Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Source: The Economic Times, Mar 12, 2013

NEW DELHI: Union Road Transport Minister CP Joshi held a review meeting on Monday to discuss the appalling performance in the highway sector in 2012-13, but sought to focus on one target the ministry might be able to meet – construction of 3,000 km of highways under contracts awarded in the past.

This year, contracts for developing just 879 kilometer (km) of highways have been awarded as opposed to the original target of 8,800 km and the record performance of 2011-12 when contracts for 6,644 km were awarded. This year’s performance is only a tad better than the award of contracts for 643 km in 2008-09-which was the worst year for new highway projects since the UPA came to power in 2004.

The first inflection point for Indian IT service providers to go global and get recognized was the Y2k boom. While the “product” technology companies tried addressing the Y2k bug with automation solutions, products and scripts, India based providers sensed an opportunity to sell services or bodies (I know the term sounds derogatory, but this is the exact phrase used in most companies, although it gets wrapped in some fancy wordings for the customer) and this lead to the rise of the Indian Top 5 at that time. The Y2k boom not only allowed the Indian organizations to get a foot in the door through some staff augmentation deals and sign global Master Service Agreements with the F500/ G1000 , but also put the world’s focus on India (and specifically Bangalore at that time). Indian IT companies started boasting revenues in the millions and approaching a billion during this phase.

The…

The Great Green Wall is a long term project in Africa that involves planting a huge ‘wall’ or trees along the Southern edge of the Sahara desert. The picture below is a bit blurry in terms of the key, but you can clearly see the sandy colour representing the desert region and the emerald green line symbolizing the proposed wall.

The wall of trees would be 4,300 miles long and 9 miles thick, so it would essentially be a long thin forest. Encouragingly, Senegal is really keen on the project and has already planted 50,000 trees (The Guardian, 2012). However the Great Green Wall would need to touch 11 countries so co-operation on a massive scale is necessary here, which can pose a challenge when tensions are high due to a lack of resources.

What’s really cool though is the African governments and the local groups involved are really psyched for this…