees. Despite operational troubles, Tulip says it ‘remains committed to its employees and values the employee interests.’Over the last few years, the company has been accumulating short-term debt due to heavy investments in data centres coupled with working capital requirements. However, these investments did not bring in the expected revenues, say analysts.

Tulip had defaulted on redemption of foreign currency convertible bonds worth $140 million due in August last year, apart from delaying salaries. Ultimately, it used proceeds from the sale of its stake in the joint venture with Qualcomm to repay this debt.

(This article was published on October 10, 2013)

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/tulip-telecom-staff-intensify-protest-over-salary-dues/article5222000.ece

CSR- Charity to Responsibility

Shekhar Shah  September 14, 2013 Last Updated at 21:50 IST

Shekhar Shah: Moving from charity to responsibility - The rules for India's new companies act

How can chief executive officers, shareholders, governments and citizens ensure that the new corporate social responsibility money will make a difference? Make CSR evidence-basedIndia's rapidly-growing philanthropic community has received a huge shot in the arm with the CSR provisions of the new Companies Act: companies above a certain size must formulate a CSR policy and annually spend at least two per cent of their average net profits over the prior three years. That will translate in 2014 into about 8,000 companies spending some Rs 12,000-15,000 crores ($1.9-2.4 billion) annually - CSR numbers unheard of in India.

On what should companies spend their hard-earned profits?

Surely, in a country with some 270 million poor living on less than Rs 30 a day, that should be an easy question to answer: spend it all on the poor and the disadvantaged, open a school or a health clinic, put an extra meal in the hands of a child, and do it locally so that the company can see and talk to the beneficiary. Indeed, the Act asks companies to give preference in their CSR funding to the local areas in which they operate. The Act also gives guidance in its Schedule VII on what to do: address extreme hunger and poverty, promote education, support gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, enhance vocational skills, promote social enterprise, and, at the end, "such other matters as may be prescribed".

This guidance is appealing in many ways. These are good outcomes to aim for. They are also expenditures that tug at the heart-strings and can be emotionally satisfying, connecting the giver and the receiver, and, on the face of it, justifying the giving. And the smiling photographs, inspiring quotes, and true life-stories in annual reports can help convey the immediacy of a company's CSR as nothing else can. Add SPARQ codes and on-demand YouTube videos, and it is a potent mix. Companies should of course do all this.

Yet it would be a big mistake to restrict CSR funding only to on-the-ground projects. And it would fly in the face of the rising global trend in governments, the private sector, and donors to ask for the knowledge of actual impact - to know the evidence of what works and what doesn't and why - before spending large sums of money.

When done without the benefit of knowledge acquired from the careful gathering and analysis of field data and evidence, and from piloting, evaluation and meta-studies, the actual outcomes and sustainability of CSR projects can be highly uncertain. The world is littered with well-intentioned, expensive schemes that look about right and spend much money, but have little or none of their intended impact. Or worse, have unintended and undesirable consequences - such as money or subsidies going mostly to the rich, or education that actually reduces employability. The link between more money and outcomes is often not as simple as might appear.

There is much evidence to show that when all other factors are taken into account, there is little correlation between merely spending more money on education, health, and livelihoods and better outcomes for poor people. If that had not been the case, India could surely have licked its problems of child malnutrition and poor learning outcomes a long time back. The solution to infant mortality and morbidity may appear to be to increase health expenditures, but there is overwhelming evidence that it is poor sanitation and water supply that needs to be tackled first. There is a classic example of de-worming in Africa where de-worming tablets distributed in schools successfully tackled multiple problems of nutrition, school attendance and educational attainment. The evidence for such interventions can only come through careful, systematic research.

For that reason, the new CSR rules should explicitly provide for the funding of such research at institutions with a strong track record of quality and credibility. High-quality applied research related to the activities listed in the Act can show the strengths and weaknesses of public and private development projects, examine how the supply of benefits will interact with the demand and preferences of beneficiaries, and identify weak links that should be corrected as companies construct their CSR policies.

Allowing companies to use a part of their mandatory CSR spending to fund research and credible, independent research institutions would have at least five large benefits for the nation. First, the more evidence-based CSR is, the greater the bang for the buck that companies can expect. As the size of the economy grows, this can be a game-changer.

Second, risk-taking and innovation are at the heart of successful companies. If applied to CSR, this can strengthen the mind-set of piloting and learning through doing, a research-to-policy tradition that in our impatience to scale up remains weak in India compared to other large nations.

Third, evidence-based CSR can allow even modest CSR expenditures to produce superior and more sustainable outcomes than much larger public schemes, and indeed, show the way for such schemes.

Fourth, India spends substantially less on its social and policy research institutions than other large economies. Given its heterogeneity and scale, it should be spending more. Sound CSR funding can help address that problem.

Finally, there is a long-standing Indian tradition of corporate and individual philanthropic support for research institutions that the new CSR Rules should build on rather than ignore. My own institution was established soon after India's independence with funding not just from the government but, at Pandit Nehru's behest, very substantially from J R D Tata and others.

With the increasing demand for evidence, outcome-based solutions and the measurement of effectiveness, the role of policy research institutions in India must grow. Independent think tanks and research institutions form a valuable link between ideas, policies, and implementation by supplying the evidence, the platform for debate and dialogue, and the bridge between governments, the private sector, citizens, and the media in shaping public policy.

Fortunately, the just-released draft CSR Rules make it clear that a company may also use its CSR Fund to support independent Indian trusts, societies, or Section 8 companies with an established track record, not just those set up by the company. Many credible Indian research institutions would fall within this definition, and many new ones could come up. If the ministry of corporate affairs and its young minister are persuaded that robust research and evidence-based CSR will produce superior results for the India of tomorrow, then it should have no problem in accepting Indian companies wanting to invest in the country's long-term capacity to produce such evidence and analysis.

If India does not invest systematically in such research capacity, it will get much less of a bang for the buck from the heightened social responsibility that the new Companies Act asks for. The ministry of corporate affairs owes it to the future of India's disadvantaged, and the millions of its young, to allow companies to do so.

---

The writer is Director-General of NCAER, the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi

http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/shekhar-shah-moving-from-charity-to-responsibility-the-rules-for-india-s-new-companies-act-113091400713_1.html

India speaks 780 languages, 220 lost in last 50 years – survey

 

SEPTEMBER 7, 2013

BHASHA | GANESH DEVY | PEOPLE'S LINGUISTIC SURVEY OF INDIABy David Lalmalsawma
No one has ever doubted that India is home to a huge variety of languages. A new study, thePeople’s Linguistic Survey of India, says that the official number, 122, is far lower than the 780 that it counted and another 100 that its authors suspect exist.
The survey, which was conducted over the past four years by 3,000 volunteers and staff of the Bhasha Research & Publication Centre (“Bhasha” means “language” in Hindi), also concludes that 220 Indian languages have disappeared in the last 50 years, and that another 150 could vanish in the next half century as speakers die and their children fail to learn their ancestral tongues.
The 35,000-page survey is being released in 50 volumes, the first of which appeared on Sept. 5 to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of Indian philosopher Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, who was also the country’s second president. The last one is scheduled to come out in December 2014.
Ganesh Devy, who supervised the project, said this is the first comprehensive survey of Indian languages that anyone has conducted since Irish linguistic scholar George Grierson noted the existence of 364 languages between 1894 and 1928.
There is a major reason for the disparity in the government’s number of languages versus what the survey found: the government does not count languages that fewer than 10,000 people speak. Devy and his volunteers on the other hand combed the country to find languages such as Chaimalin Tripura, which is today spoken by just four or five people.
One of the most interesting aspects of the project is Devy’s view of language as a marker of the well being of a community. Languages are being born and dying as they evolve – note how Old English is unintelligible today, and how different is Chaucer’s Middle English from ours – and that is a natural process. But bringing attention to Indian languages with small numbers of speakers, Devy said, is a way of bringing attention to the societies that speak them, along with the well being of their people.
Here are edited excerpts from our interview with Devy:
Q: What is the need for such a project?
There has not been a survey of languages in the country for the last 80 years. We do not know how many languages there really are. There is no official statistics disclosed to the people since 1961.
Then there are all over the world serious alarms about disappearance of languages and culture. Considering all these, we thought it will be good to have a survey as a beginning of a much larger project. So now we have now completed the language survey of India. We will soon begin an ethnographic survey.Q: What is the main finding?
That India has a fascinating diversity of languages unlike anywhere else in the world, with 780 languages reported in our volumes and maybe another 100 or so which we were not able to report. So it is like having about 900 living languages in a country, which is very exciting news.
Q: Who did the work?
They are linguists. Also our people are people who are linked with the language.
Q: In which areas of the country are language clusters mainly found?
In all the states and union territories, invariably, there are at least 10 languages or more, but in urban spaces, like Delhi or Bombay, or Hyderabad or Bangalore, nearly 300 language communities inhabit that space in a very substantial number for each community. In the northeast, there are more than 250 languages.
Q: On the other hand, language decline is more visible along the coast of India.
Because of change in the sea farming technology, local people have lost their livelihood. They are no longer into fishing, making of nets, ship breaking. They have migrated inward. So they have migrated out of their language zones… Wherever people move from one livelihood to another livelihood, they carry their language for a while. But in the second generation, or the third generation, a shift takes place. The third generation no longer feels related to the earlier language the same way.
Q: Where else do you find major decline?
Nomadic communities. We had a very terrible law brought in by the British called the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 (Rescinded in 1952). Under that act, many communities were described as criminal by birth, not criminal by act. So those communities got stigmatised. … They are mostly nomadic in habit, and today in India those people are trying to move away from their cultural identity. They are trying to conceal their cultural identity. Therefore they are giving up their language.
Q: Which other countries have rich language diversity?
Papua New Guinea. There is a claim that there can be perhaps 1,100 languages in that country.  But the demographic statistics do not bear out that claim.
The next is Indonesia, which had, at least 40 years back, 800 languages.
Then comes Nigeria, which has about 350 languages.
Q: How do you preserve a language?
Languages cannot be preserved by making dictionaries or grammars. Languages live if people who speak the languages continue to live. So we need to look after the well being of the people who use those languages, which means we need a micro-level planning of development where language is taken as one factor.
Q: Are you working with the government on ways to preserve languages on the brink of extinction?
There is a desire from the part of the government to understand what we are doing. There is a willingness on our part to be of help to the government if the government asks for help.
Q: Extinct languages: are they mainly from small communities?
In history, very large languages also go down sometimes. Latin is one example. The (ancient) Greek language is another, Sanskrit is the third one. A language does not have to be small in order to face extinction. That is the nature of language … In India linguistic states are created. If there is a very large language for which there is no state, then slowly that language will stop growing. This has happened.
For example, Bhojpuri is a very, very robustly growing language, but there is no state for Bhojpuri. So after some time the robustness will be lost … So small is not the condition for the death of a language. Several external elements play a role. Often smaller languages move to the centre … slowly grow and occupy centre stage …
So this equation that the government will come, will do something, then language will survive, that has to be taken out of all thinking. It is a cultural phenomenon.
Q: There is a volume on sign language. Can you elaborate?
Because deaf people speak … initially in a non-verbal symbolic system. And so if that symbolic system exists and is in practice, it was necessary for us to take note of it. It is very much a language… Similarly, transgender people have their language, thieves have their languages. We have documented the language of thieves, we are trying to document the language of transgender community.
Q: Can you explain?
The semantic rules work differently (for them). With transgenders, the interpretative ability of the brain is handled differently. They may use the same words as you and I use, but the meaning drawn out of those words by transgenders is different.
Q: What surprised you about your findings?
That India has so many languages came as a surprise for me … When I began in 2010, I had assembled speakers of 320 languages, and I thought maybe one could go up to 500 because (George) Grierson’s estimate was around that. But when I found more and more, it was a stunning discovery.
Q: What’s the outlook for languages?
All over the world there is a concern about the disappearance of languages. Languages are dying in a very big way everywhere in the world. Secondly, wherever the English language has gone in the last 200 years, it has managed to wipe out the local languages… But in India, English did not manage to do that because Indian languages have a historical experience of having to deal with two mega languages in the past – one was Sanskrit, and after that, Persian… So Indians knew how to cope with English. And that is why even today, though so many of us use English as if it is our first language, we still do not pray in English, and we do not sing our songs in English.
Q: Can you name a few rising/thriving languages?
Byari in Karnataka, Bhojpuri in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Khasi in Meghalaya, Mizo in Mizoram, Kumouni in Uttarakhand, Kutchhi in Gujarat, Mewati in Rajasthan.
Q: What about falling/declining languages?
Every state has about four or five languages that are critically close to extinction: Mehali in Maharashtra, Sidi in Gujarat, Majhi in Sikkim (four people in one valley), Dimasa in Assam.
Q: Do you see English as a threat to other Indian languages?
A: I don’t. When a language imbibes words from outside, it grows. Languages grow by taking words from other languages. Every language is from beginning to the end, a polluted language. The threat will come. Hindi has its roots – there are 126 languages surrounding the Hindi belt… Because they are feeder languages, they feed into Hindi, they are the roots for Hindi.
English is the sky. The sky will not harm the tree, but if you chop the roots, a mighty tree can fall. This happened with Latin, and should not happen with Hindi. Out attitude of neglect towards smaller languages is a threat to larger languages.
Q: How do you revive small/declining languages?
Revival is possible only if the livelihood of those people is protected. I’m emphasizing that the language disappears when the livelihood options of the speech community disappears.
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(You can follow David on Twitter at @davidlms25  )

http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2013/09/07/india-speaks-780-languages-220-lost-in-last-50-years-survey/