What's cashless health insuranceEach person covered under such a policy is issued a health/identity card. In the cashless system, a policyholder can walk into a hospital listed with the insurer, give the card number and get the treatment without having to stand at the cash counter.For treatment in non-listed hospitals, a thirdparty administrator's (TPA's) authorisation is required. A TPA verifies ...

How Things WorkBlimpsBlimps are the latest addition to sporting events in India. The IPL contests featured blimps; the Commonwealth Games is getting a similar showpiece equipped with cameras and lights. So, how do these fish objects fly?Very simply, the blimp is a large balloon filled with helium. Helium is lighter than air and therefore the blimp goes up. That's the ...

My leadership styleDelegative, Participative and AuthoritativeThe political leader I admire the mostSardar Vallabhbhai Patel.The business leader I admire the mostMany. Difficult to single out one name.The leadership lesson I remember the bestAlways lead from the front during times of extreme adversity.A book/movie I would recommend on leadershipThe Bridge on the River Kwai.The difference between a manager and a leaderA leader ...

What will changeCurrently, a basket of 435 commodities ranging from food items such as rice and wheat to petroleum products and medicines, is used in the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) to determine inflation. To make the index more relevant, over 250 new items, such as mineral water, cellphones, perfumes, digital cameras, computer stationery, LCD TVs, among others, will figure in ...

Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President, Chief Scientist and Head of Yahoo! Labs, was in Bangalore in late July. BT'S Rahul Sachitanand caught up with the Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, who is also a consultant professor at Stanford, on the road ahead. Edited excerpts.We see a break from the backend data centre work - which is a battle ...

After a stock market listing in October 1994, Kamat Hotels Chairman and Managing Director Vithal Kamat was looking for the next big need to meet in the hospitality business. A conversation with close friend and Technical Director Param Kannampilly at Mahabaleshwar, a hill station in Maharashtra, steered him towards building an environmentally responsible hotel that could fill a niche in ...

When Hero Honda announced a 5,500-per cent dividend per share earlier this year, it not only perked up its shareholders, but also heightened investor interest in companies that pay dividends. Hero Honda isn't an aberration. Several other firms have rewarded their shareholders with high dividends, and as the economy shows signs of improvement, more are expected to follow suit.Should dividend ...

Gururaj Deshpande Innovation AcceleratorHe's best known as the founder of successful tech start-ups Sycamore and Cascade - the first had hit $50 billion in market cap during the Internet boom. But now, serial entrepreneur Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande, 59, will soon don a new hat. His newest role is as the Co-Chair of the United States National Advisory Council on Innovation ...

There are things that Pranab Dutta likes and dislikes about Mumbai. "No other place in India has a better work culture than Mumbai. It's still among the safer cities for women to work in," says the 60-year-old Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Knight Frank India, a property consultancy.Having lived in Mumbai for 40 years, Dutta has seen the city ...

When a Mumbai-based retail giant acquired a smaller company earlier this year, it had to ensure that it did not lose any talent from the acquired firm and the merger did not create any problems in human resources. Easier said than done."Even though we have 20 people on our HR team, we were not sure if we had the right ...

Small, Light and PriceyFujitsu Lifebook ebook S760If you must have an ultra-light Windows laptop that does not compromise on performance, and if price is not an issue, look no further than this machine from Fujitsu. The Lifebook S760 is one of six laptops the Japanese company recently launched in India, all with in-built 3G, though by the time 3G data ...

Neil Sequeira wants $40,000, or just under Rs 20 lakh. The 31-yearold entrepreneur, who founded BuzzFactory.net in Pune last year to provide social media marketing solutions, has a team of six, including one member in New Zealand, which works mostly out of home. BuzzFactory's objective is to promote online visibility for clients and cut through the clutter to reach their ...

The paediatrician shrugged: "It's your choice, if you don't want the chicken pox vaccine for your daughter. But remember, one day she will get married and if she has the pox when she is carrying, the child could be born with brain damage." And what about the son, the father voiced his and his wife's concern? "Well, you know what ...

For five years, Sunil Dutt steered the meteoric rise of Samsung's mobile phone business in India as it snapped at industry leader and his former employer Nokia's heels. Nine months ago, the 60-year-old, who was part of the team that launched Barista's cafes and re-invented Whirlpool's business in India, made his first move into the computer industry when he was ...

It's a classic Hegelian thesisantithesis dialectic. The swelling ranks of retail investors should make India a happy hunting ground for mutual funds (MFs), which explains the exponential jump in the number of players. From just 20 in 1999, today we have 39 players. The antithesis: going against the global drift, retail investors still shy away from MFs, preferring risk-free, government-backed, ...

From July 1, banks have switched over to the base rate mechanism for pricing loans. This marks the end of the benchmark prime lending rate (BPLR) regime, which was particularly disadvantageous to retail borrowers.While banks were quick to raise rates every time the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) hiked its rates, the reverse did not happen. The base rate, say ...

When the first consumer digital cameras hit shop shelves about a dozen years ago, it was evident to market gurus that film photography was on its way out. And, as digital cameras started delivering sharper images, professional photographers made the shift to what are called digital SLRs, short for single-lens reflex cameras, and film truly became history.That mad rush to ...

For years, Kishen Paswan, 35, had, like most office-goers, kept to a routine of 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. So six month ago, when he decided to join WNS Global Services, a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm, in Mumbai, he was well aware of the changed work timings - 6.30 p.m. to 3.30 in the morning - but hardly about ...

To each his own. Star fund managers, as you'll discover leafing through these pages, pull in different directions. They have their own distinctive investment philosophies but, hey, still end up winners. Meet Prashant Jain, the 42-yearold Chief Investment Officer with HDFC Mutual Fund. Jain keeps it simple and adheres to the golden rules of investing. Stocks can be volatile over ...

They are very different people. Amit Tripathi, 35, had a passion for music as a young man and is still ready to sing if there is someone to listen. Ashwani Kumar, 41, on the other hand, likes to travel abroad and harbours a secret desire to explore every nook and corner of the world. Tripathi and Kumar manage the Reliance ...

Mumbai has as much a chance of becoming an international finance centre as does Mexico City. Achieving the stature of a London or a New York, or even a Hong Kong or a Singapore, is fine as far as aspirations go, but the chances of achieving that standard are as remote as those of Mumbai's second airport - proposed more ...

An involuntary shudder goes down the spine of most advertising professionals at the mention of his name. Not because Sandeep Goyal, Chairman of Dentsu India, looks especially menacing at 5'8" and 200lb-plus. Or because Dentsu India's size scares them (its billings are expected to be Rs 1,200 crore this year). Or because Goyal's company, a 26:74 venture with Japan's Dentsu ...

For 18 years, Malay Mukherjee worked with L.N. Mittal's ArcelorMittal, before leaving the world's largest steelmaker in September 2009. For many of those years, the 62-year-old specialist in mining and steel technology worked out of ArcelorMittal's seventh floor UK headquarters in Berkeley Square House in London. The view from his office was impressive - of the towering London Plane trees ...

Some 25 million Indians trust their savings, or a part of it, with mutual funds that manage assets worth more than the GDP of an Algeria or a New Zealand. It is likely that as a Business Today reader, you are one among this 2.5 per cent sliver of India's population. If so, the following question will resonate with you: ...

If Marie Antoinette, the 18th century queen of France, were to be reborn in India today as, say, the Union Minister of Food & Public Distribution, she would not be too popular with the masses if she exhorted them to eat cake because there is no bread - or, as the case is now in India, there is bread but ...