TCS and Wipro are in pursuit of outsourcing contract at Indian Railways

BANGALORE | MUMBAI: Tech firms TCS and Wipro, apart from several others, are in pursuit of up to Rs 2,500-crore outsourcing contract at Indian Railways, as the world’s biggest civilian employer plans to procure a human resource management system (HRMS) and other modules for integrating and automating functions of payroll, accounting and pension.

With around 1.6 million employees, Indian Railways aims to have a centralised system for managing its staff better. The organisation plans to spend around $1.5 billion over the next two to three years on technology.

“We will be coming out with a request for proposal very soon. The idea is to have built-operate-transfer (BOT) model with the vendors,” said a senior railways official. He requested anonymity because he is not authorised to talk about the project.

In order to avoid high capital investments in acquiring these solutions, railways is exploring cost-effective models such as software-as-a-service, wherein entire infrastructure and application software will be owned by vendors. “We also plan to bring performance and efficiency-linked parameters for paying these vendors,” the official added. At least two senior officials at Indian tech firms chasing this contract confirmed their interest on conditions of anonymity because they are not authorised to speak to media about their companies’ business pursuits.

“It will be a PPP and the pricing will be based on the number of transactions, while the IT company will fund and manage the entire IT set-up,” one of the executives said.

Indian Railways, which is the second largest rail network in the world, also plans to outsource another contract called ‘implementation of software-aided train scheduling’, valued at around Rs 450 crore. TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Mahindra Satyam are already bidding for this contract. The project will help railways do real-time train scheduling and management with the help of a software solution.

“Wipro is already doing two pilots for Indian Railways. One is a pilot for RFID and will be rolled out in next 12-18 months. The company is doing another control charting pilot for Railways where it charts the movement of trains,” another person familiar with outsourcing contract being awarded by Railways said. Both TCS and Wipro declined to offer specific comments about these contracts.

Railways is planning to outsource three more contracts over the next few months, with each estimated to be in the range of Rs 450 crore to Rs 500 crore. Apart from the asset management contract, the railways plans to invite bids for a contract to develop and deploy a solution for automating and integrating the functions of finance and payroll and the other one for material management solution.

IBM union: Layoffs could hit 16,000 by year's end

Computerworld - There's always a little bit of stealth to IBM's workforce reductions. Layoffs are usually scattered across the country and in numbers small enough to avoid triggering state and federal mass layoff notification laws. And so it was this week, as IBM cut employees from its Global Business Services unit.

IBM never comments on its cuts, the size or locations. It never says anything more about the reason for its reductions than it did today, in a note sent via a spokesman: "IBM is constantly managing resources as client demands evolve across a base of nearly 400,000 employees."

This means that the best information on IBM's workforce reduction in the U.S. come from two sources: The company's own annual report, which shows the year-to-year changes in its U.S. workforce, and the Alliance@IBM.

The Alliance says it has counted about 184 employees who have been laid off in the most recent round of cuts, based on employee information packets it received so far. But it believes the number exceeds that, according to Lee Conrad, the union's national coordinator.

In January, Conrad estimated that as many as 16,000 employees may be cut this year and it's standing by that figure. Based on its count so far, at least 10,000 employees have already been culled from the workforce because of the recession and offshoring.

"It is not right that IBM continues to keep job cut numbers, locations and divisions secret," said Conrad in an email. "IBM needs to come clean on how many jobs are being terminated as the work is offshored. We call for full transparency." The Alliance@IBM is a Communications Workers of America local that doesn't have enough members to gain official recognition as a bargaining unit.

IBM's annual report, which is due out next winter, will likely sum up the net impact of the company's shrinking U.S. workforce. In 2006, IBM employed 127,000 in the U.S; in 2007, 121,000; and last year, 115,000. Meanwhile, its employment in India, Brazil and other nations has been increasing.

Laid-off employees receive a 30-plus page package that includes what appears to be IBM's standard severance package. The last few pages of these packets usually include a listing of the job title being cut, employee ages and the number of people at a particular age. For instance, "SR Managing Consultant (MGR) 36(1), 37(1), 47(1), 53(1), 57(1), and 59(1). Or Assoc Partner Sales, Mgmt Auth 35(2), 37(1), 38(3), 39(1), 41(1), 46(2), 47(1), 48(1), 49(1), 52(3), 53(1), 55(1), and 56(1)."

It will be a W-shaped recovery: Paul Krugman

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who teaches Economics at Princeton University, has publicly lauded US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s

Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate & Noted economist More Pictures

efforts to pull the world’s largest economy out of the ongoing recession. In a free-wheeling chat with ET NOW’s senior editor in Kuala Lumpur, Mr Krugman predicts that the US economy may step out of the worst recession in more than five decades by September, but economic problems and weakness may persist. Excerpts:

Unemployment in the US fell for the first time in more than a year. But you’re telling us not to get our hopes up...
The new claims for unemployment insurance are not as bad as they were, but still indicate a worsening labour market. So, we’re basically at best stabilising, probably not even quite stabilised. This is just okay, it doesn’t look like the world is going to end right now, but it’s not a recovery.

Will the recovery be W-shaped or a V-shaped one?
It certainly is not going to be V-shaped. There’s no driver for rapid recovery. The W (the double dip) — I guess there might be a W and it will be fuzzy, so you won’t be able to see it. But it certainly is looking like a weak recovery with a possible setback. What drives those V-shaped recoveries is the housing sector. We had this enormous housing problem which imploded. Although housing is probably stabilising now, there’s still a huge overhang of excess building and there are bad memories of what happened. We’re not going to have a traditional housing-led recovery. So, we don’t have the set-up for a traditional, strong bounce back.

US households have taken up their savings rate from almost nothing to about 7%. Is that a problem for Asia, which has traditionally depended on the US consumer for buying up its exports?
Yes, we built a system — as I was describing a few years ago — where Americans have made a living by selling houses to each other, which they pay for with the money they borrowed from China. That’s over. American savings rate is going to head higher from where it is. Historically, it was 9-10%. And remember, American households took a $13-trillion hit on their wealth between the housing collapse and prices of nearly all assets fell. They have discovered that the rising value of their house is not going to provide for their retirement. Thus, they have got to start saving again.

Some people are saying that over-abundance of global liquidity has already started pushing emerging markets into bubble territory. What is your view?
I think I wouldn’t say excess of global liquidity. What I would say is that there was a global rush to safety. And some of that money is being freed up, but it’s sort of disillusioned about the things that it was chasing in the past, and is chasing new things. So, there are indications. There may be some equity bubbles out there. There may be some even real estate bubbles in Asia resurfacing, which is frightening. So, people who were terribly burnt on the US real estate market are saying: Well, but this is Chinese real estate and it can’t have the same problems, but of course, it can.

What do you think of the Chinese stimulus package?
We are not sure how much of it is real. There has been a surge in public investment, but some of that appears to be credit, which is being used just for speculation. Some of the increase in demand for raw materials seems to have been more speculative build-up, but in inventories, there is really an increase in production.

The Baltic Dry Index has dropped so it looks like that the inventory-building phase maybe coming to an end. And, of course, there are indications of bad spending and corruption. I don’t think it’s not the beginning of a sustained period of recovery.

So, is China really stoking a bubble here?
I think it is blowing some bubbles. If I was going to buy one unfortunate phrase from Alan Greenspan, I think, it’s right that it’s froth. There’s not one big bubble but there are probably many more bubbles out there.

Does the US need another stimulus package?
Oh yes. If you believe the original estimates, the stimulus package will have added, let’ssay three million jobs, to what we would otherwise have had. The fact is that we have lost 6-7 million. And it is getting worse. This package is not big enough to close the gap by a long shot and it’s limited by time. So yes, we need another package and it has to be largely spending-oriented.

Now that the worst is probably behind us, should we still worry about things like liquidity trap?
We’re in a liquidity trap because interest rates are close to zero. I think we’re going to be in a liquidity trap for at least a year, probably till the end of next year. But there are expectations in the US of inflation coming
back in future. I think it’s crazy. In Japan, the monetary base increased by 80% in 10 years after 1997 and prices continued to fall. When you are in a liquidity trap, it just doesn’t matter.

You say in your book that financial globalisation has turned out to be even more dangerous than we had imagined. Would you like to expand on that?
Think about Iceland. Did anybody truly understand that possibility? We thought before the crisis, the risks of financial globalisation were primarily to emerging markets. But the problem was simply the high leverage and exposure to foreign assets. We have seen that Germany had no housing problems. Nonetheless, German banks can be caught in deep trouble because of the fallout from the US or the Spanish housing problems.

Markets as self-adjusting, self-correcting god-like mechanisms. Do you think that dogma is out of the window now?
There’s a great seductiveness to efficient markets here. So, efficient markets have been very hard to kill. And, I think, it may survive even this. The Asian crisis, the dotcom bubble, all of those should have severely shaken faith in self-regulating markets and yet that faith persisted pretty well. So, I’m not sure that even this will kill it.

What will be your advice to India as our budget balance is fairly scary, but the FM has said: I’ll worry about it later and play for the growth now?
I think that’s right. You do have to have a plan in place to restore a healthy budget but not this year. Not with the world economy still so fragile, not with so much excess capacity still out there.

What kind of financial regulations would you want to emerge out of this crisis?
We need to have something like traditional bank regulation extended to any financial product if it is capable of generating a crisis. We need to have some central regulatory authority being given the freedom to designate certain institutions systematically important and subject those to capital requirements with limits on leverage first of all and then other kinds of potential regulations as well.

British immigration policies, an antidote for ‘brain drain’!

I’ve just come up for air after an inconveniently nasty bout of swine flu, and groggily began to find out what’s happening in the world around

NRI Taxation Forex Converter

me. Been there, done that, now I get all kinds of IMs from friends and frantic parents in India. My only advice is, as Douglas Adams would say, Don’t Panic. It’s mostly harmless.

Well, I could write about the NHS, considering my unusually intimate brush with it over the past few weeks, but what? The NHS, in my opinion, is generally a jolly good idea, if only someone would figure out a way to actually translate it into practice.

The doctors are fine. But I suspect their regs manuals are double the thickness of their medical books. While on the subject, what, exactly do India’s pandemic laws about who you can jail have anything to do with making enough anti-virals or vaccines available to the general public? Pandemic-hit countries are working on things like limiting, treating and tackling the virus, not whingeing about ancient laws.

Honestly, we always get hold of the wrong end of the stick. So, other than swine flu, what else is happening around here? Well, this is one that should give loads of people — including me — evil glee. The venerable British Academy, along with a slew of highly respected academics, commentators, and thinking heads, even the usually umm, (what’s a polite word for fuddy duddy?) Financial Times has now come to the conclusion that economics and economists need to do some serious rethinking on the future of economics itself. The way the subject has evolved has lost the plot, say the bigwigs, is too dependent on obscure and irrelevant mathematics, and economists are being seen as some kind of cross between astrologers and alchemists.

Of course, it took Queen Elizabeth herself to ask why this emperor has no clothes, when she gently enquired of the LSE, ‘How come nobody saw all this coming?” a few months back. The crux of the problem, they say, is that all those theories are based on assumptions that super efficient, super intelligent individuals all work in perfect rational harmony based on perfect information all over the world, and that’s fundamentally wrong. Duh uh?

We all realised that in college, and after trying to traumatise various teachers and getting nowhere, I figured I was better off for life learning in the canteen or library. (I wasn’t wrong. I haven’t used a comma I mugged for exams in my entire working life. I’ve used almost every canteen experience, people encounters, or fiction I read in class).
Anyway, now there’s a global debate about economics. The British view is that it needs to get closer to being the social science it is, and stop pretending to be some kind of offshoot of physics with mathematical models. They’ve finally figured out how silly they’ve always sounded. Woo hoo.

And then, of course, there’s the Home Office. Hooray. What would we snarky columnists do without them getting up to their silly antics? It’s ahuge relief that I don’t want a British passport, or else I may have to stop writing snarky columns. In a new public consultation, the Labour government wants to institute even more complicated laws for ‘earned’ citizenship and ‘probationary’ citizenship and so on. This round is more of Ms Jaqui Smith’s legacy, the former home minister best known for her husband’s porn watching habits.

Needless to say, it’s been met with bitter criticism both in the UK, the business community, and other countries like the US. In the new move, apparently ‘earned’ points will be deducted for some undefined ‘anti-patriotic’ activities, which include anti-war demonstrations. Maybe even this column, because it doesn’t show due ‘appreciation’ of British values. Now if only the British could tell me what those values are, I might appreciate them. This time last year, we were all engaged on a hugely expensive and major national exercise to define ‘Britishness’.

I usually go through Home office releases to explore new depths of stupidity, and these are some gems from the new UK Borders Agency consultation paper. One avowed aim is to ensure that UK’s immigration policy reduces the ill-effects of ‘brain drain’ for developing countries, but as yet, the government hasn’t the foggiest what that is.

Excuse me, did anyone ask the esteemed British government to worry about, say, India’s brain drain? Not that I know of. Sigh. The empire is over, people, long ago. Wake up and smell the coffee. Next there’s an entire para about how potential citizens need to be ‘integrated’, and pass tests on British history and politics, because they need to vote. Sigh, again.

All commonwealth and EU citizens already vote, from the day they rent a home, and yes, I voted in the EU elections as well as council ones. Last I heard, large chunks of British history, including Winston Churchill, were dropped from the local school curriculum to make space for life subjects like healthy eating. Exactly why do probationary citizens need to know British history when school kids don’t?

I guess the final word comes from Keith Best, the head of the Migration Advisory Service. All these desperate Labour ploys to win right wing support are dead in the water if the Tories come to power. That, without being an economist, we can pretty much predict as more than likely.

B-schools going the ISB way!

Wary of the policing by the All India Council for Technical Education -- the body that regulates technical education in the country -- more and more management schools are going the Indian School of Business way, opting for one-year management programmes and registering themselves as private limited entities under the Companies Act, 1956.

Around four B-schools that began operations in the past few months have all opted for one-year management programme against the conventional two-year courses.

"We do not want regulations to govern us. We want to be in sync with market forces. Being out of AICTE's purview gives us the flexibility to innovate because the curriculum is not decided by the regulatory body," Sunil Rai, CEO, Mumbai Business School, said.

"We are registered under the Companies Act, as we claim we are here to do business. This country needs a lot more ISBs. We are in the market to deliver the best in B-schools," he added.

MBS began operations in suburban Mumbai a few months ago. The school is registered under Section 25 of the Companies Act as a private entity. Its promoters include Godrej Sara Lee, Godrej Hicare and Godrej Hershey, besides individuals such as the school's Managing Director A Mahendran and Future Brands CEO Santosh Desai.

Another B-school, School of Inspired Leadership, which began operations in Gurgaon this July, has opted for a similar model. It is registered under section 21 of the Companies Act and managed by Grow Talent Company Ltd.

The school is promoted by industrialists Analjit Singh, chairman, Max India ; Yogesh Andlay, founder, Nucleus Software; Anil Sachdev, former director, Eicher, and K K Nohria, former chairman, Crompton Greaves , among others. Educational institutions in India can be set up only by trusts, societies and charitable companies, but the profits cannot be taken out of the institution and have to be reinvested. This not only restricts their expansion, but according to industry players, also encourages promoters to resort to creative accounting to take out profits from the institutions. Like MBS, Universal Business School, which is coming up at Karjat on the outskirts of Mumbai, is registered under Section 25 of the Companies Act. The B-school is promoted by Progressive Institutes and could opt for a one-year management programme. "We are talking to several international universities and could opt for an intensive one year management programme on the lines of ISB Hyderabad," said an official from the institute.

While these institutes are aware of the fact that ISB, which is associated with such top institutes as Kellogg, Wharton and London Business School, has been blacklisted by AICTE since its one-year management programme is not approved by the regulatory body, they are undeterred. "We are told AICTE could come up with regulations to accredit one year management programmes now. But that does not matter. Our relationship with the industry is good and we know our product will be accepted," said the CEO of one of the institutes.

MBS, however, is planning to approach the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry or Confederation of Indian Industry to accredit its programmes and inspect it. "We have applied for international accreditation for our B-school and we would like an industry body to accredit us, since that's what matters in the end," said Rai.

Senior Satyam staff quit over work rejig

Satyam continues to face attrition at the top level. This time round, the company’s decision to displace several employees from their positions has triggered the exits, say sources privy the development.

Ravi Bommakanti, head, TIMES vertical in the US, and Kiran Cavale, head of the data warehousing application service , are understood to have put in their papers. Tech Mahindra, the parent company, had earlier placed around 8,000 people in a virtual pool for six months and these employees were entitled to draw part of their remuneration . In an internal communication, the company said, “associates belonging to the enterprise business competency (EBS) and those in sales, relationships, operations management , programme management , delivery integration, solution frameworks & presales will reside in the corporate reserve till allocations are made.”

But unlike those in the virtual pool, associates who have been identified for the corporate reserve are set to draw their full salaries, although exact details of their package are not known yet. The process of identifying employees for the corporate reserve is over and the exercise could be implemented by the end of this week.

ET had reported this development on Monday. The restructuring is primarily to eliminate duplication in roles. This model is expected to reduce overheads.

“There will be a natural cost benefit that a company will accrue due to realignment of roles and responsibilities and optimal use of resources,” a company spokesman told ET earlier. Employees belonging to Band Bi and above have been rendered surplus due to this restructuring because they were in horizontal competency units where leadership positions are now redundant.

The absence of a defined role after the rejig may have also compelled employees to look for better opportunities, said sources. The horizontals or software application services such as Oracle, data warehousing , business intelligence now have a special group of consultants to train the other associates on the required software service required for a project.

HYDERABAD | CHENNAI: Despite a semblance of order after its takeover, Mahindra

1 million migrants to quit UK due to eco slowdown: Study

LONDON: With India and China fast emerging as growing economies attracting talent, Britain is in danger of losing out an estimated one million

Remittances made easy

highly skilled migrants to these countries in the next five years, according to a study.

At least 200,000 foreign nationals will depart every year as job opportunities become more scarce, The Institute for Public Policy Research said in a report, today.

The retention of highly skilled migrants is likely to become at least as important as attracting them in the first place as the traditional countries of immigration are joined by fast growing economies like China and India," the report said.

"Those most likely to leave have a high level of skills, good education and low barriers to movement and aspire to a lifestyle as global citizens," the report said.

"International competition for highly skilled migrants is intensifying and it makes no sense for the UK to succeed in attracting such migrants only to lose them quickly because of re-migration," the report said.

While the number of foreigners leaving will still be smaller than the number arriving, the rise in "re-migration" could slow the growth in the British population, the study said.

EDS workers face more pay cuts

Hewlett-Packard Co. is cutting some EDS workers' pay again, this time by up to 30 percent or more, according to some angry employees.

Officials at H-P, which acquired the Plano-based technology outsourcing company last year, said the cuts would not affect most employees and were being made to align EDS salaries with those at H-P.

That explanation did little to comfort some workers.

"I have been with EDS for almost 15 years, and the pride I once had in being a part of this organization has slowly and now surely become embarrassment and disgust," one Dallas-area worker said in an e-mail Wednesday.

H-P would not confirm the size of the pay reductions, though it did not dispute the reports of cuts ranging up to more than 30 percent.

This is the third pay cut for EDS workers this year, on top of roughly 25,000 layoffs announced last September after H-P completed its $13.9 billion purchase of the company.

The first pay cut, in February, affected all H-P and EDS employees and ranged from 2.5 percent to 20 percent.

In April, all EDS workers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico who made more than $40,000 had to take a one-month, 10 percent cut. At the time, H-P told EDS employees that no permanent salary cuts were being considered.

Several EDS workers said in e-mails and blog comments that the new round of pay cuts would apply only to U.S. employees. H-P, which has been notifying affected workers over the last several days, did not respond to requests for confirmation of those comments.

Several workers said the cuts would be very deep for them. Some making roughly $75,000 said they would see their salaries slashed to about $55,000, about 27 percent.For some workers, the reduction will come in waves, with part of it coming Sept. 1 and the rest scheduled for a year later.

The 15-year EDS vet – who verified his employment by supplying a copy of the pay cut notice he received from H-P – predicted the new cuts would lead to resignations.

"I know that my career with this company is coming to an end," the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in a follow-up phone interview. "I can't survive after this kind of hit."

His comments were echoed in numerous letters and online postings from EDS workers.

H-P doesn't disclose the current employee count for EDS locally, nationally or globally. But when the H-P purchase was announced in 2008, before the 25,000 job cuts, EDS had about 7,000 employees in the Dallas area, 48,000 nationally and 140,000 globally.

The company has remained profitable even during the severe recession. It reported earnings of $10.5 billion in 2008 on sales of $118.4 billion. For the second quarter of this year, H-P reported a profit of $1.7 billion on sales of $27.4 billion, numbers that were down a bit from the same period a year ago.

In February, chief executive Mark Hurd said he was taking a 20 percent cut in his base pay. But his salary of $1.45 million in 2008 was a fraction of his $42.5 million in total compensation.

At the conclusion of its most recent pay cut notice to employees, H-P included the following coda: "Thank you for your continued focus and dedication during this time of change. Working together, we will continue toward a successful integration process."

The spy CD that embarrassed the Congress

http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=1141987

SBI plans to hire 11,000 clerks

The country's largest lender, State Bank of India, plans to hire 11,000 clerks for marketing its financial products across the country.

The new recruits would be deployed for marketing, banking and advisory services. The duties involve extensive travelling, SBI said in an advertisement calling for applications from candidates.

It further said that depending upon the requirement, working hours would be flexible. The bank would hire 1,100 clerks in Mumbai circle and 1,000 in the Delhi circle.

Patna, Lucknow , Kolkata , Chennai, Hyderabad and Chandigarh would get 900 staff each.

SBI plans to recruit 13,000 people at various levels during the current fiscal.

"During 2008-09, the bank absorbed 33,703 new employees and this year we have plans to induct 13,000 into the SBI system," a top official had told PTI.

Last month, SBI had advertised for recruitment of 500 management executives.

SBI is also in the process of hiring officers for marketing and recovery (rural) and technical officers (farm sector). Both the jobs, though contractual in nature, will provide employment opportunity to about 481 persons.

The new recruits would be deployed across various businesses with objective to drive productivity, the official had said.