Real estate will see consolidation: Subramanian

Head Investment Banking at ENAM, Dr Srinivas Subramanian opines that organized developers are just coming into play and he feels that the markets are going to undergo a complete transformation in the next five years, reports CNBC-TV18.

He believes that the growth opportunites in the real estate sector are significant and stresses on the fact that we should look at companies not from the NAV point of view but rather from the PE point of view.

Source: http://news.moneycontrol.com

Blair Questioned by the Scotland Yard on Peerage to NRI Businessmen

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was questioned by the Scotland Yard as part of an ongoing inquiry into charges that peerages had been offered on sale to four leading businessmen, include two of Indian origin.

This is the first time in the history of British parliamentary politics that the police have knocked on the doors of a serving prime minister at 10, Downing Street. The two-hour police encounter was highly embarrassing for Blair, who had promised to make politics 'whiter than white' when he came to power in 1997.

The four businessmen who were allegedly offered peerages in exchange for funds to the Labour party are Chai Patel, a chief executive of the up-market Priory Clinics, Ghulam Noon, Britain's leading food sector entrepreneur, stockbroker Barry Townsley and property developer David Garrard.

A spokesman for Blair said the prime minister had denied to the police that peerages had been offered for sale. Blair was not cautioned but interviewed as a witness without the presence of a lawyer.

The spokesman said - "The prime minister spoke to police today in Downing Street. This was not under caution, nor was he accompanied by a lawyer." The interview was described as robust and a civil servant was present to take notes.

The spokesman added that Blair explained to the police why the four businessmen had been nominated for peerages, and insisted that giving money to a political party should not prevent someone from receiving an honour.

The prime minister explained why he nominated each of the individuals and he did so as party leader in respect of the peerages reserved for party supporters as other party leaders do.


Sourc-http://www.rxpgnews.com

Caparo's Future Growth will be India-Centric

NRI industrialist Swraj Paul, chairman of the $1.5 billion Caparo group of industries, has said India is the target for future expansion of the company and its operation will expand there from the current 5% to around one-third of the total business.

"Sixty per cent of my business is in Britain, 35% in the US and, so far, less than 5% is in India. However, India is the target for future expansion," Paul, British ambassador for overseas business said in an interview published in the latest issue of 'Manufacturer'.

The reputed monthly, promoting best practice in manufacturing, carried the article with his photograph on the cover, with a title 'Empire building' - Paul talks on Caparo, Cars and Cultures.' Lord Paul, 74, said seven plants have been built in India in the last three years and nine more are under construction. "The Indian operation will expand to around one third of the company's total business," he said.

Describing him as an Indian born Brit, the magazine narrates how Jalandhar-born Swraj Paul built his family empire brick by brick, currently employing over 5,000 people worldwide. Its size in the UK has grown from 2,000 to around 3,000 in the last three years alone.

The magazine observed that Lord Paul's enthusiasm for the company's newest project, the Caparo TI, is infectious. "It's a racing car, but also designed for the roads. It will be a two-seater, with a little space in the back, like the Aston Martin," Lord Paul said. And it will retail at around 2,00,000 pounds sterling.

Source-http://www.business-standard.com

Special Cell for Non-Resident Indians by Punjab Police

Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) cheated back home or involved in a dispute over property or even marriage, are just a phone call or an e-mail away from relief. All they have to do is to contact the NRI cell of the Punjab Police.

Lodging a complaint is a simple process. Recently, the Cell started a NRI Radio helpline to handle grievances of Canada-based NRis.

“We have a live programme with Radio in Canada. Also, we are trying to get in touch with few other radio and TV channels,” Deputy inspector General of Police, NRI cell, Sanjeev Kalra, said.

“i have a feeling that NRIs are not aware that there is such an NRI cell which looks into their problems on a priority basis. So, through all these things, we are trying to project to NRIs all over a feeling that, yes, they have somebody to look to whenever they have a problem here,” Kalra added.

An NRI settled in Toronto, Canada, Palwinder Singh, approached the NRI Cell of the Punjab Police when his family got no help from the local police.

in Palwinder’s absence, his family was attacked several times by miscreants in the village, but the local police didn’t even register their complaint. This left no option for Palwinder, and he returned home.

He then approached the NRI Cell of the Punjab Police and got his case registered. The miscreants were eventually put behind bars.

“i registered my case through the NRI Cell and got the justice which i never thought i would. The miscreants were too powerful that my family had never dreamt of getting justice. it all happened through the NRi Cell that we are now living freely,” Palwinder said.

Located in Chandigarh, the Cell works round the clock to register NRI grievances.

NRis relatives too can approach the Cell. Narvinder’s brother, who is settled in Canada, visited Punjab, and is facing a criminal case. Narvinder approached the NRI Cell to get his brother exonerated.

Since its formation in February 2004, the Cell has handled 932 complaints, out of which 771 have been disposed off satisfactorily, 161 cases are still being looked into.

The nature of complaints reveals that a majority of the NRIs face problems relating to property or money. Marital problems, theft and false allegations follow suit.

NRI victims can send their complaints through an e-mail pbpolicenri@yahoo.co.uk.

Punjabis are ethnically, linguistically and culturally related to the other Indo-Aryan peoples of South Asia.

There are an estimated 120 million Punjabis around the world. The Punjabi people have emigrated in large numbers to many parts of the world.

The United Kingdom has a significant number of Punjabis from both India and Pakistan as does Canada and the United States. The Middle East has a large immigrant community of Punjabis, in places such as the UAE and Kuwait.

Indians in the USA are one of the largest among the groups of Indian diaspora, numbering about 1.7 million, and probably the most well off - their median income is 1.5 times that of the host country. They are well represented in all walks of life, but particularly so in academia, information technology and medicine. There were over 4,000 PIO professors and 33,000 Indian-born students in American universities in 1997-98. The American Association of the Physicians of Indian Origin boasts a membership of 35,000. in 2000, Fortune magazine estimated the wealth generated by Indian Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at around 250 billion dollars.

in the year 2002, of the entire total 1,063,732 immigrants to USA from all the countries, as many as 66,864 were from India. According to the US census, the overall growth rate for Indians from 1990 to 2000 was 105.87 per cent. The average growth rate for the whole of USA was only 7.6 per cent.

Source-http://punjabnewz.com/1230/punjab-police-has-special-cell-for-non-resident-indians.html

Difference between NRE and NRO Account

NRE account is a repatriable Rupee account. It can be opened with either funds remitted form abroad or local funds which can be remitted abroad.

NRO account is a non-repatriable Rupee account and can be opened in with funds either remitted from abroad or generated in India, all bank accountsin India for NRIs/ Indians Overseas will be redesigned as NRO Accounts. Amount once transferred to NRO account will become non-repatriable.

• Funds remitted from abroad or local funds, which can otherwise be remitted abroad to the account holder, can be credited to NRE Accounts. Local funds, which do not qualify for remittance outside India, are required to be credited to NRO accounts.
  
  
• Funds can be freely transferred from NRE account to NRO account, but No funds can be transferred from NRO account to NRE account.
  
  
• Money once credited into NRO account cannot betransferred back to NRE account.
  
  
• When a resident becomes non-resident Indian their existing bank account in India become NRO Account
  

Non-Resident Indians Feelings - A Perception based Global Survey on NRIs

Non-Resident Indians Feelings About India :A Perception-based Global survey

Manama, Bahrain, December1, 2006: The Non-resident Indians (NRIs) are considered as ambassadors for Brand India in foreign lands. They try to remove a lot of misconceptions that foreigners may have about India. It is seen that most of the time they try to highlight the positives instead of the negatives about India. Furthermore, they play multifarious role by contributing to the peace and prosperity of India and Indians around the world not just restricted to sending remittances. According to one estimate, their contributions in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) of India have been about 18-20%.

The NRIs population is estimated over twenty two million, living in different regions of the world. Over 44% of them are concentrated in Asia, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand and approximately 26% are in North and South America. This is a significant population that is talented, resourceful, and quite sensitive towards the developmental issues. Majority of them are technically qualified people who immigrated to other countries for various reasons and have been playing a key role in transforming their socio-economic environment of these regions. They are one of the main investors in India. The presence of several hundreds NRIs making waves abroad and through their influence also help Indian organizations to get outsourcing projects, collaborations, joint ventures and flow of capital into the Indian businesses. NRIs are now showing long term commitments to integrate with the local businesses in India

Recently, there have been a lot of discussions on NRIs to the effect that once they leave India in search of green pastures e.g. to North America and Europe, they start berating India. Influenced by such contentious discussions, Dr. P.L. Joshi, who hails from Uttaranchal, India and currently a Professor at the University of Bahrain, has conducted perhaps the first global survey of its kind on NRIs attitudes examining “what makes them feel proud of India? Using a convenient random survey technique, 1441 questionnaires were sent by emails to NRIs living in 29 countries. Ten statements, which may make the NRIs to express their proud feelings towards India, and five statements, which may hesitate not to say so, were included in the questionnaire after a two-stage Delphi method was used to develop the questionnaire. A total of 162 replies were received; however, only 90 questionnaires were usable.

A Likert scale ranging from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1) was used to measure the responses. There was some response bias particularly from North America where the maximum number of questionnaires was sent. More than 50% of the respondents were executives and managers together with a few business people. Over 31.1% of responses were received from Middle East alone in which over 40% of NRIs population live. Again, over 50% of them have post-graduate qualifications and over 45% were in the age group of 36 to 54 years who responded to the questionnaires. The survey provides a number of insights and the respondents also offered several comments. The main findings were:

On an overall basis, NRIs strongly feel that -

(1) ‘the history and rich cultural values of India”,

(2) ‘India’s third-largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world (technical human resources)”, and

(3) ‘technology, software and other developments”

These are the three main achievements/characteristics of India, which make them feel proud of contemporary India. These three variables received more than 80% responses from the respondents in this global survey. The findings reflect that the NRIs still take pride in Indian customs, traditions and cultural values for the simple reason that perhaps it is the only country in the world with multicultural diversity, immense demographics and ethnic communities living in peace. Of course, there were statistical differences in their perceptions when data was analyzed by NRIs living in developed versus under-developed countries, Middle East region versus rest of the world . The respondents living in developing countries gave higher score on the ten variables compared to NRIs living in developed world.

The respondents were not very much impressed with the claims that India has become self –sufficient in agricultural food grains. It received seventh ranking in the ranking order and only 36.7 percent of respondents agreed that India has achieved self-reliance in food grains. The perceptions of respondents living in developed countries and developing countries were similar on this point.

Furthermore, it seems that respondents’ attitudes towards India from the Middle East and Asia were more positive than NRIs living in the Western countries. The reason may be that NRIs in Middle East are unique as they are not naturalized there and ultimately will return to India (Non-Returnable Indians). For nine statements, the average score from respondents from Europe were below 80 percent. The NRIs from Europe also ranked “India’s third largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world (technical human resources)” as the main characteristics/achievement of India.

Source-http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0612/S00064.htm