icsi newsletter republicday · "india will miss you, rk laxman. we are grateful to you for...

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US and India to formulate smart city action plans in three months

Real Estate

New Delhi: Agree to set up city-wise Task Force for making Vizag, Allahabad and Ajmer smart cities Shri M.Venkaiah Naidu and US Commerce Secretary hold extensive talks on smart city development India and the United States of America today agreed on taking quick measures for development of Visakhapatnam, Allahabad and Ajmer as smart cities. Issues relating to development of these cities as smart cities were discussed in detail at a meeting between the Minister of Urban Development Shri M.Venkaiah

Naidu and the visiting US Sec-retary of Com-merce Ms. Penny Pritzker. The discussions last-ed about 45 minutes. The US delega-tion agreed to the suggestion of Shri. Venkaiah Naidu for setting up Task Force

for each of the three cities for formulating concrete action plans in the next three months. Each Team will consist of three repre-sentatives each from central and respective state governments and the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA). Each city Task Force will discuss city specific features, project re-quirements and appropriate revenue models for enabling flow of investments etc., before suggesting action plans for develop-ing them as smart cities. Ms. Penny Pritzker said ‘this meeting was in pursuance of the directive of President Barack Obama to work on the economic dimension of strategic and commercial dialogue between Prime Minister Modi and President Obama and the decisions taken’. USTDA and the respective three state governments signed Memoranda of Understanding on January 25, for developing Visakhapatnam, Allahabad and Ajmer as smart cities.

Referring to the Modi-Obama Joint Statement of September last year and signing of MoUs on smart city cooperation, Shri Naidu said ‘it is now time for both the sides to walk the talk by acting quick and concretising the agreements reached. The Joint Statement and the MoUs have raised high hopes about smart cities becoming a reality. President Obama’s current visit to India has even furthered these expectations and action is the need of the hour’. In her response, Ms. Penny Pritzker said she was in agreement with Shri Naidu’s views and needful would be done. Referring to her meetings with Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Shri N.Chandrababu Naidu and of Rajasthan Smt. Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Ms.Pritzker noted that she found them to be ‘go get-ters’ and was confident of making a success of smart city coop-eration between the US and India. She also said that US com-panies would be told that ‘what is being talked about India is real and they should seize the opportunities’. Shri Venkaiah Naidu assured the US delegation that he would personally ensure that things move fast with regard to develop-ment of smart cities. Shri Naidu informed the US delegation that the Ministry of Urban Development will be represented by Shri Durga Shankar Mishra, Additional Secretary and Dr.Sameer Sharma and Shri Praveen Prakash, both Joint Secretaries on the Task Force for each of the three cities. Soon after the meeting, Shri Naidu spoke to Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan and will soon appraise Chief Minister of UP about the decisions taken. Chief Minister of AP informed that his government will be represented by the state’s Urban Development Minister Dr. P. Narayana besides Secretary(UD) and Municipal Commis-sioner of Visakhapatnam. Ms. Penny Pritzker informed Shri Naidu that Shri Arun Kumar, Assistant Secretary of State will coordinate and will give the names of their nominees. The six member US delegation included Shri James Mathew Hock, Chief of Staff, Shri Thomas Wyler, Senior Advisor on Policy, Shri Arun Kumar, Assistant Secretary of State and Ms. Holly Vineyard, Deputy Assistant Secretary.

ICSI NEWSLETTER

Republic Day SPECIAL EDITION

The Website incredible-india.org has been up-

e-Visa Dream, a Reality for 43 Nations




Minister of State for Urban Development and Housing & Ur-ban Poverty Alleviation Shri Babul Supriyo, Secretary (UD) Shri Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary(HUPA) Smt. Anita Ag-nihotri and other senior officials of both the ministries also participated in the discussions.

Travel & Tourism

Giving the tourism sector a significant push, the govern-ment in November 2014 launched the online visa facility for 43 countries including the US, Australia, Japan, Israel, Ger-many and Singapore. Travelers can apply for a visa from the comfort of their homes and receive a visa within 72 hours.

The electronic travel author-ization (ETA) will be valid for 30 days and the visa fee has been fixed at $62. Those traveling on leisure, short duration medical treatment, casual business visit or to meet friends and relatives will be eligible to apply. The facility will be made available at nine airports including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chen-nai, Kochi, Goa, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapu-ram.

Other countries included in the first phase are Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, UAE, Jordan, Kenya, Fiji, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Poland, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, Mauritius, the Czech Republic, Oman, Ar-gentina, Kazakhstan, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indone-sia, Vietnam, Luxembourg, Japan, and New Zealand, Fin-land, South Korea, Mauritius, Mexico, Norway, Oman and the Philippines among others. 'High-risk' countries, have not been included .Tourism secretary Lalit Panwar described the launch of e-visa as a "red letter day" in tourism history.

Use of Technology for Service delivery

graded. New features such as Walking Tours, Audio-Tours, Holiday Planner and 360 degree view of monuments have been added on the website. In addition, selection of system integrator for developing new website of the Ministry has been initiated. The Android Mobile Application of Incredible India’s official trip planning and destination discovery App Tripigator.com was launched by the Ministry of Tourism in the year 2014.

2014 had 3 Tourism Ministers namely, K

Chiranjeevi, Shripad Yesso Naik and Dr.

Mahesh Kumar.

The Year also saw 2 tourism Secretaries

namely, Parvez Dewan and Dr. Lalit Panwar

Domestic Tourist Visits to all states/UTs were

-1145 million in 2013 showing a growth rate

of 9.6% over the previous year.

FTAs in 2014 have now reached 7.46 million

(as per the provisional figures given by

Ministry of Tourism Govt. of India.)

Foreign Exchange Earnings from tourism

crossed ₹ 1 lakh crore mark during January to

November 2014.

Employment of 24.5 million (direct and

Indirect) is targeted to be created during the

years 2010 to 2016.

DO YOU KNOW?

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Issue 2015 – 01 – 1 ICSI Newsletter: Service Industry Republic Day Special Edition




First five star hotel of Northeast India, Radisson Blu starts op-eration in Guwahati Carlson Rezidor Hotel

group is prospecting to

open hotels in the state

capitals of Northeast

India. Already the group

has started Radisson Blu

in Guwahati, the first

five star hotel of North-

east India. The group

stated that its second

hotel in Kolkata will

become operational in

another 2 years. This is the 9th hotel opening of Carlson Re-

zidor Hotel group in India in 2014. With this addition, the

group has further strengthened its portfolio to 73 operational

hotels in India.

New Low Cost Carrier in Indian Sky

Travellers in India will get to ‘Fly the New Feeling’ as TATA-SIA airline Vistara started operations on January 9, 2015, with Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Ahmedabad and Ahmedabad-Mumbai as its initial routes.

Talking about delivering a seamless and personalized travel experience, through a slew of unique products and features to delight customers, Yeoh called Vistara their New Year gift to India, as the airline becomes the first Indian airline to offer premium economy seats to customers.

To ensure a hassle-free and seamless check-in experience for customers, Vistara’s innovative customer interface will offer four different ways to check-in, including an auto check-in facility, a first in domestic travel in India. Besides web check-

in and check-in via the mobile app, Vistara will also provide personalized service and dedicated counters, as well as desig-nated queues, for passengers to check in at the airport.

Further enhancing the seamless experience, travellers with hand baggage can proceed for security once they check in at the mobile tablet service offered by Vistara customer service

India lost its political cartoonist

Media

Who can forget the very famous cartoon character “The Common Man” creation of the great car-toonist Late R.K. Laxman. The legacy of cartoon journalism is said to be started by this great per-sonality who not only associated common man problems with poli-tics but also portrayed common man as the central character in development of nation. Long be-fore the Aam Aadmi Party took up the cause of India’s common man, political cartoonist R.K. Laxman caricature appeared on the front page of The Times of India for more than 60 years depicting the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of everyday life in India. Cartoons carry more powerful and attractive message. To some, the only connection between comics and newspapers is in the funny pages, or a single panel editorial cartoon. "India will miss you, RK Laxman. We are grateful to you for

adding the much-needed humour in our lives and always bringing smiles on our faces," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in an English-language statement. Born in 1921, Laxman was the youngest of six brothers who in-cluded R K Narayan, one of India's most renowned writers. Laxman showed an early talent for sketch-ing and illustrated many of Narayan's stories before joining the Times of India in the 1950s. Narayan died in 2001. Laxman's Common

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Man character, often described as holding up a mirror to In-dia's democracy, spawned a television sitcom, was the mascot for an airline and featured on a postage stamp. In 2005, Laxman was awarded the Padma Vibhushan.




Technology

Technology Trends for 2014-2015 A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with po-tential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programmes and initiatives.

TOP IT TRENDS FOR 2014

Mobile Device Battles

By 2015 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web access device worldwide and that by 2015 over 80 per cent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smart phones. However, only 20 per cent of those handsets are likely to be Windows phones.

It is expected that by 2015 tablet shipments will reach around 50 per cent of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google’s Android and Apple IOS operat-ing systems.

Enterprises will need to support a greater variety of form fac-tors reducing the ability to standardize PC and tablet hardware. The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is just one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.

Mobile applications and HTML 5

The market for tools to create consumer and enterprise facing apps is complex with well over 100 potential tools vendors. For the next few years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile application so expect to employ several. Six mobile architectures – native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain popular. However, there will be a long term shift away from native apps to Web apps as HTML5 be-comes more capable.

Personal Cloud

The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC. The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, web destina-tions and connectivity that will become the home of their com-puting and communication activities.

Users will see it as a portable, always-available place where

they go for all their digital needs. In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across devices.

Enterprise App Stores

Enterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps forc-ing the enterprise to deal with multiple stores, multiple pay-ment processes and multiple sets of licensing terms. By 2015, it is expected that many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores. With enterprise app stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing govern-ance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosys-

tem to support apptrepre-neurs.

The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the internet will expand as consumer devices and physical assets are connected to the internet. Key elements of the IoT which are being embedded in a variety of mo-

bile devices include embedded sensors, image recognition tech-nologies and NFC payment. As a result, mobile no longer re-fers only to use of cellular handsets or tablets.

Hybrid IT & Cloud Computing

A recently conducted survey revealed that the internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role is emerging as IT organizations realize that they have a responsibility to help improve the pro-visioning and consumption of inherently distributed, heteroge-neous and often complex cloud services for their internal users and external business partners.

The internal CSB role represents a means for the IT organiza-tion to retain and build influence inside its organization and to

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Dealing with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional approaches.

This realization is leading organizations to abandon the con-cept of a single enterprise data warehouse, instead they are moving towards multiple systems, including content manage-ment, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file sys-tems tied together with data services and metadata, which will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse.

Analytics

With the improvement of performance and costs, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every ac-tion taken in the business. The mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data repositories potentially enables use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time.

In Memory Computing

In memory computing (IMC) can also provide transformation-al opportunities. The execution of certain-types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds allowing these processes to be provided in the form of real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services.

The possibility of concurrently running transactional and ana-lytical applications against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business innovation. Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use.

Integrated Ecosystems

The market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems and away from loosely coupled heterogene-ous approaches. Appliances combine hardware and software and software and services are packaged to address and infra-structure or application workload. Cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages facilitate purchase, consumption and/or use of capabilities from multiple vendors and may provide a founda-tion for ISV development and application runtime. In the mo-bile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive varying degrees of control across and end-to-end eco-system extending the client through the apps.

Education

Govt. draws roadmap for Skill Development New Delhi: The government has drawn up an ambitious roadmap to enhance skill levels of millions of people who join the queue of job hopefuls every year.

The plans involves integrating skill enhancement and entre-preneurship in the syllabi at the school level, set up 2,500 multi-skilling institutions in the public private partnership mode, and set up institutes of entrepreneurship development in various centres including upcoming smart cities among others. The plan also includes setting up skill universities (one for each region including one in north-east) to develop large numbers of qualified instructors, reform and reorient existing industrial training institutes (ITIs) with industry-driven rele-vant curricula and leverage 25% of corporate social responsi-bility (CSR) funds and defence offset in skill development projects. A National policy on skill development and entrepreneurship will be finalised by March 31, 2015, sources told HT. Sources said that the government is likely to launch a Prime Minister’s fellowship scheme for skilling and innovation. A sustained national campaign will also be launched to make vocational training aspirational with celebrities as brand am-bassadors. For entrepreneurship, the plan involves integrating entrepre-neurship training in schools alongside vocational training programmes. In addition, the government will likely support setting up incubation and research parks and enable credit linkages through banks. The government is also drawing up plans to provide market-ing support to tech start-ups to create one million “digital entrepreneurs”. According to estimates between 2013 and 2022, India will have to skill 120 million people in non-farm sectors, with the highest requirement skilled labour to come from the construc-tion sector (31 million) followed by retail (17 million) and logistics (12 million). During 2005-12, India added only 15 million jobs, a quarter of the figure added in the previous six years. Of India’s 1.2-billion population, 60% are of the working age. And of the 15 million individuals who join the queue of job seekers every year, only 3% undergo vocational training. The scheme for adoption of ITIs through public-private part-nership is also likely to be revamped. In the earlier scheme, launched in 2007, about 1,396 insti-tutes were to be developed by involving the industry, which would adopt them while the government would provide a grant of ₹2.5 crore for each of them. The scheme did not take off as planned because it did not have much involvement of the state bureaucratic structure, which is where the clearances are needed.

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