20 facts you must know about India's growth

1)The Indian economy is the eleventh largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth largest by purchasing power parity (PPP).

2)India is poised to achieve 9 per cent economic growth in the current financial year itself, driven by robust performance by the agriculture and industry sectors.
The economy grew by 8.9 per cent in the second quarter of the current fiscal.

3)India has emerged as one of the world's top ten countries in industrial production. The nation's industrial production grew at the fastest pace in three months at 10.8 per cent.
Manufacturing grew 11.3 percent in October after a 4.6 percent gain in September.

4)India is one of the fastest growing automobile markets in the world, expanding at 35 per cent on average in the first four months of the current financial year.

5)The Bombay Stock Exchange has been rated as the world's best performing stock market recently. With a 13 per cent gain, Sensex is among the world's 10 biggest markets, according to data collected by Bloomberg.

6)Indian companies have become bigger and stronger in the last ten years with the average revenue of a company on the Fortune India 500 list standing at Rs 7,632.5 crore (Rs 76.32 billion).
The total revenue of the Fortune India 500 companies stands at Rs 38,16,239.40 crore.

7)India is the world's largest recipient of overseas remittances. The remittances grew from $49.6 billion in 2009 to $55 billion in 2010.
It is also the country with the second largest number of emigrants after Mexico, according to the World Bank.

8)India owns over 18,000 tonnes of above ground gold stocks worth approximately $800 billion and representing at least 11 per cent of global stock, according to estimates of World Gold Council.
India ranks 11th in the world with 557.7 tonnes of gold reserves.

9)India is among the top 10 nations in terms of foreign exchange reserves.
The country's foreign exchange reserves breached the $300-billion mark for the first time since 2008 with an addition of $2.2 billion on the back of a healthy rise in foreign currency. The nation's forex reserves currently stand at $296.40 billion.

10)India's services sector, backed by the IT revolution, remains the biggest contributor to the country's GDP, with a contribution of 58.4 per cent.

The industry sector contributed 24.1 per cent and the agriculture sector contributed 17.5 per cent to the GDP.

11)India's civil aviation sector will be among the top five in the world in the next five years.
Indian domestic air traffic is expected to reach 160-180 million passengers per year, while international traffic will exceed 80 million.

12)India's exports during November jumped by 26.8 per cent to $18.9 billion year-on-year. India's exports during April-September aggregated to $103.65 billion registering a year-on-year growth of 28 per cent.

13)India, China and Brazil are the top three target countries for foreign direct investment until the end of 2012 with the United States, for years number one, now in fourth place, according to the UN trade and development agency UNCTAD.

14)The Indian telecommunications industry is the world's fastest growing telecommunications industry, 723.28 million telephone (landlines and mobile) subscribers and 687.71 million mobile phone connections as of September 30, 2010.

15)The number of Internet users in India is estimated at 81 million. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India pegs the number of broadband subscribers at 10.08 million in August 2010.

16)The Indian IT-BPO industry is expected to exceed $70 billion in fiscal 2011.
The Indian IT-BPO exports are projected to grow by 13 per cent to 15 per cent while domestic IT-BPO will grow slightly more by 15 per cent to 17 per cent during fiscal 2010-11.

17)India has the largest number of post offices in the world. The world's highest post office, Hikkim is located at 15,500 feet in the Lahaul Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh.

18)The largest employer in India is the Indian Railways, employing over 1.6 million people. Indian Railways started operations on April 16, 1853.

19)ndia ranks second in farm output globally. India is one of the largest producer in the world of milk, cashew nuts, coconuts, tea, ginger, turmeric and black pepper.

20)Tourism is the largest service industry in India, with a contribution of 6.23 per cent to the national GDP. The number of foreign tourists visiting the country during September this year is higher than that of the same month last year.

Around 3.69 lakh (369,000) foreign tourists came to India in September this year as compared to 3.28 lakh (328,000) during the same month in 2009.

Courtecy:www.rediff.com

"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!"

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India ?
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones
Reason being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cell phone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sony’s and Canons are taking note.
Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).
Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.
Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smart phone bus. They admit that Apple's I phone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?
The "Mahabharata" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"
Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."
In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India ? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and tele presence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton 's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India . PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then tele presence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmy gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.
Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cell phone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley ). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.
—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the IIM,Bangalore