Today's Hot Stories - March 12, 2013
10 Headlines for Today
(1) May back UPA, won’t support 'communal' NDA: Jagan's mom
(2) Raghav is Biti, confirm Rajasthan police
(3) Iran, Pakistan ignore U.S., launch gas pipeline project
(4) Govt gets just Rs 3,639cr from CDMA auction
(5) Telcos fined Rs 2,800cr for issuing 'fake' SIMs
(6) TV content fast getting globalised, Viacom CEO Robert Bakish says
(7) Federer in fourth round at Indian Wells
(8) NBA: Spurs rebound from loss to top Thunder
(9) Deborah bags silver in Asian Cycling Championship
(10) Steven Spielberg plans film based on India-Pakistan border
5 Stories for Today
(1) Anti-rape bill deferred over differences within cabinet
(2) Papal Conclave to begin on Tuesday
(3) Microfinance pays penalty to insurance regulator IRDA
(4) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's hiring practices questioned by staff
(5) SEZs back on govt radar after exports’ uptick
(1) Anti-rape bill deferred over differences within cabinet
The anti-rape bill was today deferred after difference of opinions over it within the cabinet. The criminal amendement bill has been referred to Group of Ministers. According to the reports, there was no consensus on voyeurism, stalking, age of consent and the definition of term rape
within the cabinet.
Punishment for false complaints and evidences reportedly, emerged as sticking points in the cabinet meeting that met on Tuedsay to deliberate over the bill.
This bill will replace the ordinance on crimes against women promulgated last month which had prescribed life imprisonment as the maximum punishment for those committing rape.
It will also replace the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2012 introduced in the Lok Sabha in December last. Earlier finance minister P Chidambaram, who heads the Group of Ministers on media, had also dismissed reports about differences in the government over the bill and said there are different points expressed by different people with some suggesting that the word sexual assault must be retained while others favour the term rape.
Source: The Hindustan Times
(2) Papal Conclave to begin on Tuesday
Cardinals, after a week-long meeting, set Tuesday as the start date for the conclave to elect the next Pope. Tuesday will begin with a morning Mass and the first and only round of secret balloting in the afternoon.
If there is no immediate victor, the cardinals will retire for the day to return on Wednesday for two rounds of balloting in the morning, two rounds in the afternoon until a Pope has been chosen. In the past 100 years, no conclave has lasted longer than five days. A Tuesday start date could be read as something of a compromise.
Monday had been seen as an obvious choice to start the conclave to ensure a Pope would be elected and installed by Sunday, March 17 — the last Sunday before Holy Week begins.
American and some German cardinals had argued that the time for discernment should come during the pre-conclave meetings, when there is more time for discussion and information-gathering.
Some Italian media have speculated that with governance such a key issue in this conclave, the cardinals might also be considering an informal Pope-secretary of state “ticket”,a papal appointment responsible for running the Holy See.
That formality brings the number of cardinal electors to 115; two thirds of which or 77 votes is required for victory.
Source: The Hindu
(3) Microfinance pays penalty to insurance regulator IRDA
SKS Microfinance said it has paid Rs 50 lakh as penalty imposed by insurance regulator IRDA along with a request to file a review petition to drop the charge made against the company.
"The company has paid Rs 50 lakh to IRDA with a request to permit it to file a review petition to drop the said charge," SKS said in a filing to bourses.
The insurance watchdog last month imposed Rs 50 lakh penalty on the SKS Microfinance which had collected extra funds, apart from the premium, as a corporate insurance agent without proper disclosure to policy-holders.
As per the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) order, a microfinance institution (MFI), which also operates as a corporate insurance agent, cannot collect more than the premium amount charged for the policy on behalf of an insurance company.
It held the company which acted as a corporate agent of Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company, guilty on that score and charged a penalty.
Meanwhile, the company in a separate statement said that it has appointed Ranjana Kumar, former vigilance commissioner with Central Vigilance Commission, as an Independent Director on its Board.
The company's shares closed today at Rs 140, down 2.32 per cent on the BSE.
Source: The Indian Express
(4) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's hiring practices questioned by staff
Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer was asked at an all-staff meeting several weeks ago whether her rigorous hiring practices had caused the company to miss out on top engineering talent in Silicon Valley's hyper-competitive job market.
Mayer dismissed the complaint that she had refused good candidates because they did not have degrees from prestigious universities, and instead she challenged her staff to get better at recruiting, according to an employee who was at the meeting.
"Why can't we just be good at hiring?" Mayer said, playing off a line from what she called one of her favourite movies, 1989's "Say Anything", according to the employee. He did not want to be identified because he was not authorised to discuss Yahoo's internal matters.
The question, according to Yahoo insiders, reflects wider concerns among hiring managers and rank-and-file employees over the way Mayer has tightened hiring practices since becoming CEO last July, as part of an effort to transform Yahoo's workforce and culture.
Mayer insists on personally reviewing every new recruit, a practice that supporters say brings needed discipline to the company. Critics, however, say her high standards are hampering Yahoo's already challenged ability to fill vacancies.
Even before Mayer's now-famous ban on working from home drew controversy last month, Yahoo was struggling with the perception that its best days are behind it, according to recruiting consultants. The company also faces fierce competition for talent in Silicon Valley, where Google and Facebook hold more prestige, while start-ups offer the lure of shares in an eventual IPO.
Rick Girard at Stride Professional Search, who specializes in placing engineers with start-ups, said a Yahoo job offer was still viewed as a "back-up" option by many of his clients.
"We only had one person who ended up taking the job at Yahoo. I think it was because she wanted to be at a larger company," he said.
Yahoo declined to comment for this story or to make Mayer available for an interview. The CEO told investors in January that Yahoo was seeing a marked increased in the volume and quality of job applicants, and that attrition among "highest-performing talent" was significantly lower than in the past.
Still, Yahoo has almost 900 jobs open, representing nearly 8 percent of its workforce of 11,500, according to its website. Some of the openings are months-old. In comparison, Google has almost 1,000 open jobs, but that is just 2 percent of a workforce that is more than four times the size of Yahoo's.
Google's playbook
Mayer joined Yahoo after a 13-year stint at Google, during which she helped develop its flagship search product. She is the third CEO in about a year to lead Yahoo, whose revenue had stagnated amid competition from Google, Facebook and other web companies, an exodus of senior executives, and an internal reorganisation that eliminated thousands of jobs.
Mayer quickly nabbed two high-profile executives to join her team: chief financial officer Ken Goldman, who has three decades of experience at leading software and Internet companies, and chief operating oOfficer Henrique De Castro, a former Google colleague. She also quickly won favour with Wall Street - Yahoo's shares have risen about 47 percent since she joined.
"Stopping the hemorrhaging is job one and I think she's accomplished that almost by virtue of her presence," said Neil Sims, a managing director with executive recruiting firm Boyden.
Job two is to modernise Yahoo's dated consumer web products and services, which have an impressive audience of roughly 700 million people, but have not kept up with trends in mobile computing and social networking. Hiring new talent is critical to that success, analysts said.
"They have a lot of people who create the products that Yahoo is known for, but it's not the same products that Yahoo needs to offer if it's to have the same scale in five years that it has today," said Ken Sena, an analyst with Evercore Partners.
To make Yahoo a more attractive place to work, Mayer has borrowed from the Google playbook and provides employees with free food and the latest smartphones.
But she has also firmly stated at a staff meeting that one Google policy she will not be importing is its famous decree that employees get to spend a fifth of their time on personal projects, according to people who were at the meeting.
It's clear that Mayer wants to impose more discipline on Yahoo's workforce after years of management turmoil.
"From the time she got there, she was kind of shocked by the culture, by the fact that so many people were working from home that you couldn't even have a Friday staff meeting," said another person familiar with Mayer's thinking.
Mayer has more than a dozen ideas to make the organisation more efficient and orderly, the person said, adding, "You're going to continue to see important and sometimes controversial and tough moves made."
Discipline needed
The controversy has caused consternation in the administrative assistant ranks as well as the professionals.
Mayer has brought Google's high recruiting standards to Yahoo, in particular its focus on academic credentials, according to current and former Yahoo employees. High grades from top-rated schools such as Stanford University, where Mayer earned her masters in computer science, are important. A computer science degree is much more valued than others, even the electrical engineering degree that Yahoo co-founder David Filo earned, these people said.
Yahoo said in January that it added 120 employees with computer science degrees in the fourth quarter. It is not known how many employees quit that quarter, but two former executives said Yahoo's attrition rate averaged at 20 percent historically.
Mayer's focus on academics extends to existing staff as well. For instance, some administrative assistants were recently informed that they had to take a modified version of the law school admissions test, for reasons not fully explained. The demand sparked consternation and Yahoo later backed off, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who said it was unclear how widespread the requirement was intended to be.
Another Google practice that Mayer has adopted at Yahoo is to personally review and sign off on every hire, which inevitably slows down recruiting.
Job applicants often go through the interview process, then "wait and wait," said one executive who recently left Yahoo. "One person we wanted waited eight weeks, then they inevitably got another offer."
While some may think Mayer's recruiting practices overly rigid, others say they are necessary.
"Adding a little more friction in a process that needs improvement can help you identify how the system is working in order to improve it," said Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo executive whose famous 2006 "Peanut Butter" memo warned that the company was losing its focus and spreading itself too thin.
Hiring the right people is the foundation on which great products are built, said Garlinghouse who is now the chief executive of online file-sharing service YouSendIt. But he noted that focusing too much on academics was not the most effective way to find the right employees.
"Some of the best people I've ever worked with didn't necessarily get the best GPA or go to Stanford," he said.
Headcount constraints
Yahoo ended 2012 with 11,500 full-time employees. Facebook, whose $5 billion revenue in 2012 is level with Yahoo's, employed just 4,619 at year's end.
"Hiring is only being done to replace some of the attrition, but no hiring that would grow the headcount," said the former executive, who added that top managers were given 2013 budgets that called for headcount to remain flat versus 2012.
Mayer is taking a hard look at staffing levels in some of Yahoo's outposts, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter, particularly its more than 2,000-person operation in Bangalore, India. It is Yahoo's largest engineering center outside its Sunnyvale, California headquarters.
Mayer is weighing bringing certain jobs in India back to Sunnyvale to unite more of Yahoo's product development at the home base, said one of the sources.
Several recruiters said Yahoo's vast audience of 700 million unique visitors is appealing to engineers. But with so many attractive opportunities at startups and successful internet companies, the lure of Yahoo is not as strong as it could be.
Mayer has brought some buzz back to the company, said one former Yahoo engineer. But working at a "hot" start-up such as Dropbox or AirBnB "looks much stronger on your resume than being an employee at Yahoo," said the engineer, who turned down an offer to return to Yahoo.
"We don't typically run into Yahoo," said Alan Shapiro, the owner of San Jose-based Technology Search International which specialises in finding jobs for software engineers. "When we represent a candidate, we'll ask who else they're talking to. Yahoo is not a name that's frequently mentioned."
Source: The Times of India
(5) SEZs back on govt radar after exports’ uptick
Special economic zones that had slipped down the government's priority list are back in favour as desperate government looks for ways to revive exports. The upcoming foreign trade policy is likely to extend sops such as focus market scheme and focus product scheme to make SEZs attractive.
So far, these incentives were available only to domestic tariff areas or DTA, an area outside the SEZs.
SEZs back on govt radar after exports’ uptick
"SEZs are generally not a part of the foreign trade policy. However, in these times of sagging exports we are planning to announce a set of incentives like extending focus market scheme and focus product scheme to boost exports and make SEZs attractive," said a commerce ministry official.
Focus market scheme helps offset high freight cost and other externalities to select international markets to enhance India's export competitiveness in these markets.
The objective of the focus product scheme is to promote products that have high export intensity / employment potential, to offset infrastructural inefficiencies and other associated costs involved in marketing these products. Focus markets scheme covers Africa, Latin America and large parts of Oceania and there are over 1,000 focus products.
Industry has also been demanding abolition of Minimum Alternate Tax levied on SEZs. "SEZs have become unviable due to minimum alternate tax and dividend distribution tax, so we have requested the government to incentivize these by extending the FMS and FPS to them and also cut Minimum Alternate Tax /Dividend Distribution Tax," said Sanjay Budhia, chairman, CII export chairman, CII National Committee on Exports.
The government was of the view that SEZs already get tax benefits, unlike the domestic tariff areas, said Ajay Sahai, director general and CEO of Federation of Indian Exports Organization. "Also there were budget constraints. However this time, the finance minister has indicated full support to the commerce ministry," he added.
Sahai also said there may be investment-linked I-T deduction for SEZs. "It may also form a part of the FTP announcement for 2013-14", he said. In his budget speech, finance minister P Chidambaram had said, "I look forward to the changes that will be made to the Foreign Trade Policy next month and I assure my support to measures that will be taken to boost exports of goods and services."
Interest subsidies allotted for export promotion is 1,200 crore for 2013-14, against 1,000 crore last fiscal, a 20% increase. According to a study by Federation of Indian Exports Organization in 2009, overall export compound annual growth rate or CAGR was at 20% whereas for the focused markets it stood at 36%. Similarly, the CAGR for exports before the announcement of the scheme stood at 16%, which increased to 36% post scheme.
Last year, the commerce ministry had discussion paper on SEZ reforms had noted that SEZs are less viable compared with DTAs, as benefits such as Focus Product Scheme, Focus Market Scheme, Duty Drawback, etc. were unavailable to SEZ units.
Source: The Economic Times
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