Mr. Jain discussed with a select group of business leaders and members of the Indian Business & Professional Council on the theme “The Future of Marketing.”

Regarding its acceptance to the conference at the invitation of the SPJCM, M. Jain said: “In the current momentum and grow rapidly world of management training, SP Jain distinction has rarely achieved by the development and implementation of some of the most prestigious, industry focuses MBA programs in this region. I welcome the opportunity for an institution as prestigious. ”

The introduction by Dr. Dipak Jain, President of SPJCM, Nitish Jain, said: “Mr Dipak Jain is a giant in the global landscape management and training We feel honored, he accepted that his unique vision, ideas and knowledge in the field of marketing. ”

The problem with the collection of Dr. Jain has maintained an excellent exhibition that the public spell-bound sales on future challenges for companies and how they can be treated; Client - centric marketing to attract and retain customers and employees is the only way in which organizations can sustain and grow in the future

Under pressure from local industrialists who fear they are losing out to foreign competition, the Indian government is reviewing a number of free-trade pacts, including those pending with Thailand and Asean.

“Bilateral agreements having divergent standards with different countries may not help India remain competitive in the international market,” said R.V. Kanoria, a international trade expert with the Confederation of Indian Industry, a New Dehli-based trade group.

“Liberalisation of tariffs by the Indian government should be calibrated with internal reforms in labour, infrastructure and agriculture,” he said in an interview with the Bangkok Post.

In October 2003, India signed a signed a limited trade deal with Thailand that came into effect in September 2004. Under the so-called “early-harvest” agreement, which expires in 2008, Indian and Thai firms can freely import and export 82 items. The deal calls for tariffs to be reduced by 50 percent in 2004-05, 75 percent in 2005 and 100 percent in 2006.

Bilateral trade in these 82 items consequently doubled to US$430 million in 2005 from $217 million in 2004, with Thailand recording a trade surplus of $253 million.

The lopsided numbers soured the Indian business community, particularly the automotive components makers, and talks on a more comprehensive deal that would cover thousands of items has since stalled. Recently CII said it was working to modify existing FTAs and implement a new set of industry recommendations for future trade deals, while claiming that multilateral agreements under the World Trade Organisation would benefit the country more than bilateral agreements.

“Toyota, Honda and Procter & Gamble are the three multinational corporations that have benefited the most from the Indo-Thai FTA,” said Sharif D. Rangnekar, an economic analyst and editor of the Indiabiznews.com website.

He added that “these three companies find the logistics of doing business with India rather attractive because they have major manufacturing units in Thailand and find it easy to launch their products in India”.

Indian products, on the other hand, “don’t have a large market in Thailand even if they have the required certification,” Mr Rangnekar said, explaining that this is partly due to the fact that India’s population of 1.1 billion dwarfs that of Thailand.

Criticism of the India-Thai FTA has come from a wide range of sources, including industry groups, independent research think-tanks and columnists. In 2004, the National Council of Applied Economic Research slammed the pact, primarily because of the complicated issue of “rules of origin”. It also questioned if the “early-harvest” agreement is compatible with WTO rules.

Last year, India’s Ministry of Commerce undertook an impact assessment study of the limited trade scheme with Thailand, which analysed trade flows and drew inferences for the future. The Tariff Commission also submitted a similar study to the federal Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion in New Delhi.

The CII committee headed by Mr Kanoria will soon come up with guidelines for the Indian government to consider before negotiating FTAs. These are expected to include guidelines relating to negative list, common floor prices and rules of origin.

A survey by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), one of the largest apex industry associations in India together with the CII, found in 2005 that imports from Thailand rose phenomenally under the limited FTA, while exports from India to Thailand actually declined.

Abir Pal, Shailesh Dobhal, Brian Carvalho, Roshni Jayakar, Priya Srinivasan, Sahad P.V., Venkatesha Babu, Kushan Mitra, Nitya Varadarajan

She has a first, maybe several firsts to her credit.

She has helped change the way her company works.

She has helped create an industry.

She has helped her company explore uncharted waters.

She has changed the way her industry works.

She is the role model for other women in business.

She is in a position to change the lives of countless individuals.

She may satisfy any of these conditions.

She may satisfy all.

She is one of the most powerful women in Indian business.

She is one of the 25 most powerful women in Indian business.

Stateswoman #1

Arnavaj ‘Anu’ Aga

62 Chairperson Thermax

Aga gives up one source of power and, not surprisingly, taps into another.

India Inc. Has enough male industrialists and CEOs who have grown into the position of elder statesman-Ratan Tata, Rahul Bajaj, N. R. Narayana Murthy-but Anu Aga is the first woman who qualifies for that distinction. With her patrician features and striking cropped silver mane, the lady is a regular at industry fora, and when she talks, people listen. That’s not just because Aga built the Pune-based Thermax Group into a Rs 830-crore energy and environmental engineering major. It is not because of her stated objective of “doubling turnover and trebling profits in the next three years”. It is because she speaks (and acts) from the heart (one reason why this magazine dubbed her India Inc.’s Ms Conscience in last year’s listing of powerful women). This is evident in Thermax’s practice of putting aside 1 per cent of its profits for social causes and its generous contributions towards efforts to beautify Pune. And it is evident in Aga’s own association with Akanksha, a non-governmental organisation that strives to provide education to children who live in slums and on the streets.

Last year, one of this magazine’s writers wrote “… Aga will definitely not feature in the next listing… She turns 62 in September 2004 and will hand over charge as Chairperson…”. Now, with the date of her retirement drawing close, it emerges that Aga’s power was never positional (arising from the post she held); it was always personal-arising from truth, fairness, transparency and corporate ethics. That could explain why the economics graduate (she also has a post-graduate degree from Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences) was motivated by a letter from a concerned shareholder to put aside her grief at the death of her husband and Thermax’s founder Rohinton, and focus on the ailing company. As it could, her outspoken criticism of the way the government of Gujarat handled the sectarian violence that broke out in the state in early 2002.

Byline: Swati Prasad, Brian Carvalho, Shailesh Dobhal, Roshni Jayakar, Moinak Mitra, Priya Srinivasan, Nitya Varadarajan, Kushan Mitra

Mammon may be the deity of choice of the corporate world but there is one higher authority to which he must pay obeisance. This is power itself. It is the ability to shape and change organisations, careers, markets, entire industries, sometimes, the lives of an entire nation. It is the deafening silence that falls upon a meeting when someone with enough of the commodity to spare raises his or her voice to make a point. It is the raw envy an individual’s achievements provoke in people around. It is, in equal parts admiration, respect, influence, and it is more.

Definitions are important, for they delineate who we are and what we do. When we at Business Today set out to identify the 25 most powerful women in Indian business, we started off by looking for a largely-objective quantifiable methodology (confession: we are partial to numbers) that could accomplish the task. Power, unfortunately, confounds most available metrics. So, we decided to do the next best thing: define our universe and the criteria we would use to identify the most powerful women in business.

The universe we decided on was, simply, women in business. Entrepreneurs, executives, wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters inducted into the family business, everyone would be considered. That left out women who weren’t actively involved in business, but who exerted considerable influence (sometimes more than those in business) simply by being close to those in power. Infosys’ N.R. Narayana Murthy, Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani, and Godrej’s Adi Godrej are all powerful men and they are married to strong women (Sudha, Nita, and Parmeshwar, respectively) who serve, more often than not, as muse, confidant, and sounding board rolled into one. Does that make them powerful? You bet, but the fact that they aren’t actively in business disqualifies them from this listing.

The criteria we used was equally straightforward: to qualify for the listing a woman needed to have done one of several things. She had to have achieved something really of note such as becoming the country’s first woman Revenue Secretary, like Vineeta Rai did. She should have helped change her company, much like Mallika Srinivasan changed, and is changing, TAFE. She must have created an industry like Shahnaz Husain did the beauty one. She could have pushed at the frontiers of commercial science like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Villoo Morawala Patell did and continue to do. She had to have helped her company chart unexplored waters (and successfully at that), much like Shikha Sharma and Chanda Kochhar helped ICICI Bank do. She could be at the vanguard of change in her industry, like Meenakshi Madhvani has always been. She should have pioneered good business practices like Anu Aga did. Or she might be in charge of a company that through money-power, innovations, products and services, or a combination of all changes the direction of other companies and of individuals. Put simply, merely being a senior woman executive wasn’t enough.

Armed with these definitions Business Today’s correspondents and editors fanned out meeting consultants, analysts, executives, the women themselves, and just about anyone else who could provide a perspective of power. The result is the first ever listing of The 25 Most Powerful Women in Indian Business.

India Inc’s

ICFAI University is helping in the globalisation of Indian business education and research through its case study development. ICFAI started developing its own case studies because of the lack of contemporary Indian cases and the non- usability of case studies developed by the Harvard Business School due to unfamiliar terms and language used. According to Dr A Besant C Raj, Chancellor of ICFAI, case studies help students in developing communication and interpersonal skills besides imparting knowledge. Case studies also instil confidence in students and expose them to industries, organisations, functions and responsibilities.

The case studies developed by ICFAI are used by over 100 business schools worldwide apart from several management textbooks published in the US, Canada, the UK and other parts of Europe. ICFAI has also won prizes in international case study writing competitions.

HYDERABAD: Simplistic as it may sound, the lack of communication and tradition is responsible for splits in major Indian business families, says in academician who has studied the phenomena around the world.

To prevent such splits that are often very messy, Indian family-controlled businesses could learn a lot from US and European models where even in third generation conglomerates there is a clear separation of ownership and management, says K Ramachandran, associate dean for academic programs at The Indian School of Business (ISB).

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“The role of the family in running a business is to a large extent controlled if there is a strong board of directors that presides over the company,” said Ramachandran.

“In India, what it comes down to lack of communication is because of which there are differences in goals and therefore, a lack of prioritising,” he said, specifically stating that he was not referring in particular to any of the big-ticket separations That have occurred in Indian business families in the past few years.

The Reliance congloméré diversified pharmaceutical major Ranbaxy are some of the Indian family-controlled businesses that have split up in recent times.

As for lack of tradition, this is more of a north Indian phenomenon, Ramachandran said.

“In the south, family traditions are stronger because the money is not the main problem. South Indian families play the role of a trustee where the main aim is to preserve the wealth and hand it over to the next generation , “he maintained.

“Then, the women not get involved in the business but concentrate on playing a social role,” he added.

“It’s not that women do not run businesses in the south. In fact, many of them operate some very successful family venture. But where in companies dominate the men, the women generally stay away from the day-to-day affairs of the business, “said Ramachandran.

So, despite deep divisions among many companies in the south, they still have managed to stay together for their common good, the academic explained. This, however, is not generally the case in the rest of India, he added.