Archive for December, 2007

The, the Taj Mahal Hotel , Mumbai, laid foundation due to rejection by the British. Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (J N Tata) took two British clients with him to the Majestic Hotel but was denied entry because he was Indian. Stung by this insult, he decided to set up the world’s finest hotel, and this led to the foundation of the prestigious Taj group of hotels in 1902.

The Tata empire today is one that has touched almost every aspect of Indian life.

Pic: Bombay House, the headquarters of the Tata Group (1926).

‘Bombay House‘, the headquarters of the Tata Group — has a fascinating piece of history. In the early 1900s, a plot of ground was put up by the Bombay Municipality for sale in Bombay and purchased by the Tatas.

George Wittet, who once a consulting architect to the government and who later joined the Tatas as the head of the then Tata Engineering Company Limited, constructed a building that was completed in July 1924. That became the ‘Bombay House’, the headquarters of the Tata Group.

The Tata empire today is one that has touched almost every aspect of Indian life.

After waiting over it for nearly one and a half months, the government on Wednesday accepted the voluntary retirement plea of India’s first Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Kiran Bedi.

Bedi was clearly irked over being bypassed for the post of Delhi Police chief after Y.S. Dadwal, two years her junior, was preferred this July.

Ms. Bedi, who had been ignored for the hot-shot post of Delhi’s Police Commissioner earlier this year, said: “You cannot be valued in one position and devalued in another. If the Government is really serious about [police] reforms, then why deny me the place from where I can effect them? What’s the point in doing paper reforms when there is no dearth of such recommendations lying un-implemented.”

Saying that she was “grateful to the Government for not having delayed the approval” to her voluntary retirement plea, Ms. Bedi said she would continue to work on police and prison reforms besides pursuing other academic and social interests. Continue reading…

India will end 2007 with 9 %  growth in its gross domestic product. The question economists are grappling with is, can this growth momentum be maintained in 2008?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s vision of a 10 per cent growth during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan could still be some distance away.

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