Tuesday, January 10, 2006
All for a better Bangalore
The public can register all property documents at present, but the state government is planning an amendment to impose restrictions through a legislation in an effort to ensure that Bangalore's growth is more planned. The government had issued a notification on April 23, 2005, imposing restrictions on the kind of documents that can be registered for the sale, mortgage, gift, exchange, agreement to sell, lease or assignment of any site. But, in response to a petition, the Karnataka High Court, in its order dated January 3, 2006, quashed this notification. After reviewing the situation in the aftermath of the order being quashed and a Supreme Court judgment that the HC referred to, deputy chief minister M P Prakash on Monday told reporters: "The judiciary has said an executive order is not enough to impose such restrictions.
Our law department is of the opinion that a legislation will be more effective." Prakash said as a result of the January 3 order, all types of registration, without any restrictions, were now open. In view of this, the government wants to bring in the legislation and the restrictions at the earliest. "We will bring the legislation — an amendment to the Karnataka Stamps and Registrations Act — in the legislature session, beginning January 19. But there will be a lag period of about three months, as this legislation has to get Presidential assent," Prakash said. The state also considered putting in a review petition in the HC on the January 3 order, but dropped it as the law department favoured the amendment as a better option. Prakash said suitable amendments to the Karnataka Municipalities Act (1964) will also be brought in the session to ensure that the restrictions are properly implemented. In revenue layouts: On the regularisation of property in revenue layouts against payment of a fine, Prakash said the issue will come up before the next cabinet session for clearance.
Bangalore biz majors revise office hours
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Intellectual property stuck in Bangalore traffic could soon become a thing of the past. Tormented by slow moving traffic which rendered employees distressed and tired even before they stepped into office, Bangalore corporates have revised their office timings to beat the city's infamous bumper-to-bumper vehicular movement. Biotech major Biocon has advanced its office hours from October, with the clock ticking for them from 7.30 am to 4 pm. UK-based retail giant Tesco's Whitefield facility has re-scheduled its timings to 8.15am to 5.15pm from mid-December, software behemoth TCS to 8am-5pm from November, and Siemens to 7.15 am-4.30 pm. Prior to this revamp, all of these companies were sticking to the predictable 9.30 am to 5.30 pm schedule.
Chinese telecom vendor Huawei Technologies, interestingly, has pushed forward its office hours at its Airport Road facility by an hour with the timings now scheduled from 10.30am, a far cry from the peak-hour of 9.30am. Biocon's HR head Gautam Reddy told The Sunday Times of India that employees were spending more than three hours to commute to and fro from the office every day. "Being a research firm we want people to be as fresh as possible when they come in. Initially, there was some resistance as people found it too early. But now they are enjoying it as they are getting a lot of time at home in the evening," he said. "Now we have a bunch of content employees, who have time to catch up with friends or go to a pub."
Dodging Traffic And Talking Business In Bangalore
By Aaron Ricadela
Within a few hours in Bangalore, you can go from wending your way down a dirt road outside a 17th-Century mosque lined with trinket-sellers, barefoot urchins, and men herding sheep in the street, to drinking beer in the walled-off gardens of the old British Bangalore Club, where Winston Churchill used sup. It's not that other cities don't abut rich and poor, extravagant and destitute. But here they're in high relief. And quite literally, nearly crashing into each other.
For entry one in a week-long blog I'll keep of a reporting trip to India: 24 hours on duty and off. I arrived at my hotel at nearly 3 a.m. Sunday after negotiating the chaos of the baggage claim at Bangalore International—a misnomer, really, since the crumbling former industrial airport owned by military plane maker Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. has been pressed into service as an international port of call to accommodate the city's booming technology business. It takes 20 hours to get here from San Francisco, and I've been assured that's the short way. It also means that day's night and night day, which led to breakfast at 3 p.m. They do make a strong pot of coffee here though.
I knew I was on tap to meet some executives from IT outsourcing company Microland in the evening, but I wanted to see Bangalore for myself first. So I hired a taxi driver for two hours for the equivalent of $15—for that price the driver will take you around the city, and wait for you while you walk around and see the sights. But getting around can be an adventure. The poor are on foot, the noveau riche drive new cars, and in between surge city buses, auto rickshaws—smoke-spewing, three-wheeled motorized cabs, taxis, trucks, and ubiquitous motor scooters. The roads—the paved ones—have lines on the blacktop, but that's a formality. Generally, the whole lot lurches forward in an urgent mass. Suresh Iyer, a VP at Microland, compares it to a school of fish. They just know where to go.
Which brings me to the Bangalore Club. Built in 1868, it's the type of woody, Raj-era oasis that that still has a men's only bar, and another tie-required chamber with a giant hookah in the corner. My host, Microland chairman Pradeep Kar, a bearded, casually dressed Indian businessman who used to live in California's Silicon Valley, walks me through the place and tells me about his company's origins as a PC importer, distributor, and network designer. That's partly where the 1,300-person IT outsourcing firm's big contracts with U.S. companies like General Electric and Proctor & Gamble sprang from. Microland got out of the computer distribution business in 1998, but its IT services work persists quite nicely. Like most things in business, high-tech money here didn't suddenly appear here whole cloth. But the juxtapositions resulting from it seem to some residents to have done so.
For entry one in a week-long blog I'll keep of a reporting trip to India: 24 hours on duty and off. I arrived at my hotel at nearly 3 a.m. Sunday after negotiating the chaos of the baggage claim at Bangalore International—a misnomer, really, since the crumbling former industrial airport owned by military plane maker Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. has been pressed into service as an international port of call to accommodate the city's booming technology business. It takes 20 hours to get here from San Francisco, and I've been assured that's the short way. It also means that day's night and night day, which led to breakfast at 3 p.m. They do make a strong pot of coffee here though.
I knew I was on tap to meet some executives from IT outsourcing company Microland in the evening, but I wanted to see Bangalore for myself first. So I hired a taxi driver for two hours for the equivalent of $15—for that price the driver will take you around the city, and wait for you while you walk around and see the sights. But getting around can be an adventure. The poor are on foot, the noveau riche drive new cars, and in between surge city buses, auto rickshaws—smoke-spewing, three-wheeled motorized cabs, taxis, trucks, and ubiquitous motor scooters. The roads—the paved ones—have lines on the blacktop, but that's a formality. Generally, the whole lot lurches forward in an urgent mass. Suresh Iyer, a VP at Microland, compares it to a school of fish. They just know where to go.
Which brings me to the Bangalore Club. Built in 1868, it's the type of woody, Raj-era oasis that that still has a men's only bar, and another tie-required chamber with a giant hookah in the corner. My host, Microland chairman Pradeep Kar, a bearded, casually dressed Indian businessman who used to live in California's Silicon Valley, walks me through the place and tells me about his company's origins as a PC importer, distributor, and network designer. That's partly where the 1,300-person IT outsourcing firm's big contracts with U.S. companies like General Electric and Proctor & Gamble sprang from. Microland got out of the computer distribution business in 1998, but its IT services work persists quite nicely. Like most things in business, high-tech money here didn't suddenly appear here whole cloth. But the juxtapositions resulting from it seem to some residents to have done so.
