Expansion, Excellence and Equity – Key Drivers for Innovation in India

The first ever CII India Innovation Summit held in Chicago

Diversity has always been the backbone of innovation in India. In solving the challenges of development, demography, and disparity, will need expansion, excellence and equity. Today, as a nation of a connected billion, a first in the history of the world, we need to leverage emerging technologies, including social media, to help alleviate the enormous problem of poverty.

Leveraging collaborations to scale up innovations, and the growing role of technologies to enable this cross-sector engagement is very important. We need to see more collaborative networks between the governments, industry, academia and institutions, cutting across country borders.  

Cyber Security Issues in Social Media

Gopinath Shanmugam, Lead Consultant – ERP for CII’s Session on Achieve CyberSecurity Together

In today’s civilization Internet is an increasing element of day to day activity. In particular children and youth, for whom social networking is one of the most popular activities, has opened the security threat matrix adding to the challenges of online internet experience. Protecting them from cyber space malice adds to the woes of cyber-paternalism, and cyber-libertarianism opening up issues related to national cyber security spectrum. 

Economy Matters – June 2013 Update

Global economies are witnessing two-speed recovery with the US economy showing firm signs of recovery, while growth in Euro Area is still languishing in sub-optimal territory.

Among the Asian economies, growth in Japan and China too continues to remain tepid. The optimism shown by the US Federal Reserve, in wake of encouraging economic indicators coming out of the US economy, has led to worries about the possible tapering of its asset purchase programme by end of the current year. The repercussions of this development have been felt globally, highlighted by sharp strengthening of the US dollar. The Indian Rupee too has felt the heat and weakened by more than 10 per cent since the start of this fiscal. 

Relaxation of FDI Norms

CII welcomes Cabinet’s decision to liberalise sectoral FDI limits and put more sectors on the automatic route. For a large emerging economy that seeks a strategic global role, it is essential to be perceived as an open and attractive investment destination by foreign players. Given the current slowdown in FDI inflows and economy, opening up sectoral ceilings on FDI and automatic approval mechanism would attract more overseas investors. This would have cascading benefits on macroeconomic indicators like Current Account Deficit and Balance of Payments. Besides, FDI has catalytic positive impact on productivity, employment, technology enhancement and competitiveness of the entire domestic industry.