29 April 2007 - 23:14
Three Indians in the Top Five on the Sunday Times UK Rich List
India to Get Free High-Speed 2Mbps Broadband
Shortage of Relevant Graduate Skills but not Solar Panels
Lakshmi Mittal, the President of Arcelor Steel, is still the richest person in Britain with assets totalling £19.25 billion, an increase of £5 billion over last year. The second richest is the Russian oil tycoon and football groupie Roman Abramovitch with a mere £10.8 billion.
According to the List, despite the fact that Labour have been in power for the last ten years, the wealth of Britain's resident super-rich has trebled. Thanks to Gordon Brown’s management of the economy the gap between the rich and the poor is now greater than it was before Labour came to power. Nice one Gordon.
The only person in the top five who was actually born in the UK is the celebrated estate agent, the Duke of Westminster, with a ‘bijou’ property empire of £7 billion.
The Hinduja brothers, Sri and Gopi, are ranked joint fourth with a £6.2 billion empire obtained from “industry and finance”, although as there are two of them they only really have £3.1 billion each, so possibly some ‘match fixing’ there.
If you want to be on the list you will need a fortune of £70 million to scrape in at number 1,000. If you think you have been inadvertently left off, you need to complain to the Sunday Times, not me.
India to Get Free High-Speed 2Mbps Broadband
The Indian government has decided to provide free, high-speed broadband services throughout India by 2009, via state-owned telcos BSNL and MTNL. Consumers will no doubt be delighted, but the telecom businesses themselves may be less pleased as they risk losing most of their revenue, in part due to the change to VOIP, which allows people to make telephone calls free of charge. The quality of VOIP calls, is starting to improve and by 2009 it is expected to be as good as analog calls. Telecom companies will be forced to create new applications if they wish to continue in business. India is a long way behind China in so far as concerns infrastructure but the Indian government has taken a decisive step to modernize its communications network, plus India will not be hampered in its development by the censorship and State control that exists in China.
Shortage of Relevant Graduate Skills but not Solar Panels
According to KV Kanath CEO of ICICI Bank: "skill-sets in India do not match a lot of the jobs. What is being taught is a disconnect from what we require. Last year, to recruit 10,000 people we had to see 300,000 resumés." There are plenty of UK graduates looking for jobs, so maybe we’ll see some of them emigrating to India.
Mr Kamath also warned that the infrastructure in India could be a threat to economic growth. He said that India's infrastructure needs to be improved, as power blackouts are still relatively frequent. "New capacity will take three or four years to come up," he said. "It will be a catch-up game for a very long time."
One development that may help is the market that has arisen for household solar panels in India, with the help of a UN program that helps local banks offer cheaper loans to enable people to pay for the panels. It’s worth bearing in mind that China is currently a major manufacturer of solar panels, it would seem to me be a wise move for Indians to start making their own (if they don’t already).
I must admit I don't know if there are any Indian manufacturers of solar panels, so if anybody knows of any please don't hesitate to leave a comment (preferably polite).
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