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Ashu Garg, Dilip Venkatachari, Sachin Maheshwari
Bite Communications
IIT Alumni 2007 Global Conference wrap-up report
July 11, 2007
From July 6th through July 8th, 2007, the Indian Institute of Technology hosted its
2007 Global Alumni Conference in Santa Clara, California. The event, attended by
nearly 4,000 graduates of what is widely recognized as one of the most prestigious
engineering schools in the world, attracted a broad array of business, technology
and political leaders, including Jeff Immelt, Arun Sarin and Hillary Clinton, as well
as some of IIT’s most recognizable alumni, such as Rajat Gupta, Vinod Khosla and
Umang Gupta.
Given the high caliber attendees, as well as the broad range of topics covered at
the event, the conference was a prime opportunity for IIT alumni to remind the
media, and key audiences internationally, that IITians are a well-connected
community of exceptionally talented individuals who have made lasting societal
contributions.
To achieve this objective, Pan IIT and Bite Communications worked together to
develop an aggressive media campaign aimed at driving media attendance at the
event, coverage of the conference, and ongoing opportunities for thought
leadership. By and large, these goals have been met.
Media interactions at the show
In total, 85 reporters registered to attend the event, 17 of whom committed to
moderate panels. Of those 85, 58 reporters actually attended the event (full list
below), including all 17 who had agreed to moderate panels. While at the show,
these reporters had ample opportunities to interact with IIT brand ambassadors.
Nine reporters attended the morning press session with Dilip Venkatachari, 22
attended the distinguished alumni panel, and nine attended the press conference
with Arun Sarin (full list below). Additionally, throughout the course of Friday and
Saturday, the PR team arranged 17 one-on-one interviews for a variety of brand
ambassadors (full list below).
Client confidential
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
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All reporters we talked to were overwhelmingly impressed with event. The PR
team received many compliments on the quality of the speakers, sessions, access
to brand ambassadors, attendees and organization of the show.
For future consideration: While conducting outreach to the press to attend the
event, we had a variety of high level reporters from Fortune, Forbes, The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times and others say that they would have loved to
have attended/participated, but the fact that the conference was held in
conjunction with the 4th of July holiday weekend prevented them from doing so.
Media coverage
Qualitatively speaking, between May 25 and July 10, the PR efforts ended up
producing 37 unique stories that were picked up by an additional 109 outlets
worldwide (full coverage report below). The local NBC and ABC affiliates attended
to cover Hillary Clinton’s keynote, resulting in two segments on the local ABC News
(click to download/view; the link will expire on July 18 and is only for internal
usage only.) This gave us a grand total of 150 hits and counting.
A review of the coverage shows that, not surprisingly, the keynotes drove the
majority of coverage. Hillary Clinton’s keynote resulted in a plethora of stories
about her wooing Indian-American donors and voters. While these stories didn’t
focus on IITians specifically, they did point to IITians as an important, influential
group of Indian-Americans in the US. Coverage of Jeff Immelt’s keynote focused
on globalization and its popularity in the US. Again, in this instance, while IITians
were not the focus of the coverage, many reporters mentioned the IITian successes
at GE (35 of the top 600 employees) as proof that IITians are “in demand.” Finally,
coverage of Arun Sarin’s keynote mainly focused on his comments about “losers” in
India trying to sabotage Vodafone’s acquisition of Hutchison Essar. In this
coverage, IITians were only mentioned because the comments were made at their
alumni gathering.
Aside from the widespread coverage of the keynotes, the PR team was able to
drive several positive IITian focused stories including an interview on Foreign
Exchange with Rajat Gupta, a Q&A in The San Francisco Chronicle with Umang
Gupta, a highly positive conference recap story again in The Chronicle, and finally,
an “elephant” story on Time.com, positioning an IIT degree as the most sought
after pedigree in Silicon Valley (full text of all coverage below).
For future consideration: In the future, if the PR team has a heads up on what
topics the keynote speakers will be addressing, it will be easier to tie those
speeches back to our key messages in conversations with reporters.
Moving forward
Perhaps most importantly, the conference PR efforts served as an excellent
sounding board to determine if journalists would be interested in the results of the
research conducted on IIT alumni feelings on immigration and industry
preferences. Discussions with Associated Press, BusinessWeek, Financial Times,
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Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
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Fortune, Reuters, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury News and
USA Today leave the PR team feeling confident that the media is more interested
than ever in hearing about IITians and what they’re doing. Our follow up research
announcement could drive significant coverage of the IITians, if we position the
statistics properly and make sure we have a “point of view” that positions us as
experts, and not just the organization that conducted the research.
The IIT 2007 Global Alumni Conference was an excellent forum to remind the press
who IITians are, and why they’re important. With that mission accomplished,
there’s now an opportunity to drive regular and systematic coverage of the
Institutes, its alumni, and all the amazing things they are doing around the world.
Client confidential
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345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
Press Attendees at Event
Name
Pamela Tom
Cameraman
Rachel Konrad
Sudan Thanawala
Eric Savitz
Ryan Flynn
Michael Copeland
Chris Johnson
P Hari
Steve Hamm
Kevin Allison
Robyn Meredith
Rick Rocamora
Sarah Lacy
Om Malik
Sanjay N
Shalini Narang
T D Kathuria
Robert Mullins
Sonia Sidhu
Kirin Sampat
Richard Springer
Brian Womack
Jim DeTar
Achal Mehra
Jason Pontin
Kate Greene
Romesh Jepra
Cameraman
George Kiriyama
Dorothy Griggs
Shahid Siddiqi
Michael Reilly
Brad Stone
Aditi Vidyasagar
Harriet Vidyasagar
Ashok Srivastava
Chandra Gollapudy
Nitish Thakor
Rabiz Foda
Kamla Bhatt
Meenakshi Ganjoo
Client confidential
Publication
ABC 7 News
ABC 7 News
AP
AP
Barrons
Bloomberg
Business 2.0
Business Journal Photographer
Business World
BusinessWeek
Financial Times
Forbes
Freelancer
Freelancer
(BusinessWeek/Fortune)
GigaOm
Hindustantimes.com
Hindustantimes.com
Hindustantimes.com
IDG
India Post
India West
India West
Investors Business Daily
Investors Business Daily
Little India
MIT Tech Review
MIT Tech Review
National Newspaper
Association
NBC
NBC
NCAM-SATS Web site
& AGATE flyer - photographer
NCAM-SATS Web site
& AGATE flyer
New Scientist
New York Times
Out of India
Out of India
PiTech
PiTech
PiTech
PitTech
PodTech
Press Trust of India
Moderator
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
Eric Auchard
Tom Abate
Mary Anne Ostrom
Harvi Sachar
Ram Gopalan
Andreas Kluth
Sam Rao
Hiroshi Kotani
Ashlee Vance
Jyoti Thottam
Laura Locke
Matt Marshall
Louis Trager
George Joseph
Don Clark
Dan Farber
Client confidential
Reuters
San Francisco Chronicle
San Jose Mercury News
Silicon India
Silicon India
The Economist
The Indian Express
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun
(Japan Economic Journal)
The Register
Time Magazine
Time Magazine
Venture Beat
Warren Communications News
Worldwide Business Service
WSJ
ZDNet
x
x
x
x
x
x
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
Press Interactions at Event
Friday, July 6 Q&A with Dilip (9)
IDG, Robert Mullins
India West, Richard Springer
Nikkei/Japan Economic Journal, Hiroshi Kotani
Reuters, Eric Auchard
San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Abate
Technology Review, Jason Pontin
Time Magazine, Jyoti Thottam
Warren Communication News, Louis Trager
ZDNet, Dan Farber
Friday, July 6 Brand Ambassador Press Conference (22)
AP, Rachel Konrad
AP, Sudhin Thanawala
Financial Times, Kevin Allison
Freelancer, Rick Rocamora
IDG, Robert Mullins
India West, Richard Springer
Nikkei, Hiroshi Kotani
Out of India, Aditi Vidyasagar
PiTech – Rabiz Foda, Nitish Thakor, Chandra Gollapudy, Ashok Srivastava
San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Abate
Silicon India, Ram Gopalan and Harvi
Tech Review, Jason Pontin
The Economist, Andreas Kluth
Time, Laura Locke
Time Magazine, Jyoti Thottam
Wall Street Journal, Don Clark
Warren Communication News, Louis Trager
ZDNet, Dan Farber
Saturday, July 7 Arun Sarin Press Conference (11)
Forbes, Robyn Meredith
India West, Richard Springer
Newsmarket Wire, Preeti Salvi
Nikkei, Hiroshi Kotani
Podtech, Kamala Bhatt
PiTech - Rabiz Foda, Nitish Thakor, Chandra Gollapudy, Ashok Srivastava
Reuters, Eric Auchard
Warren Communication News, Louis Trager
One-on-one media interviews (17)
ABC Channel 7 and Umang Gupta
ABC Channel 7 and Dilip Venkatachari
Associated Press Rachel Konrad and Umang Gupta
Client confidential
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
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Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
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Associated Press Rachel Konrad and Kanwal Rekhi
Associated Press Rachel Konrad and Navin Chaddha
BusinessWeek Steve Hamm and Pradeep Khosla
BusinessWeek Steve Hamm and Rajat Gupta
Investors Business Daily Brian Womack and Pradeep Sindhu (CTO of Juniper
Networks)
Podtech Khamla Bhatt and Yogen Dalal
Podtech Khamla Bhatt and Shekhar Kapur
Time Magazine Jyoti Thottam and Rajat Gupta
Time Magazine Jyoti Thottam and Vinod Khosla
Time Magazine Jyoti Thottam and Umang Gupta
Time Magazine Jyoti Thottam and Yogen Dalal
Time Magazine Jyoti Thottam and Vinod Khosla
Time Magazine Jyot Thottam and Dilip Venkatachari
Silicon India Ram Gopalan and Umang Gupta
Client confidential
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
IIT Global Coverage
Index of Coverage
Hillary's Hypocrisy
CNN
Lou Dobbs
July 10, 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi_c9ep9uKI&mode=user&search
It's Time for DARPA 2.0
Gearlog
Jeremy A. Kaplan
July 10, 2007
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/07/clinton_its_time_for_darpa_20.php
Sarin lashes India’s ‘vested interests’
Financial Times.com, Mumbai
Joe Leahy
July 10, 2007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6ee50a1a-2f02-11dc-b9b7-0000779fd2ac.html
Indian businesses want action on H-1B visas
Indian alumni group is hoping to get a separate vote on legislation that went down with the
immigration reform bill
IDG News Service
Robert Mullins
July 9, 2007
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/07/09/India-wantsH-1B-visas_1.html
Also appears in:
- InfoWorld
- Computerworld Malaysia
Clinton Urges Indian Businesses to Invest in U.S.: Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton
said the U.S. is a market for foreign companies to invest in.
IDG News Service
Robert Mullins
July 9, 2007
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,134253/printable.html
Also appears in:
- PC World
- PC World Singapore
- ITWorld
- Computerworld Malaysia
A Reunion at the "MIT of India"
Time Magazine
Jyoti Thottam
July 9, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1641232,00.html
General Electric CEO Immelt says globalisation would be outvoted in popular vote in the US
Finfacts Team
Author N/A
Client confidential
Bite Communications
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Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
Jul 9, 2007
http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/printer_1000article_1010539.shtml
IIT Alumni Global Conference 2007
Hindustan Times
Shalini Kathuria Narang
July 09, 2007
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=99524b64-0806-4a1c-b31a-cb93e303cc61
Sarin says “losers” tried to derail Hutch deal
“The billionaire losers “club was trying to unwind the deal,” the Vodafone leader told a
conference of Indian business and academic leaders
Reuters
Eric Auchard
July 8, 2007
http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2007-0708T054612Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_India-283677-1.xml
Also appears in:
- Hindu, India
- The Statesman, India
- Gulf Times, Qatar
- Economic Times, India
- Business Standard, India
- NDTV.com, India
- Rediff, India
- Reuters India, India
- Moneycontrol.com, India
- NewKerala.com, India
- Zee News, India
- Reuters India
Indian Businesses Seek Visas: Tech group urges Congress to boost the number of worker visas
after immigration bill fails.
IDG News Service
Robert Mullins
July 8, 2007
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,134245/printable.html#
Also appears in:
- PC World
Hillary speaks up on outsourcing
Chennai Online News
Author N/A
July 7, 2007
http://www.chennaionline.com/colnews/newsitem.asp?NEWSID=%7B999C20EC-24F4-4BCE-97F237E52AC55FE7%7D&CATEGORYNAME=BIZ
Graduates celebrate India's clout
They recall how technology institute prepared many for their roles in America
San Francisco Chronicle
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
July 7, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/07/BUGQ5QSE7L1.DTL
Clinton gives voice to outsourcing fears
San Jose Mercury News
Client confidential
Bite Communications
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By Mary Anne Ostrom
July 7, 2007
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6320636
Globalization, is a tough sell, GE’s Immelt says
Reuters
By Eric Auchard
July 7, 2007
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN0620856720070707
Also appeared in:
- Canada.com
- domain-b.com
- EarthTimes
- International Business Times
- KPCL 7
- MSN Money
- Washington Post
- WIS 10
- Zee News India
- The Economic Times, India
- The Business Standard
Globalisation unpopular in the US: GE chief Jeffrey Immelt
Domain-b India
Author N/A
July 7, 2007
http://www.domain-b.com/economy/trade/20070707_jeffrey.html
Hillary to woo Indian-Americans
Associated Press
July 7, 2007
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20070018037#
Also appears in:
- CBS 5
- NDTV.com
Hillary walks the tightrope; says ‘no’ to outsourcing, ‘yes’ to more H-1Bs
Financial Express India
Author N/A
July 7, 2007
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=169455
Hillary links up with IIT
Presidential nominee walks outsource tightrope
The Telegraph, India
Author N/A
July 7, 2007
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070708/asp/frontpage/story_8031452.asp#
Also appears in:
- The Telegraph, Calcutta, India
Clinton taps growing political clout Indian-Americans
Associated Press
Rachel Konrad
July 6, 2007
http://www.pe.com/ap_news/California/CA_Clinton_Indian_Americans_295936C.shtml
Client confidential
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
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Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
Also appears in:
- abc7news.com
- ABC30.com
- The Benton Crier
- The Boston Globe
- CBS 5
- CBS 47
- Centre Daily Times
- Charlotte Observer
- Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
- Contra Costa Times
- Deccan Herald India
- Dunton Springs Evening Post
- Forbes
- Fort Worth Star Telegram
- FOX News
- Guardian Unlimited UK
- Hinesberg Journal
- Howell Times and Transcript
- International Herald Tribune
- Jackson news Tribune
- Jordan Falls News
- KESQ 3
- The Kindred Times
- KGET 17
- KSBY
- Leading the Charge.com
- Los Angeles Times
- The Ledger
- Macon Telegraph
- Meadow Free Press
- Miami Herald
- MLive.com
- Monterey County Herald
- NDTV.com
- New Hope Courier
- Newsday
- TheNewsTribune.com
- News & Observer
- Olberlin
- The Olympian
- Ottawa Recorder
- Philadelphia Daily News
- Pioneer Times Journal
- Pierceland Herald
- Prescott Herald
- Press-Enterprise
- KESQ
- KSBY
- San Francisco Chronicle
- San Jose Mercury News
- San Luis Obispo Tribune
- Seattle Post Intelligencer
- Sky Valley Journal
- Sioux City Journal*
- Times Daily
Client confidential
Bite Communications
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Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
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-
Town Hall
The Washington Post*
The Westfall Weekly News
Washington Post
White Rock Reviewer
Worcester Telegram
Zee News India*
The United States of Technology?
Americans still have a lot to celebrate when it comes to technology, but in a shrinking,
empowered world, so do many others elsewhere, says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick.
Fortune
David Kirkpatrick
July 6, 2007
http://money.cnn.com/2007/07/05/technology/fastforward_us.fortune/index.htm
GE CEO: India won't grow at the expense of U.S.
CEO Jeffrey Immelt claims that India's strong economic growth should allow it to enter the
global market without draining other countries
InfoWorld
Robert Mullins
July 6, 2007
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/06/GE-CEO-says-India-will-not-grow-at-the-expense-ofUS_1.html
Also appears in:
- Infoworld
- Computerworld Singapore
GE chief executive talks globalism to Indian tech alums
San Francisco Chronicle
Tom Abate
July 6, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=18299
Candidates tread carefully around outsourcing issue
Clinton speech today to alumni of India university follows Obama camp memo on related topic
San Jose Mercury News
Mary Anne Ostrom
July 6, 2007
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6310946
Also appears in:
- Contra Costa Times
- SiliconValley.com
GE CEO on high tech and globalization (blog)
Seattlepi.com
Peeyush Ranjan
July 6, 2007
http://peeyushr.blogspot.com/2007/07/ge-ceo-on-high-tech-and-globalization.html
Outsourcing's challenge
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES PRESSURED ON BOTH SIDES OF COMPLICATED LABOR ISSUE
San Jose Mercury News
Mary Anne Ostrom
July 6, 2007
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6310946
Client confidential
Bite Communications
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Telephone: 415.365.0222
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Clinton Taps growing political clout Indian-Americans: Speaks Via Satellite
KGO-TV ABC 7
Pamela Tom
July 6, 2007
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=politics&id=5398301
Hillary Clinton disses the Valley
Valleywag
Owen Thomas
July 6, 2007
http://valleywag.com/tech/yahoo/hillary-clinton-disses-the-valley-275637.php
GE CEO Jeff Immelt: India, globalization and the economics of scarcity
ZDNet
Dan Farber & Larry Dignan
July 6, 2007
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5595
JotSpot joining Google Apps revolution
ZD Net
Dan Farber
July 6, 2007
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5601
Clinton Snubs Indian Tech Group
The Sun
Josh Gerstein
July 5, 2007
http://www.latestpolitics.com/blog/2007/07/clinton-snubs-indian-tech-group.html
Women IITians join hands
The Economic Times
Ishani Duttagupta
July 2, 2007
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Women_IITians_join_hands/articleshow/2166236.cms
ON THE RECORD, Umang Gupta, Chairman, PanIIT USA
San Francisco Chronicle
Ken Howe, Alan T. Saracevic, Tom Abate, Ralph Hermansson, Jessica Guynn, Colleen Benson, Steve
Corder
July 1, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/01/BUG80QN2IG1.DTL&hw=IIT&sn=001&sc=1000
After IIT of excellence, IISc Age to descend on US
The Times of India
Chidanand Rajghatta
June 20, 2007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/After_IIT_of_excellence_IISc_Age_to_descend_on_US/articlesh
ow/2137150.cms
Hillary pilloried for India 'connections'
The Times of India
Chidanand Rajghatta
June 16, 2007
Client confidential
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Foreign_hand_Hillary_pilloried_for_India_connections/articles
how/2127053.cms
Hillary to interact with IIT alumni next month
Indiaedunews.net
Staff
June 14, 2007
http://www.indiaedunews.net/IIT/Hillary_to_interact_with_IIT_alumni_next_month_1344/
Also appears in:
- Daily News & Analysis
- Economic Times
- Hindustan Times
- India eNews.com
- Indian Muslims
- Malaysia Sun
- NewKerala.com
- NEWSPost India
- Times of India
- Zee News
Clinton Taps Newly Active Indian Donors
The Sun
Josh Gerstein
June 12, 2007
http://www.nysun.com/article/56332
In Depth: Sizing up the Competition (transcript from broadcast)
Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria
Fareed Zakaria
May 25, 2007
http://foreignexchange.tv/?q=node/2054
Client confidential
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Full Text
Hillary's Hypocrisy
CNN
Lou Dobbs
July 10, 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi_c9ep9uKI&mode=user&search
Hillary's hypocrisy is exposed when they report on her kowtowing to the Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) 2007 Global Alumni Conference -- Santa Clara, California, July 6, 2007. Hillary
Clinton, as Obama said, is a senator from Punjab. Tom Tancredo is interviewed, and Steve
Camarota shows off his whistling skills.
It's Time for DARPA 2.0
Gearlog
Jeremy A. Kaplan
July 10, 2007
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/07/clinton_its_time_for_darpa_20.php
In a recent address to the Indian Institutes of Technology, Hillary Clinton proposed a novel solution
to the problems facing today's environment: the creation of a new research think-tank, sort of like
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Part of a proposed $50 billion strategic
energy fund, the new agency would create a slew of "green-collar" jobs, Clinton suggested, and the
collective brainpower of these scientists and researchers could come up with some novel solutions
to our energy crisis. The end goal: transforming the way we do business, and growing the economy,
while simultaneously aiding our move to renewable energies.
The IIT's 2007 Global Alumni Conference also featured keynotes by Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General
Electric Corp., Arun Sarin, the CEO of Vodafone, and Rajat Gupta of McKinsey & Company.
According to Clinton, DARPA "put a bunch of researchers, engineers, and scientists together, and
said 'think big.' The result: stealth technology, the Internet, the computer mouse. We need a
DARPA for energy, to ask our leading minds to think outside the box, outside the gas tank. Let's be
innovative again."
Sarin lashes India’s ‘vested interests’
Financial Times.com
Joe Leahy in Mumbai
July 10, 2007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6ee50a1a-2f02-11dc-b9b7-0000779fd2ac.html
Arun Sarin, Vodafone chief executive, has risked causing a storm in India after he claimed vested
interests had worked behind the scenes to try to “derail” the UK group’s $11bn takeover of
Hutchison Essar.
In rare public remarks from an important foreign investor that highlights the hurdles overseas
companies can run into in India, Mr Sarin said rivals had tried to meddle with the regulatory
approvals process for the deal, India’s biggest foreign investment.
“The billionaire losers’ club was trying to unwind the deal,” Mr Sarin was quoted by Reuters as
telling a recent conference in Silicon Valley.
Vodafone won control of Hutchison Essar, India’s fourth-largest mobile operator, in a fiercely
contested takeover battle this year, defeating rival domestic bidders Reliance Communications and
the Essar group, and an overseas bidder, the Hinduja group.
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Reliance, which operates India’s second-largest mobile company, is run by Anil Ambani, a leading
businessman and a former parliamentarian. Essar is backed by the Ruia business family and is the
minority shareholder in Hutchison Essar, and Hinduja is controlled by an overseas Indian business
family.
The deal, which took more than two months to secure regulatory approval, was heavily scrutinised
by India’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board, the ministry of law and the department of
telecommunications.
During this time, Vodafone faced allegations in the media that the deal violated foreign ownership
restrictions, including a lawsuit to this effect from Telecom Watchdog, an obscure activist group.
“What I didn’t count on was that the bureaucracy would kick in with this kind of evil spirit from our
competitors who had lost,” Mr Sarin told the conference.
In a statement this week, India-born Mr Sarin sought to clarify his comments at the conference.
Mr Sarin praised the country’s authorities for the “speed and thoroughness” with which they
scrutinised the transaction, saying it set a positive example for the global investment climate.
However, he said: “My remarks . . . about the process [at the conference] were directed at
attempts by vested interests to de-rail the approvals procedure.”
The process for foreign investment in India, while it has become more transparent and efficient
than in the past, can still provide opportunity for interference from third parties.
Indian businesses want action on H-1B visas
Indian alumni group is hoping to get a separate vote on legislation that went down with the
immigration reform bill
IDG News Service
Robert Mullins
July 9, 2007
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/07/09/India-wantsH-1B-visas_1.html
Alumni of a major Indian university want the U.S. Congress to take separate action to pass H-1B visa
legislation that went down with the immigration reform bill that failed in Congress last week.
Members of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumni association, meeting for a three-day
conference in Santa Clara, Calif., said Friday that they are hoping to get a separate vote on an
immigration bill provision that would increase the number of visas granted to highly skilled
engineers coming from abroad to work at U.S. technology companies.
"Almost as soon as the bill died, there was talk of piecemeal moves to get parts of that bill passed,"
said Umang Gupta, chairman and CEO of Keynote Systems, a company that measures the technical
performance of Web sites. He's also chairman of the board of PAN IIT, the alumni group hosting the
conference, which has drawn close to 4,000 people.
The legislation would increase the limit of H-1B visas to be granted every year to 115,000 from
65,000 today. Backers say the extra visas are needed because there aren't enough qualified U.S.
engineers to do the work U.S. companies need done. Opponents say the visas just make it possible
for U.S. companies to hire foreigners at lower wages than they would have to pay U.S. hires.
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The legislation would also continue to allow 20,000 visas per year to applicants who have advanced
degrees from U.S. colleges and universities.
Today, about half of the graduates of U.S. engineering schools are non-Americans, many of whom
have to return to their home countries to find work when they should be allowed to work here and
contribute to U.S. economic growth, said Pradeep Khosla, dean of the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
"The day this country limits the free flow of skilled immigrants coming into this country, that's the
day we start going downhill," said Khosla.
Another IIT alum, Yogen Dalal, managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm, noted
that in the early 1990s, some in Silicon Valley thought they would be overcome by the Japanese.
But the success of valley companies such as Google and Apple, which introduced its iPhone a week
ago, shows it remains a center for innovation.
"Wealth is being created by innovation right here in [Silicon Valley]. Economic value is being
created here. The work force is just being redistributed," Dalal said.
The H1-B discussion is happening against the backdrop of the loss of thousands of jobs in recent
years, particularly in Silicon Valley, as companies outsourced work to lower-wage markets in
countries such as India. But as more work is done in India, wage inflation has begun to narrow the
pay gap between India and the United States. And in some cases, Indian companies have begun
moving jobs to the United States, said Arjun Malhotra, chairman and CEO of Headstrong, an
outsourcing consulting firm.
"If you look at the issue today, it's not outsourcing, it's global sourcing. You go to wherever the best
resources are available to do that job," said Malhotra.
The Indian Institute of Technology was created in 1950, three years after India gained its
independence from Great Britain. It has about 100,000 alumni, 25,000 of whom live and work in the
United States.
Clinton Urges Indian Businesses to Invest in U.S.:Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton
said the U.S. is a market for foreign companies to invest in
IDG News Service
Robert Mullins
July 9, 2007
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,134253/printable.html
U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. is not just a market
for foreign companies to sell into but to invest in as well.
In a satellite TV address to a conference of Indian business leaders gathered in Santa Clara,
California, Clinton said Friday that many global businesses are eager to sell to American consumers,
while at the same time American jobs are being exported to lower wage countries.
Offshoring eliminates good-paying jobs in the U.S. and threatens the middle class, she said. While
the U.S. accounts for only 5 percent of the world's population, it accounts for about 20 percent of
the world's gross domestic product, a measure of economic activity.
"Countries around the world rely on our marketplace and Americans are literally fueling economic
growth throughout the world," Clinton said. "We can promote shared prosperity and a race to the
top, not to the bottom."
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Rather than just sell to Americans, foreign companies should establish business operations in the
U.S., which has a highly educated and highly productive workforce and efficient capital markets,
Clinton said. "I have serious concerns about creating good jobs right here in the United States."
The Democratic candidate's audience was an estimated 4,000 attendees at the Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) 2007 Global Conference, which concluded a three-day run Sunday. IIT, an
engineering and science school founded in 1950, operates seven campuses throughout India. The
alumni association, PAN IIT, hosted the conference. Of 100,000 IIT alumni, 25 percent of them live
and work in the U.S.
Clinton was the only one of the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates to accept an invitation to speak
at the conference, organizers said. The group is trying to take a more proactive role in public policy
issues.
"I think our political involvement has lagged behind our overall presence and economic involvement
in the country. I'm glad our political activity is catching up to what it should be," said Rajat Gupta,
former managing director of the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and a conference organizer.
The Indian business group won Clinton's support for increasing the number of H1-B visas granted
annually in the U.S. to 115,000 from 65,000 now. Some U.S. companies say they need to hire highly
skilled engineers from India and other countries because of a shortage of them in the U.S.
Unfortunately, that increase was one of many provisions in the immigration reform bill that died in
the U.S. Congress June 28. PAN IIT hopes the H1-B increase can be brought back as a separate piece
of legislation.
Clinton also called for encouraging American students to study math, engineering and science to
prepare them for more tech industry jobs in the future. She also called for specific outreach to
female and minority students kept under a glass ceiling preventing them from advancing to good
paying tech jobs.
"I think that's important. In fact, I'm trying to break a very high and very hard ceiling myself," she
said.
A Reunion at the "MIT of India"
Time Magazine
Jyoti Thottam
July 9, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1641232,00.html
Google, Microsoft and General Electric came to Santa Clara, Calif., last weekend, and all but
begged graduates of one of the world's top engineering schools to work for them. Google spent
$200,000 to be the lead sponsor of the four-day-long reunion of 3,500 alumni. Microsoft's research
center in Hyderabad came calling. The CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt, already employs 1,500 graduates
and says he needs more. Stanford? MIT? Harvard? Nope. This was a gathering of graduates of the
Indian Institutes of Technology.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru started the Indian Institute of Technology in 1950 because he
recognized that his new country needed builders— engineers who would give India the same vitality
that was turning the United States into a superpower. The IIT system now includes seven campuses,
and its graduates quickly became India's technological elite. A half-century later, their influence is
almost as great in the U.S., where 25,000 of IIT's 100,000 graduates live. IIT grads include venture
capitalists Vinod Khosla, Kanwal Rekhi and Yogen Dalal; former McKinsey managing director Rajat
Gupta; Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin and 35 of the top 600 executives at GE. Silicon Valley couldn't run
without them, and India's booming tech economy has opened up another world of opportunity.
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"You've almost got too many choices," Immelt said in a speech to the group on Friday. Spend some
time in the world of IIT, and engineering almost feels — well, glamorous.
IIT has often been called the MIT or Harvard of India, but there's a big difference — IIT is a lot more
selective than the top Ivy League schools. About 250,000 Indian students take the first screening
exam for a spot at an IIT; 100,000 make it to the next round; but only 4,000 are eventually
selected. Even if they could make the cut at IIT, however, the brightest young American students
are less likely now than they were a generation ago to choose engineering. The number of
engineering grads in the U.S. peaked in 1986 at close to 80,000, and has fallen to about 70,000
now. "Engineering has played second fiddle to other professions in the U.S." says Subhash Tandon, a
1972 IIT grad. "There isn't a prime time TV show about engineers."
But it will take more than a CSI: Palo Alto to reverse that trend. Engineering in the U.S. needs a
rebranding. IIT went through such a transformation after the tech bubble burst in 2001, when
engineers — Indian and American alike— were being laid off by the thousands. That's when some of
the school's most prominent alumni decided to turn IIT into a brand combining the brainpower of
engineering with the excitement (not to mention the big money) of entrepreneurship, by playing up
the accomplishments of IITans like Umang Gupta, CEO of the web services company Keynote and
employee No. 17 of the company that later became Oracle. Gupta is a rock star to young IITans,
who say he understands their desire to take what they know and build something bigger out of it.
"Everybody wants to start a company," says Deepak Goel, a 1999 IIT graduate and design engineer
at Microsoft.
Making a mark in the global economy, however, means becoming a global citizen. "How well do you
travel?" Immelt asked. It's a lesson that U.S. workers, too, are starting to learn. Satish Bhat,
program manager of Microsoft's development center in Hyderabad, says he's been taking on not just
Indians who want to move home, but also "diversity hires" — Americans who want to move to India.
"That's where the action is," Bhat says.
Still, the IIT boosters are aware of the challenges of globalization and those it leaves behind.
Immelt said India's success will be defined by its ability "to make the pie bigger."
Hillary Clinton, who spoke by satellite to the crowd (a decision that left many at the conference
wondering whether she was trying to distance herself from India), asked these engineers, scientists
and business people to use their skills to create "a shared prosperity for America and India." IIT
graduates helped build the technology that made globalization possible. Perhaps they'll also be the
ones who make it work for everyone.
General Electric CEO Immelt says globalisation would be outvoted in popular vote in the US
Finfacts Team
Author N/A
Jul 9, 2007
http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/printer_1000article_1010539.shtml
Speaking at the India Institute of Technology Alumni 2007 Global Conference, at Santa Clara in
California's Silicon Valley at the week-end, Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO , General Electric
Co. warned that if globalisation was put to a popular vote in the United States in the current
political climate, it would be voted out.
The conference brought together graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology. The network of
technology schools, founded in the 1950s, has maintained its elite status by admitting just a few
thousand students each year based on a competitive, nationwide exam.
Rajat Gupta, a senior partner in the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, and Dilip Venkatachari, who
heads Google's mobile products division, described IIT as a university system that has graduated
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about 100,000 people in the past half century. About 25,000, like themselves, eventually
immigrated to America and climbed the corporate and entrepreneurial ladders.
Jeffrey Immelt, who heads one of the world's biggest public companies was in Santa Clara for both
recruitment and to discuss the perils of globalization. "I'm here today because I am a big consumer
of the product, which is you," said Immelt, noting that GE employs about 1,500 IIT graduates.
"Thirty-five of the top 600 people in GE are IIT grads."
Immelt spoke about the strength of the Indian economy. "The economy has now gotten to a point in
India where the government can't screw it up," he said to applause.
"I'm a globalist, you're a globalist," Immelt said, saying the real question is whether the process
would be slowed or stopped by political backlash.
"If you put globalization up for a vote in the U.S., it would lose 60-40," he said, attributing this
margin in part to "misinformation" but also because "the bottom 25 percent of the US has suffered
from a wealth standpoint."
"The question is whether we will be allowed to globalise over the next 10 to 20 years. We need to
earn the right to globalise," Immelt said.
Immelt posed this challenge for his audience: "Can the standard of living of Indians grow one
hundred-fold, which should be your goal, without the standard of living of Americans going down?"
He said that the bottom 25 per cent of the US economic ladder has suffered from the "hollowing
out" of good-paying manufacturing jobs, while trade deficits mount and middle-class financial jobs
don't pay as well as industrial jobs.
Immelt said that India's close political and economic ties to the US gave it a major advantage over
other fast-growing emerging economies such as China and Russia, whose growth may be coming at
the expense of US jobs.
"When I look at India versus China, China has a hard time with win-win," he said in reference to the
growing US trade imbalance in the face of China's mounting trade surplus. "That is a problem over
the long-term. India can do much better," he predicted.
Globalisation is entering a fourth stage, Immelt said. It started out importing high-end products
from the United States to India, and then turned to local joint ventures, followed by moves to build
factories in China and India, its current focus. The next stage is designing technologies in India for
the rest of the world.
As an example, GE is taking technology it developed in the United States for high-end magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) scanners and doing research in India to develop a low-cost, $500,000 MRI
scanner that it can sell in emerging markets, including China. He said this could become a $1 billion
export opportunity over the next five to 10 years for GE
Since the 1970s, General Electric has been one of the earliest and biggest multinational investors in
India, employing 13,000 people in the country and Bangalore being GE's single largest research
centre in the world.
"We have $3 billion in revenue in India ... on our way to $8 billion in 2010," Immelt said. "We are
going to hit those goals and probably go right past them."
IIT Alumni Global Conference 2007
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Hindustan Times
Shalini Kathuria Narang
July 09, 2007
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=99524b64-0806-4a1c-b31a-cb93e303cc61
IIT Alumni Global Conference 2007Around 4000 alumni of myriad IITs from all over the world came
together at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California from July 6-8 to participate in the panIIT Alumni Global Conference.
Though interesting and thought-provoking Keynote addresses and panel discussions on varied topics
covering the vast spectrum of business, social, entertainment, education and other aspects were
informative and inspiring and attracted the attendees in large numbers, yet, the most important
aspect of the gathering were the informal meetings and greetings by old pals and class mates in a
mammoth networking event of sorts.
In his welcome Keynote, Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, the company with the unique
distinction of having the most IITians on its rolls, said: "We are investing in industries concerned
about solving the issues of scarcity. Besides innovative healthcare and education initiatives, he
expressed investment interest in players in energy efficiency conservation, fuel diversity, next
generation nuclear power, cleaner technologies, renewable energy, hybrid technologies and ecodriven products."
"We have been able to redeploy $6 billion by simplifying out inquiry to order workflow and we are
investing around a billion dollars in companies in China and India. Opinionating about India's
economy, he optimistically said: "Indian economy has reached a point that no Indian government
can screw it up."
Expressing his views about US partnership with other economies, Immelt opined: "Any nation that
can figure out the mutual win-win equation between US and its own economy will be the long term
winner."
The same thought though in a stronger political lingo was expressed in the evening closing keynote
by Senator Hillary Clinton who addressed the gathering via a direct satellite feed and said that it is
interesting that in a conference with the theme of transforming a world through technology, she is
reaching the attendees via the medium of technology.
While applauding the IITs for their quality of higher education and the ability of the attendees to
think big, she challenged the attendees to work towards keeping and creating key jobs in US and
emphasized the need of treating US not just as a market but as an economy that also needs to
sustain its health and grow. She reiterated her commitment to the H1-B visa programme but lucidly
expressed the need for companies and governments to rethink strategies that promote shared and
multilateral gains."
On a lighter note, in a panel titled Bollywood goes main stream in the US, Shekhar Kapur, one of
the speakers said: "Unlike Chinese, Korean or Japanese movies, Bollywood has not gone global. We
seem to be too satisfied with ourselves. The need is to compete globally and embrace global
realities."
He added that entertainment business because of the viewer demographics is moving towards Asia
and new delivery mediums like the internet are democratising the film delivery process. He added
that India has a rich culture of tales and Indians are great story tellers and thus have great
potential to deliver world class movies with universal themes and mass global appeal.
Later in another session on culture and identity, he emphasized the need for Indian techies to look
beyond traditional careers for their children by supporting their choices of alternative professions
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in cinema, sports, art, and others. Consul BS Prakash in the same session also reiterated the need
for the Diaspora to integrate with the main stream and enhance their political standing in the US.
In another "off the beaten" track panel on Social Transformation, SN Subba Rao, Founder of the
National Youth project, said: "Community work is a great integrating force unifies people,
communities and nations.
The diversity of the panels from core business subjects like Is an MBA Required to Succeed in
Business and From Engineer to Leader to Clean Energy-Life Beyond Fossil Fuels and Social
Entrepreneurship-The New Face of Entrepreneurship were very well represented by the various
leaders in their arenas and incited the audience to not only look at personal economic and career
goals but at larger societal good.
Several members of the audience posed interesting questions and queries and expressed interest in
giving back to their nation of birth and alma maters.
Some of the top Indo-American corporate and academic honchos like Vinod Khosla, Kanwal Reikhi,
Rajat Gupta and others also addressed the gatherings and presented interesting insights on myriad
topics. Some of the top global corporate players like Google and Yahoo with State Bank of India
were the main sponsors of the mega event.
Sarin says “losers” tried to derail Hutch deal
“The billionaire losers “club was trying to unwind the deal,” the Vodafone leader told a
conference of Indian business and academic leaders
Reuters
Eric Auchard
July 9, 2007
http://www.livemint.com/2007/07/09173810/Sarin-says-losers-tried-to-d.html
Santa Clara, California: Vodafone’s top executive said on 7 July his hopes that India’s regulatory
bureaucracy has modernized was shaken by last-minute moves to derail his company’s $11 billion
(Rs44,000 crore) takeover of Hutchison Essar.
Arun Sarin, the chief executive of global wireless operator Vodafone Group Plc, called for greater
transparency in India’s merger approval process to defeat backroom efforts by vested interests to
manipulate India’s political bureaucracy.
“I really did not expect people — the “good and great” of India — to be calling cabinet secretaries,
ministers, to say, ‘You have to unwind this deal, because we want a piece of it,´” Sarin told a
conference of Indian business and academic leaders taking place in Silicon Valley during the
weekend.
He was speaking to hundreds of fellow alumni — academics, engineers and entrepreneurs — the
Indian Institutes of Technology. IIT graduates have founded many of Silicon Valley’s top companies.
Sarin, now a US citizen, is one of India’s best-known expatriate businessmen. Raised at a military
boarding school in Bangalore, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, then rose
through the ranks of the US telecommunications industry before joining London-based Vodafone as
CEO in 2003.
Vodafone edged out some powerful Indian business groups with an $11 billion bid for Hutchison
Telecommunications’ majority stake in India’s fourth-biggest mobile firm in January.
It then underwent a three-month regulatory wait — rapid by US or European standards, he noted.
Sarin said he was confident the deal would sail through until the regulatory process in New Delhi
entered its final weeks and he became aware of behind-the-scenes lobbying of key bureaucrats by
competitors attempting “to crater the deal.”
“The billionaire losers’ club was trying to unwind the deal,” the Vodafone leader said. “What was
fascinating was that there was absolutely no transparency to the process.”
“What I didn’t count on was that the bureaucracy would kick in with this kind of evil spirit from our
competitors who had lost,” he said at a news conference after his speech.
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Despite his criticisms of India’s regulatory environment, Sarin said he was confident throughout the
government approval process that political and economic forces now at work in India would allow
Vodafone’s bid for Hutchison Essar to prevail.
Before entering the bidding for Hutchison Essar, Sarin said he had spent time with Indian
government leaders to gain assurance that Vodafone’s entry into India would be welcomed.
“I was completely confident from a political standpoint we would have the blessing and air cover”
to get the deal done, he told reporters.
Despite the resistance, Vodafone’s bid gained approval in April. Previously known as Hutchison
Essar, the Indian company has been renamed Vodafone Essar. Vodafone owns two-thirds, while
Indian company Essar owns the remaining third.
Indian Businesses Seek Visas: Tech group urges Congress to boost the number of worker visas
after immigration bill fails.
IDG News Service
Robert Mullins
July 08, 2007
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,134245/printable.html#
Alumni of a major Indian university want the U.S. Congress to take separate action to pass H-1B visa
legislation that went down with the immigration reform bill that failed in Congress last week.
Members of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumni association, meeting for a three-day
conference in Santa Clara, California, said Friday that they are hoping to get a separate vote on an
immigration bill provision that would increase the number of visas granted to highly skilled
engineers coming from abroad to work at U.S. technology companies.
"Almost as soon as the bill died, there was talk of piecemeal moves to get parts of that bill passed,"
said Umang Gupta, chairman and CEO of Keynote Systems Inc., a company that measures the
technical performance of Web sites. He's also chairman of the board of PAN IIT, the alumni group
hosting the conference, which has drawn close to 4,000 people.
The legislation would increase the limit of H-1B visas to be granted every year to 115,000 from
65,000 today. Backers say the extra visas are needed because there aren't enough qualified U.S.
engineers to do the work U.S. companies need done. Opponents say the visas just make it possible
for U.S. companies to hire foreigners at lower wages than they would have to pay U.S. hires.
The legislation would also continue to allow 20,000 visas per year to applicants who have advanced
degrees from U.S. colleges and universities.
Today, about half of the graduates of U.S. engineering schools are non-Americans, many of whom
have to return to their home countries to find work when they should be allowed to work here and
contribute to U.S. economic growth, said Pradeep Khosla, dean of the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
"The day this country limits the free flow of skilled immigrants coming into this country, that's the
day we start going downhill," said Khosla.
Another IIT alum, Yogen Dalal, managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm, noted
that in the early 1990s, some in Silicon Valley thought they would be overcome by the Japanese.
But the success of valley companies like Google Inc. and Apple Inc., which introduced its iPhone a
week ago, shows it remains a center for innovation.
"Wealth is being created by innovation right here in [Silicon Valley]. Economic value is being
created here. The work force is just being redistributed," Dalal said.
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The H1-B discussion is happening against the backdrop of the loss of thousands of jobs in recent
years, particularly in Silicon Valley, as companies outsourced work to lower-wage markets in
countries like India. But as more work is done in India, wage inflation has begun to narrow the pay
gap between India and the U.S. And in some cases, Indian companies have begun moving jobs to the
U.S., said Arjun Malhotra, chairman and CEO of Headstrong Corp., an outsourcing consulting firm.
"If you look at the issue today, it's not outsourcing, it's global sourcing. You go to wherever the best
resources are available to do that job," said Malhotra.
The Indian Institute of Technology was created in 1950, three years after India gained its
independence from Great Britain. It has about 100,000 alumni, 25,000 of whom live and work in the
U.S.
Hillary speaks up on outsourcing
Chennai Online News
Author N/A
July 7, 2007
http://www.chennaionline.com/colnews/newsitem.asp?NEWSID=%7B999C20EC-24F4-4BCE-97F237E52AC55FE7%7D&CATEGORYNAME=BIZ
Trying to blunt criticism over her links with Indian Americans, Democratic presidential hopeful
Hillary Clinton has said her countrymen's fears on outsourcing must be allayed to avert possible
political and economic fall-out.
"If the standard of living and the quality of life falls in reality and in perception and in any way
decreases in the US, our bilateral cooperation and partnerships could very well suffer in the long
run," Hillary said.
"Workers in the US are concerned about outsourcing, as I'm sure you know. And I think they have a
right to be," she told a conference sponsored by the alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology at
Santa Clara in California.
Hillary, who was due to appear in person but could not make it to the event, spoke via satellite
from New Orleans and warned that global business and government leaders should help keep
Americans in jobs or suffer the consequences.
"If the US continues to outsource jobs to India in increasingly large numbers, people will begin to
feel insecure and may very well seek more protection against what they view as unfair
competition," she said.
"America is not just a marketplace to get a foothold in. It's a place to make lasting investments that
will create jobs and economic growth for everyone," the 'San Jose Mercury News' quoted Hillary as
saying.
"I am concerned that trade is becoming a zero-sum game, instead of being a means to lift up all
who participate," she said, citing statistics that show American workers have become more
productive this decade but their median income has declined.
America should be viewed "as a land of consumers and innovators, as a marketplace and a talent
pool. We can promote shared prosperity that allows us to lead the global economy in our race to
the top, not to the bottom," Hillary said. She said the global economy was an "upside down
pyramid" with economic growth resting on the shoulders of the American consumer.
US consumers are "literally fueling growth throughout the world", she said. "So, if globalization
pushes down US wages, other countries will be affected," she added.
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Hillary also reiterated her call to expand the H-1B visa programme that allows companies to bring
in skilled foreign workers who "contribute greatly to US technology development" saying that she
would use fees collected from the visas to train American workers.
Indians are among the major beneficiaries of the H-1B visa programme.
The US government has an urgent responsibility to create new programmes to produce more college
graduates, particularly in mathematics and science.
"She challenged us. That's what a leader should do," Subhash Tantry, CEO of Fox Technologies of
Palo Alto, was quoted by the newspaper as saying. (Agencies)
Index of Coverage June 7- July 7
Graduates celebrate India's clout
They recall how technology institute prepared many for their roles in America
San Francisco Chronicle
Tom Abate
Saturday, July 7, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/07/BUGQ5QSE7L1.DTL
Several thousand graduates of India's elite university system gathered at the Santa Clara Convention
Center Friday for an event that celebrated the growing economic and political clout of that nation's
expatriates and touched on issues stemming from the increasing globalization of talent and
innovation.
The conference, which ends Sunday, brings together graduates of the Indian Institute of
Technology. This network of technology schools, founded in the 1950s shortly after India achieved
independence, has maintained its elite status by admitting just a few thousand students each year
based on a competitive, nationwide exam.
Rajat Gupta, a senior partner in the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, and Dilip Venkatachari, who
runs Google's mobile products division, described IIT as a university system that has graduated
about 100,000 people in the past half century. About 25,000, like themselves, eventually
immigrated to America and climbed the corporate and entrepreneurial ladders.
Opening the event, Gupta recalled how this global gathering started five years ago with a meeting
of 25 alumni at Stanford. "From those humble beginnings it is gratifying to have nearly 4,000 IITians
gathered here in such a short time," Gupta said.
To the extent this was a coming-out party for the Indian American lobby, its impact was somewhat
tarnished by the last-minute decision of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton -- originally due to
appear in person -- to address the group by satellite instead. During her 15-minute remarks, Clinton
said she favors globalization and immigration, but suggested that Americans are getting short shrift
from trends like outsourcing and the ever-widening trade deficit.
"Americans are concerned about outsourcing and I think they're right to be," said Clinton, who
argued for strengthening the education system to get more people, particularly women and
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minorities, into fields like engineering. At the same time, Clinton said, she favors the H-1B program
that allows high-tech companies to hire college-educated foreigners and would support an increase
in the number that U.S. firms are allowed to hire.
The politics of immigration surfaced again in an afternoon news conference when reporters asked
Indian American business and academic leaders to react to the congressional deadlock over
immigration.
"The day this country limits the reasonably free flow of skilled immigrants is the day we start going
downhill," said Pradeep Khosla, dean of the college of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
General Electric chief executive Jeffrey Immelt discussed the promise and perils of globalization -and also played to the crowd. "I'm here today because I am a big consumer of the product, which is
you," said Immelt, noting that GE employs about 1,500 graduates of the prestigious system. "Thirtyfive of the top 600 people in GE are IIT grads."
Arguing that "business in the 21st century is really the intersection between globalization and
technology," Immelt spoke about the strength of the Indian economy and took a swipe at the
political process. "The economy has now gotten to a point in India where the government can't
screw it up," he said to applause.
He also acknowledged the controversy that surrounds the growing integration of world economies.
"I'm a globalist, you're a globalist," Immelt told his audience, saying the real question is whether the
process would be slowed or stopped by political backlash.
"If you put globalization up for a vote in the U.S., it would lose 60-40," he said, attributing this
margin in part to "misinformation" but also because "the bottom 25 percent of the U.S. has suffered
from a wealth standpoint."
Immelt posed this challenge for his audience: "Can the standard of living of Indians grow one
hundred-fold, which should be your goal, without the standard of living of Americans going down?"
E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/07/BUGQ5QSE7L1.DTL
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Clinton gives voice to outsourcing fears
By Mary Anne Ostrom
San Jose Mercury News
July 7, 2007
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6320636
In one of her bluntest assessments of globalization yet, Sen. Hillary Rodman Clinton challenged a
large crowd of Indian technologists gathered in Santa Clara on Friday to help allay the fears of
Americans that good jobs are being exported, or risk political and economic backlash.
"Workers in the U.S. are concerned about outsourcing, as I'm sure you know. And I think they have a
right go be," Clinton told about 3,000 people attending a conference sponsored by the alumni of the
Indian Institutes of Technology. "If the standard of living and the quality of life falls in reality and in
perception and in any way decreases in the United States, our bilateral cooperation and
partnerships could very well suffer in the long run."
Speaking via satellite from New Orleans, Clinton also warned that global business and government
leaders are advised to help keep Americans in jobs or suffer the consequences.
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"If the United States continues to outsource jobs to India in increasingly large numbers, people will
begin to feel insecure and may very well seek more protection against what they view as unfair
competition," she said.
"America is not just a marketplace to get a foothold in. It's a place to make lasting investments that
will create jobs and economic growth for everyone," she added.
While Clinton has been a strong backer of free trade and pro-business immigration policies, and
cited the "great accomplishments of globalization" during her speech, as a Democratic presidential
candidate who is trying to woo labor backing and middle-class voters, she is also highlighting the
negative impacts.
"I am concerned that trade is becoming a zero-sum game, instead of being a means to lift up all
who participate," she said, citing statistics that show while American workers have become more
productive this decade, their median income has declined.
She said America should be viewed "as a land of consumers and innovators, as a marketplace and a
talent pool. We can promote shared prosperity that allows us to lead the global economy in our
race to the top, not to the bottom."
She described a global economy as an upside down pyramid "with economic growth resting on the
shoulders of the American consumer," adding that U.S. consumers are "literally fueling growth
throughout the world."
She said growing economies rely on American workers having a high enough standard of living to
buy products from them. "So if globalization pushes down U.S. wages, other countries will be
affected."
Clinton also reiterated her call to expand the H-1B program that allows companies to bring in
skilled foreign workers who "contribute greatly to our U.S. technology development." She said she
would use fees collected from the visas to train American workers and said the U.S. government has
an urgent responsibility to create new programs to produce more college graduates, particularly in
math and science.
"She challenged us. That's what a leader should do," said Subhash Tantry, CEO of Fox Technologies
of Palo Alto.
Clinton had planned to appear in person, but organizers announced Thursday she would deliver her
remarks via satellite. Clinton's U.S. Senate spokesman cited her schedule, saying it was logistically
not possible for her to make the trip to California. Instead, she spent Friday meeting with the
United Steelworkers candidates' forum in Cleveland and then traveled to speak in New Orleans at a
music festival, one that Barack Obama had appeared at on Thursday.
Although some said they were disappointed not to see Clinton in person, attendees were promised
if they handed in their business cards they would be returned with a Clinton autograph.
Contact Mary Anne Ostrom at (415) 477-3794 or mostrom@mercurynews.com
Globalization, is a tough sell, GE’s Immelt says
Reuters
Eric Auchard
July 7, 2007
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN0620856720070707
If globalization were put to a popular vote in the United States in the current political climate, it
would lose, General Electric Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt warned on Friday.
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"If you put globalization up for a popular vote in the United States, I think it would lose 60/40," he
told the India Institute of Technology Alumni 2007 Global Conference, a Silicon Valley event
attended by thousands of India's top academic and business elite.
Immelt was responding to a moderator's question on whether the internationalization of the
economy was likely to come under attack as the U.S. presidential election cycle heats up.
GE has shifted over the past three decades from one of U.S. industry's biggest manufacturers into a
services-focused global conglomerate active in energy, construction, financial services and health
care.
U.S. public acceptance of globalization will depend, the GE leader said, on "Indians' and India's
ability to figure out the win/win ... to figure out the ways that the whole pie gets bigger and
(wealth is) not just taken from one place to another."
The bottom 25 percent of the U.S. economic ladder has suffered from the "hollowing out" of goodpaying manufacturing jobs, he said, while trade deficits mount and middle-class financial jobs don't
pay as well as industrial jobs.
INDIA OVER CHINA
Immelt's remarks came at the end of what was largely a corporate recruiting speech to attract topflight engineers and managers to join GE. But the comments also had a political edge aimed at
government officials in the United States and India.
"I am a globalist. You are a globalist. We all believe in the strength of the global economy," he told
the largely Indian immigrant audience, many of whom are entrepreneurs that form the backbone of
Silicon Valley's thriving high-tech economy.
"But the question is whether we will be allowed to globalize over the next 10 to 20 years," Immelt
said. "We need to earn the right to globalize," he said, adding that political and regulatory decisions
are a big part of any calculation.
Immelt said issues like mounting trade imbalances and immigration policy figure in the debate. But
he underscored that India-U.S. ties do not exist in a vacuum.
India's close political and economic ties to the United States gives it advantages over other big,
fast-growing emerging economies such as China and Russia, whose growth may be coming at the
expense of U.S. jobs, he said.
"When I look at India versus China, China has a hard time with 'win/win.' That is a problem over the
long term. India can do much better," he predicted.
NEXT WAVE OF GLOBALIZATION
Since the 1970s, General Electric has acted as one of the earliest and biggest multinational
investors in India. The company employs 13,000 staff in the country. The city of Bangalore is GE's
single largest research center in the world.
"We have $3 billion in revenue in India ... on our way to $8 billion in 2010," Immelt told the
audience. "We are going to hit those goals and probably go right past them."
Wall Street expects GE 2007 revenue of around $175 billion. The company generates more than half
its sales outside the United States.
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Globalization is entering a fourth stage, he said. It started out importing high-end products from
the United States to India, then turned to local joint ventures, followed by moves to build factories
in China and India, its current focus. The next stage is designing technologies in India for the rest of
the world.
As an example, GE is taking technology it developed in the United States for high-end magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) scanners and doing research in India to develop a low-cost, $500,000 MRI
scanner that it can sell in emerging markets, including China. He said this could become a $1 billion
export opportunity over the next five to 10 years for GE.
Globalisation unpopular in the US: GE chief Jeffrey Immelt
7 July 2007
http://www.domain-b.com/economy/trade/20070707_jeffrey.html
Speaking at the India Institute of Technology Alumni 2007 Global Conference, at Silicon Valley,
Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive, General Electric Co, has warned that if globalisation
were put to a popular vote in the United States in the current political climate, it would be voted
out.
"If you put globalisation up for a popular vote in the United States, I think it would lose 60 - 40," he
told thousands of India's top academic and business elite, responding to a moderator's question on
whether the internationalisation of the economy was likely to come under attack as the US
presidential election cycle heats up.
US public acceptance of globalisation will depend on "Indians' and India's ability to figure out the
win-win ... to figure out the ways that the whole pie gets bigger and (wealth) not just taken from
one place to another," the GE chief cautioned.
He explained that the bottom 25 per cent of the US economic ladder has suffered from the
"hollowing out" of good-paying manufacturing jobs, while trade deficits mount and middle-class
financial jobs don't pay as well as industrial jobs.
GE has shifted over the past three decades from one of the largest manufacturers in the US industry
into a services-focused global conglomerate active in energy, construction, financial services and
health care.
The stock markets expect GE's 2007 revenue at $175 billion. The company generates more than half
its sales outside the United States.
Immelt's observations came at the end of a corporate recruiting speech to attract top-flight
engineers and managers to join GE. But the comments also had a political edge aimed at
government officials in the US and India.
He told the largely Indian audience, many of who are entrepreneurs forming the backbone of
Silicon Valley's thriving high-tech economy, "I am a globalist. You are a globalist. We all believe in
the strength of the global economy.
"But the question is whether we will be allowed to globalise over the next 10 to 20 years. We need
to earn the right to globalise," he said, adding that political and regulatory decisions were going to
determine the continuing of globalisation.
The fourth stage of globalisation
India's close political and economic ties to the US gave it a major advantage over other fast-growing
emerging economies such as China and Russia, whose growth may be coming at the expense of US
jobs.
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"When I look at India versus China, China has a hard time with win-win." He said referring to the
growing US trade imbalance in the face of China's mounting trade surplus. "That is a problem over
the long-term. India can do much better," he predicted.
Globalisation is entering a fourth stage, he said. It started out importing high-end products from
the United States to India, and then turned to local joint ventures, followed by moves to build
factories in China and India, its current focus. The next stage is designing technologies in India for
the rest of the world.
As an example, GE is taking technology it developed in the United States for high-end magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) scanners and doing research in India to develop a low-cost, $500,000 MRI
scanner that it can sell in emerging markets, including China. He said this could become a $1 billion
export opportunity over the next five to 10 years for GE
Since the 1970s, General Electric has acted as one of the earliest and biggest multinational
investors in India, employing 13,000 people in the country and Bangalore being GE's single largest
research centre in the world.
"We have $3 billion in revenue in India ... on our way to $8 billion in 2010," Immelt disclosed,
adding, "We are going to hit those goals and probably go right past them."
Hillary to woo Indian-Americans
Associated Press
Rachel Konrad
July 7, 2007
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20070018037#
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is wooing wealthy entrepreneurs with
ties to India, seeking to tap the growing political clout of Indian-Americans in California's Silicon
Valley.
Clinton spoke by live video feed from New Orleans to nearly 4,000 businessmen attending the
annual alumni conference of the Indian Institute of Technology.
Clinton, the only Republican or Democratic presidential candidate to accept an invitation from the
IIT, reiterated her call for more H-1B work visas for highly educated immigrants.
It is an issue of deep concern to the Indian and Indian-American executives and engineers in the
audience.
But she did not shy from characterisation of the pain of offshore outsourcing, the exporting of
technology jobs to low-cost workers in countries such as India, China and Russia.
The United States has sent tens of thousands of high-paying computer programming and engineering
jobs to developing countries in recent years.
''Workers in the United States are concerned about outsourcing, and I think they're right to be, but
so should all of us who value the bilateral relationship between the US and India,'' Clinton said.
''If the US continues to outsource jobs to India large numbers, people will increasingly feel insecure
and increasingly seek protection.''
Obama's sarcastic comments
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Her appearance comes less than a month after rival Barack Obama's campaign sent a sarcastic
memo to reporters criticizing Clinton's ties to India.
The memo characterised the New York senator as the ''Democrat from Punjab'' - a reference to a
joking introduction of Clinton by Rajwant Singh, national chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion
and Education.
Prominent Indian-Americans immediately demanded an apology from Obama. Within days, the
Illinois senator conceded that their concerns over the campaign memo were ''entirely justified.''
Clinton's courting of Indian-American voters comes as the 2.3 million-member community in the US
exerts more influence in the 2008 presidential election.
In May, Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley raised $200,000. In April, New York hotelier and
restaurateur Sant Chatwal claimed that Indian-Americans could raise at least $5 million for Clinton's
campaign.
According to the US Census Bureau, although they make up for less than one per cent of the US
population, Indians living in the United States have the highest average income of any racial group.
Hillary walks the tightrope; says ‘no’ to outsourcing, ‘yes’ to more H-1Bs
July 7th, 2007
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=169455
Santa Clara, Jul 7 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is wooing wealthy
entrepreneurs with ties to India, seeking to tap the growing political clout of Indian-Americans in
California’s Silicon Valley.
Clinton spoke on Friday by live video feed from New Orleans to nearly 4,000 businesspeople
attending the annual alumni conference of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), one of the
world’s most elite university systems.
Clinton—the only Republican or Democratic presidential candidate to accept an invitation from the
IIT—reiterated her call for more H-1B work visas for highly educated immigrants, an issue of deep
concern to the Indian and Indian-American executives and engineers in the audience.
But she did not shy from characterisation of the pain of offshore outsourcing - the exporting of
technology jobs to low-cost workers in countries such as India, China and Russia.
The United States has sent tens of thousands of high-paying computer programming and engineering
jobs to developing countries in recent years.
“Workers in the United States are concerned about outsourcing, and I think they’re right to be—but
so should all of us who value the bilateral relationship between the US and India,” Clinton said. “If
the US continues to outsource jobs to India in increasingly large numbers, people will increasingly
feel insecure and increasingly seek protection.”
Her appearance comes less than a month after rival Barack Obama’s campaign sent a sarcastic
memo to reporters criticising Clinton’s ties to India. The memo characterised the New York senator
as the “Democrat from Punjab”—a reference to a joking introduction of Clinton by Rajwant Singh,
national chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education.
Prominent Indian-Americans immediately demanded an apology from Obama. Within days, the
Illinois senator conceded their concerns over the campaign memo were “entirely justified.”
Client confidential
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
Clinton’s courting of Indian-American voters comes as the 2.3 million-member community in the US
exerts more influence in the 2008 presidential election. Although they make up less than one per
cent of the US population, Indians living in the United States have the highest average income of
any racial group, according to the US Census Bureau. Their 2005 median household income was
nearly $74,000, 59% higher than the general population average.
They also have a disproportionate influence in Silicon Valley. Of an estimated 7,300 US tech
startups founded by immigrants, 26% have Indian founders, CEOs, presidents or head researchers,
according to a recent report by Duke University.
In May, Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley raised $200,000. In April, New York hotelier Sant Chatwal
said Indian-Americans could raise at least $5 million for Clinton’s campaign.
“Our political clout—or I should say political involvement—has lagged behind our economic
involvement, so I’m glad the political activity is catching up,” said Rajat K Gupta, senior partner at
consulting firm McKinsey & Company who chairs the Global Pan IIT Board, which organised the
conference in Santa Clara.
Hillary links up with IIT
Presidential nominee walks outsource tightrope
The Telegraph, India
July 7, 2007
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070708/asp/frontpage/story_8031452.asp#
Santa Clara, July 7: It may not be the best of times for Indian professionals in the West, but one
American is never shy of being seen wooing them.
Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton eagerly addressed hundreds of Indian Institute of Technology
graduates yesterday, despite having been mocked as “Democrat from Punjab” weeks ago in a dig at
her Indian ties.
Hillary, who spoke by live video feed from New Orleans to nearly 4,000 entrepreneurs at the annual
IIT alumni conference in Santa Clara, is seeking to tap the growing political clout of IndianAmericans in California’s Silicon Valley.
Her acceptance of the IIT invitation, a first by a presidential candidate, comes at a time the Indian
professional’s stock may have fallen slightly in two other English-speaking countries.
Four Indian doctors and engineers are in custody in Britain and Australia over last weekend’s failed
car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. There are fears the two countries might intensify
background checks on Indian doctors, making it tougher for them to get jobs there.
Calls for more restricted entry of Indian professionals have already been sounded in America, where
both Democratic and Republican lobbies are crying themselves hoarse about immigrants taking
away jobs.
Hillary, however, repeated her call for more H-1B work visas for highly educated immigrants, an
issue of deep concern to the Indian and Indian-American executives and engineers in the audience.
Such courtship of Indians had led Hillary’s Democratic rival Barack Obama’s campaigners to send a
sarcastic memo to reporters describing the New York senator as the “Democrat from Punjab”. It
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was a reference to a tongue-in-cheek introduction of Hillary by Rajwant Singh, the national
chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education.
Prominent Indian-Americans immediately demanded an apology from Obama, causing the Illinois
senator to concede that their concerns were “entirely justified”.
No presidential candidate can ignore the sentiments of the 2.3 million Indian-American voters.
Although they make up less than 1 per cent of the population, they have the highest average
income of any racial group and increasingly exert influence on US politics.
According to the Census Bureau, Indian-Americans’ 2005 median household income was nearly
$74,000, 59 per cent higher than the general population average. They also have disproportionate
influence in Silicon Valley. Of an estimated 7,300 US tech start-ups founded by immigrants, 26 per
cent have Indian founders, CEOs, presidents or head researchers, according to a report by Duke
University.
Hillary, however, balanced her stand on H1-B visas by sympathising with those who oppose offshore
outsourcing, the export of technology jobs to low-cost workers in countries such as India.
“Workers in the United States are concerned about outsourcing, and I think they’re right to be —
but so should all of us who value the bilateral relationship between the US and India,” Hillary said.
“If the US continues to outsource jobs to India in increasingly large numbers, people will
increasingly feel insecure and increasingly seek protection.”
Hillary taps growing clout of American desis
The Time of India
July 7, 2007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/The_United_States/Hillary_taps_growing_clout_of_Ame
rican_desis/articleshow/2185229.cms
SANTA CLARA: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is wooing wealthy
entrepreneurs with ties to India, seeking to tap the growing political clout of Indian-Americans in
California's Silicon Valley.
Clinton spoke on Friday by live video feed from New Orleans to nearly 4,000 businesspeople
attending the annual alumni conference of the Indian Institute of Technology, one of the world's
most elite university systems.
Clinton — the only Republican or Democratic presidential candidate to accept an invitation from
the IIT — reiterated her call for more H-1B work visas for highly educated immigrants, an issue of
deep concern to the Indian and Indian-American executives and engineers in the audience.
But she did not shy from characterisation of the pain of offshore outsourcing — the exporting of
technology jobs to low-cost workers in countries such as India, China and Russia. The United States
has sent tens of thousands of high-paying computer programming and engineering jobs to
developing countries in recent years.
"Workers in the United States are concerned about outsourcing, and I think they're right to be — but
so should all of us who value the bilateral relationship between the US and India," Clinton said. "If
the US continues to outsource jobs to India in increasingly large numbers, people will increasingly
feel insecure and increasingly seek protection."
Client confidential
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
Her appearance comes less than a month after rival Barack Obama's campaign sent a sarcastic
memo to reporters criticising Clinton's ties to India. The memo characterised the New York senator
as the "Democrat from Punjab" — a reference to a joking introduction of Clinton by Rajwant Singh,
national chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education. Prominent Indian-Americans
immediately demanded an apology from Obama. Within days, the Illinois senator conceded that
their concerns over the campaign memo were "entirely justified".
Clinton's courting of Indian-American voters comes as the 2.3 million-member community in the US
exerts more influence in the 2008 presidential election. Although they make up less than 1% of the
US population, Indians living in the United States have the highest average income of any racial
group, according to the US Census Bureau.
Clinton taps growing political clout Indian-Americans
Associated Press
Rachel Konrad
July 6, 2007
http://www.pe.com/ap_news/California/CA_Clinton_Indian_Americans_295936C.shtml
Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton is wooing wealthy entrepreneurs with ties
to India, seeking to tap the growing political clout of Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley.
Clinton was scheduled Friday to address nearly 4,000 businesspeople attending the annual alumni
conference of the Indian Institute of Technology, one of the world's most elite university systems.
Clinton, who will speak by live video feed from New Orleans, was the only Republican or
Democratic presidential candidate to accept an invitation from IIT, whose members include
powerful executives and wealthy fundraisers in Silicon Valley.
Her appearance comes less than a month after rival Barack Obama's campaign sent a sarcastic
memo to reporters criticizing Clinton's ties to India. The memo characterized Clinton as the
"Democrat from Punjab" a reference to a joking introduction of Clinton by Rajwant Singh, national
chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education.
Prominent Indian-Americans immediately demanded an apology from Obama. Within days, the
Illinois senator conceded that their concerns over the campaign memo were "entirely justified."
Clinton's courting of Indian-American voters comes as the 2.3 million-member community exerts
more influence in the 2008 presidential election.
Although they make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, Indians living in the United
States have the highest average income of any racial group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Their 2005 median household income was nearly $74,000, 59 percent higher than the general
population average.
They also have a disproportionate influence in Silicon Valley. Of an estimated 7,300 U.S. tech
startups founded by immigrants, 26 percent have Indian founders, CEOs, presidents or head
researchers, according to a recent report by Duke University.
In May, Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley raised $200,000. In April, New York hotelier and
restaurateur Sant Chatwal said Indian-Americans could raise at least $5 million for Clinton's
campaign.
"Our political clout or I should say political involvement has lagged behind our economic
involvement, so I'm glad the political activity is catching up," said Rajat K. Gupta, senior partner at
Client confidential
Bite Communications
345 Spear Street, Suite 750
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone: 415.365.0222
Facsimile: 415.365.0223
www.bitepr.com
consulting firm McKinsey & Company who chairs the Global Pan IIT Board, which organized the
conference in Santa Clara.
The United States of Technology?
Americans still have a lot to celebrate when it comes to technology, but in a shrinking,
empowered world, so do many others elsewhere, says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick.
Fortune
David Kirkpatrick
July 6, 2007
http://money.cnn.com/2007/07/05/technology/fastforward_us.fortune/index.htm
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- As we celebrated the nation's birthday, I asked myself a patriotic question:
Does the United States still lead in tech? As an American myself, my lens is inevitably distorted.
Even so, the answer is hardly an unqualified yes.
On the positive side, this is the country where some of the most important breakthrough products
are still being created. The iPhone came out of Cupertino. As the packages say: "Designed by Apple
in California." And here some of the most revolutionary new Internet businesses are still being
incubated - including Facebook of Palo Alto, Second Life (created by San Francisco's Linden Lab),
and Salesforce.com (Charts), also of San Francisco. Each is pointing the way to whole new ways of
doing things online.
But the equally-disruptive Skype came out of Europe, and Joost, launched by the same visionaries,
seems a truly international company. Nokia (Charts) of Finland continues to be the world's largest
cellphone-maker by revenues, and Samsung of Korea is close behind. SAP (Charts) of Germany, of
course, still dominates the enterprise software business that Salesforce.com is unsettling. (Though
much of SAP's engineering is done from its tech center in Palo Alto.)
No other country can duplicate the American environment of tech creativity, which arises from a
unique stew of entrepreneurs, academics, engineers, imaginative marketers and savvy financiers
packed together in an atmosphere of risk-taking and plentiful capital. There is nowhere outside the
United States remotely like the three places where this formula is most clearly at work - Silicon
Valley of course, plus Austin and Boston.
But while Silicon Valley retains its unrivaled vitality, the rest of the world is now paying close
attention and is never far behind. Every innovation is mimicked elsewhere. For instance, there is a
German clone of Facebook, called StudiVZ.
My own best guess is that the next great hotbed for tech innovation will be China. It is steadily
tightening the rules for software intellectual property protection. And a raft of amazingly fastgrowing Internet businesses have already arisen, including portals Sina.net and Sohu (Charts),
search engine Baidu (Charts), game company Shanda (Charts), auctioneer Alibaba, and
communications and gaming pioneer Tencent. Some number their customers in the hundreds of
millions.
The United States for much of the 20th century had the natural competitive advantage of the most
developed and largest domestic market. If you could make it here, in effect, you could make it
anywhere. Now the numbers are starting to favor China, which will eventually have the world's
largest domestic market in all parts of tech. It is already the world's second-largest PC market, with
120 million installed PCs, and another 21 million expected to be sold this year, according to
Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500). And in China there are an astonishing 460 million cellphone
subscribers, by far the biggest such market anywhere. Tech innovation in China will garner
customers and become fine-tuned, then begin penetrating markets elsewhere.
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It's been sad to see post-9/11 immigration paranoia inhibit the free movement to the United States
of creative engineers from around the world. We have survived, sure, and it's not so bad that many
of those smart people have stayed in their own countries. But it's telling that a new survey of
recent graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology - that group of schools that offer superb
engineering training - shows that for the first time IIT graduates are more interested in working in
China or India itself than in coming to the United States. In the past, they have helped start many
of the United States' most aggressive and creative tech firms.
Of course the lure of India, China and other developing markets is powerful regardless of what is
happening in the United States. That's where the growth is.
Which leads to perhaps my ultimate patriotic thought - it's great for the United States when
formerly poor countries get wealthier and stronger. As the gap between our own wealth and that of
the rest of the world diminishes, we will be more secure and less the subject of jealousy and
hatred. And who doesn't want the most people possible to thrive?
So let's keep leading the world in tech, if we can. But as people around the world take advantage of
great U.S. innovations like the PC and the Internet, I'm happy to see them adding further innovation
no matter where they come from.
GE CEO: India won't grow at the expense of U.S.
CEO Jeffrey Immelt claims that India's strong economic growth should allow it to enter the
global market without draining other countries
InfoWorld
Robert Mullins
July 6, 2007
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/06/GE-CEO-says-India-will-not-grow-at-the-expense-ofUS_1.html
General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt warned an audience of Indian business leaders Friday that
India's strong economic growth wouldn't come at the expense of the economic health of countries
like the U.S.
Immelt made the remarks at the Global Alumni Conference of the Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT), which drew close to 4,000 people to Santa Clara, California. IIT, with seven campuses
throughout India, has 100,000 alums worldwide, about 25,000 of whom live and work in the U.S.
Immelt acknowledged that the offshoring of U.S. positions to India has cost the nation jobs and
reduced its manufacturing base. But Indian companies need to grow enough to expand globally,
creating jobs in the U.S.
"The challenge to India is can the standard of living of India grow by a hundredfold without the
standard of living of America going down at the same time?" Immelt said in a keynote address.
"India's ability to figure out the win-win, to figure out a way the whole pie gets bigger, that it's not
just taking from one place to the other, that in the end is going to determine whether this will be
the Indian century."
Immelt cited Japanese companies like Toyota and Canon that succeeded by expanding beyond
Japan's borders to invest in global markets. He encouraged Indian companies to pursue the same
strategy.
Of GE's total work force of 300,000, 13,000 live and work in India, and the company plans to add
4,000 jobs there over the next few years. While India's economy is growing, Immelt said it still
needs significant new investment in infrastructure, including roads, power plants, and other
facilities.
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GE specializes in infrastructure technology, including nuclear power reactors and gas turbines as
well as medical equipment and jet engines.
U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, a Democratic candidate for president in 2008, cancelled a planned
visit to the Global Alumni Conference to give a Friday afternoon address. She received boos from
some in the audience when it was announced that she'd speak to them only via a satellite TV link.
GE chief executive talks globalism to Indian tech alums
San Francisco Chronicle
Tom Abate
July 6, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=18299
General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt just delivered an impressive speech about the
promise and perils of globalization to several thousand graduates of India's elite technology schools,
the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), who are meeting in Santa Clara for an alumni event. Let me
blog some of his remark's before I wander around to get more material for a Saturday newspaper
story.
"I'm here today because I am a big consumer of the product, which is you," the GE chieftan said to
laughter and applause. Reading from prepared notes but appearing at ease, Immelt said GE
employed about 1,500 graduates of IIT, a substantial number given that just 100,000 people have
emerged from this Indian institution since it was founded in the 1950s by then Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru. "Thirty-five of the top 600 people in GE are IIT grads," Immelt said.
Setting the stage for his remarks, Immelt said "business in the 21st Century is really the intersection
between globalization and technology," and suggested that success would go to those who find ways
to use these two forces to solve big problems, like the scarcity of energy due to increased
worldwide demand coupled with the environmental problems stemming from global warming.
"If I had one dollar to spend today," he said, he'd invest it in meeting what he called "the economics
of scarcity" in the energy arena through a combination of better efficiencies -- GE will introduce
refrigerators and lights that use half the energy of their predecessors -- coupled with new sources
of supply.
"We're investing in the next generation of nuclear power," he said. "This will be a place we'll want
to invest in India."
Speaking to this audience of mainly high-tech and business executives, Immelt spoke about the
strength of the Indian economy and took a swipe at the political process. "The economy has now
gotten to a point in India where the government can't screw it up," he said to applause.
Noting the controversy that surrounds the growing integration of world economies, Immelt said "I'm
a globalist, you're a globalist" then told his international audience "will we be allowed to globalize"
is the real question.
"If you put globalization up for a vote in the U.S. it would lose 60-40," Immelt said, attributing this
losing margin in part to "misinformation." But he acknowledged downsides to the trend. "The
bottom 25 percent of the U.S. has suffered from a wealth standpoint," he said, owing in large part
to the "hollowing out" of manufacturing in United States and the loss of good jobs.
Framing the challenge for his audience of Indian-born executives, many of whom have scaled the
corporate ladder in the United States while retaining strong ties to home, Immelt said: "Can the
standard of living of Indians grow 100-fold, which should be your goal, without the standard of
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living of Americans going down." Finding this win-win, for India and the U.S., he said, "will
determine if this is the Indian Century."
Let me get out of the press room now and meet some folks. More later.
Candidates tread carefully around outsourcing issue
Clinton speech today to alumni of India university follows Obama camp memo on related topic
San Jose Mercury News
Mary Anne Ostrom
July 6, 2007
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6310946
It may not be as big a campaign issue as the war in Iraq or universal health insurance, but
outsourcing of U.S. jobs is becoming one of the hottest topics of the 2008 presidential race, with
Silicon Valley leaders playing key roles.
The subject will almost certainly come up today, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to a
powerful group of alumni of India's most prestigious technology school, the India Institute of
Technology, including many executives whose businesses use or supply outsourcing services.
Clinton was scheduled to give the speech in person. However, on Thursday her campaign announced
she will deliver her remarks via satellite to as many as 4,000 alumni at the Santa Clara Convention
Center.
Outsourcing is a dicey subject that has both Republican and Democratic candidates scrambling for
coherent policies that don't anger voters who worry for their jobs or influential campaign backers -including tech leaders who rely on outsourcing and hiring of foreign workers.
Underscoring the sensitivity, Barack Obama last month had to rush to quell a controversy over a
memo released by one of his campaign staffers. The memo, which Obama said he knew nothing
about, painted Clinton as too cozy with Indo-American leaders and others, including Cisco Systems,
that have large operations in India. Translation: Her backers seek to export U.S. jobs.
The memo boomeranged, sending Obama to smooth over the feelings of Indo-American leaders and
even some of his own backers. They feared the campaign appeared to be scapegoating the IndoAmerican community, a growing source of votes and campaign dollars.
Also, just before last month's death of immigration legislation that would have increased the
number of highly sought-after H-1B visas -- for educated and skilled workers -- came an
embarrassing video. Made by a Pittsburgh, Pa., law firm for would-be visa users and posted on
YouTube, it instructed employers how to skirt the law that requires Americans be given preference
in hiring.
Now, business and labor interests are set to square off about the issue in the presidential arena.
Wearing two hats
Business leaders argue there is a severe shortage of skilled worker visas required to keep U.S.
businesses competitive. On the contrary, labor and U.S. engineer groups say the system is poised to
cost Americans millions of jobs.
The leading Democrat and Republican candidates are treading softly, mostly offering similar
prescriptions focusing on helping displaced U.S. workers, ending tax incentives for companies that
export work and calling for cleaning up the visa system.
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"It's especially a tough issue for Democrats who have to wear a labor hat and a technology hat," said
Bill Whalen, a GOP political analyst at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Adding fuel to the controversy, a prominent former Clinton administration official warned during a
congressional hearing last month of a "politically potent brew."
Alan Blinder, a member of President Clinton's original Council of Economic Advisers, told a
congressional committee of "many actual and potential job losers clamoring for protection."
Despite two months of heavy advertising by IIT touting Clinton's role as keynote speaker, the
senator's office said delivering the remarks in person was "not logistically possible."
Her Senate spokesman, Philippe Reines, said the decision was not influenced by growing scrutiny of
outsourcing and her ties to Indian-Americans, who do aggressive fundraising for her campaign. IIT
officials said they understood the "last-minute change" in Clinton's schedule. Among the hosts of the
IIT event are leaders of McKinsey and Headstrong, which provide outsourcing consultancy services.
Outsourcing is "a global trend, and businesses in the U.S. and India benefit from it immensely," said
Ashu Garg, a Microsoft vice president of marketing and IIT alum.
"We believe it needs to continue but at the same time recognize there are social costs in the U.S.,
and it's worth the debate on how the transition is managed," he said.
Democratic and Republican presidential contenders have been meeting quietly with people on the
other side of the issue too, including Blinder and boosters of U.S.-based engineers.
"When push comes to shove, the candidates don't know what to do about it. They don't want to
anger the business community in any way," said Ron Hira, author of the 2005 book "Outsourcing
America" and an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
"There's not a silver bullet. But part of it is lack of political courage to say what's good for these
companies isn't always good for the country. It isn't business-bashing."
But the lesson delivered by John Kerry still smarts among Democrats. During his 2004 presidential
bid, Kerry surprised even his own supporters and angered U.S. corporate leaders by labeling those
who seek offshore tax benefits "Benedict Arnolds."
Today, Democratic candidate John Edwards, who often makes speeches about the threats of
globalization to the "have-nots," uses more tempered language.
Yet the issue is only poised to get bigger as business and labor interests begin their effort to shape
the candidates' agendas. Silicon Valley tech leaders intend to push their case for hiring skilled
foreign workers and against protectionist-sounding measures.
Putting on the pressure
"What makes this issue of even more interest to us is you have a California primary that matters and
candidates can't just come to raise money," said Robert Hoffman, an Oracle vice president who coleads Compete America, an alliance of tech employers seeking pro-business immigration reforms.
"One of the questions that our employees and the companies will want to know is what are these
candidates going to do to represent our innovative leadership," and preserve competitiveness.
And labor leaders, often key allies of Democrats at election time, also intend to put on the pressure
as the issue grows in voters' minds.
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"You see a much broader swath of jobs going offshore compared to the last presidential election,"
said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. He said
he is not satisfied with any of the candidates' discussion of the issue.
The Republicans more aligned with business, saying weaker U.S. companies will lead to more job
eliminations.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney hired as a campaign adviser a former key Bush
White House economist who in 2004 declared outsourcing is "probably a plus" over time.
"The problem is that there hasn't been any serious discussion by either party's candidates," said the
Hoover Institution's Whalen. "The Democrats angrily claim that Republicans don't care about
working men and women. The Republicans say the Democrats are just loony protectionists. It makes
for good sound bites and doesn't solve the problem."
GE CEO on high tech and globalization (blog)
Seattlepi.com
Peeyush Ranjan
July 6, 2007
http://peeyushr.blogspot.com/2007/07/ge-ceo-on-high-tech-and-globalization.html
Let me just remove the suspense on why we drove from Seattle to Bay Area over the weekend.
There is a Global IIT Alumni conference being held in Santa Clara this week, and has names like Jeff
Immelt, Hillary Clinton and myself in attendance. I was scheduled to fly in Thursday morning, and
was staying at the hotel adjoining the convention center where the conference is held. And right
next to it is the Great America amusement park.
Mallika soon figured that we will have a nice place to stay, and I'll be out of her hair attending the
conference, while she can enjoy pools and rides of the park in sunny California. The last minute
flight fares were steep, and if we drove, I could expense the gas and mileage. The road trip
happened.
About the conference, it is much better than I expected - but then it is just the first day, lets see
how 4000 desis do cooped up in a few conference rooms. But then, there is a celebrity lineup to
keep them focused. The opening keynote today is by Jeff Immelt and the closing remarks by
Hillary.
Listening to top executives always fascinates me. They usually say the same thing you have heard
many times before, but everyone has one such nugget that is worth taking away from the speech,
and Jeff's was no different.
At one point in the packed dark room full of techies, he said (paraphrased): "What is high tech? I
tell my guys at GE that if more than 5 people can do it, it is not high tech". I am sure the audience
wanted to look around to see the reaction, but did not - fearing 3999 pair of eyes looking back at
someone who does a job similar to theirs. Then he explained that he considers things like jet
engines and magnetic resonance scanners as high tech since less than 5 companies in the world
work on them. But not cell phones - tons of companies make cell phones.
I almost felt like explaining to him the economics concept of "minimum efficient scale", but then
realized he is the head of a 400 Billion dollar company, and I can barely balance my monthly
budget. So I kept quite.
Another interesting point he made was about globalization. He said he feels the US is changing and
going from one phase to another. The first phase according to him was when US was exporting high
end products to developing nations like India and China. The phase two was where US is a better
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supplier of products, and can get stuff built in places like China and India for the rest of the world.
And the third phase, the one he says is coming is where US would use China and India as a place to
design technologies which are used in the developed world. Developed world products in
developing world economics he said.
While many may say this hollows out the design capability in places like America, he had a good
example. Cost of a MR scanner setup for a hospital would run into millions of dollars. The Chinese
arm of GE was able to design one for $500k because the Chinese hospitals could not afford that high
a price tag. Benefit to the US: those two thirds of hospitals, that cannot afford the millions of
dollars for this setup are now able to purchase one for their own patients. Quite fascinating.
Jeff also talked a little about India. According to him India till 1990 was about the market for
goods. I completely agree since that is the time when I saw all middle class families getting their
VCRs, vacuum cleaners and washing machines. From 1990 to 2005, India was about people. Again, I
agree - this is the time when salaries rose from $2000 a year (when I graduated) to $40000 (what a
good engineer can make today). Indians topped the world by receiving a whopping salary growth of
between 12% and 16%. Obviously, to take this further, we need to see how India takes this further.
As Jeff said, it is at a point where the government of India cannot afford to screw it up.
In his closing remarks, he said that India and US are in a great partnership, and we need to build
upon that. To the applause that followed, he remarked, "Thanks.. I am not a politician. Save your
applause for Sen. Clinton".
Outsourcing's challenge
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES PRESSURED ON BOTH SIDES OF COMPLICATED LABOR ISSUE
San Jose Mercury News
Mary Anne Ostrom
July 6, 2007
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6310946
It may not be as big a campaign issue as the war in Iraq or universal health insurance, but
outsourcing of U.S. jobs is becoming one of the hottest topics of the 2008 presidential race, with
Silicon Valley leaders playing key roles.
The subject will almost certainly come up today when Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., speaks to a
powerful group of alumni of India's most prestigious technology school, the India Institute of
Technology, including many whose businesses use or supply outsourcing services.
Clinton was scheduled to give the speech in person. However, her campaign announced Thursday
that she will deliver her remarks via satellite to as many as 4,000 alumni at the Santa Clara
Convention Center.
Outsourcing is a dicey subject that has both Republican and Democratic candidates scrambling for
coherent policies that don't anger voters who worry for their jobs, or influential campaign back ers
- including tech leaders who rely on outsourcing and hiring of foreign workers.
Underscoring the sensitivity, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., last month had to rush to quell a
controversy over a memo released by one of his campaign staffers. The memo, which Obama said
he knew nothing about, painted Clinton as too cozy with Indian-American leaders and others,
including Cisco Systems, that have large operations in India. Translation: Her backers seek to export
U.S. jobs.
The memo boomeranged, sending Obama to smooth over the feelings of Indian-American leaders,
even some of his own backers. They feared the campaign appeared to be scapegoating the IndianAmerican community, a growing source of votes and campaign dollars.
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Also, just before last month's death of immigration legislation that would have increased the
number of highly sought after H-1B visas - designated for educated and skilled workers - came an
embarrassing video. Made by a Pittsburgh law firm for would-be visa users and posted on YouTube,
it instructed how to skirt the law that requires Americans be given preference in hiring.
Now, business and labor interests are set to square off over the issue in the presidential arena.
Differing arguments
Business leaders argue there is a severe shortage of skilled worker visas required to keep U.S.
businesses competitive. On the contrary, labor and U.S. engineer groups claim the system is poised
to cost Americans millions of jobs.
Not surprisingly, the leading Democratic and Republican candidates are treading softly, mostly
offering similar prescriptions focusing on helping displaced U.S. workers, ending tax incentives for
companies that export work and calling for cleaning up the visa system.
"It's an especially tough issue for Democrats who have to wear a labor hat and a technology hat,'
said Bill Whalen, a GOP political analyst at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Adding fuel, a prominent former Clinton administration official warned during a congressional
hearing last month of a "politically potent brew." Alan Blinder, a member of President Clinton's
original Council of Economic Advisers, told a congressional committee of "many actual and potential
job losers clamoring for protection."
Despite two months of heavy advertising by IIT touting Hillary Clinton's role as keynote speaker
today, the senator's office said delivering the remarks in person was "not logistically possible."
Her Senate spokesman, Philippe Reines, said the decision was not influenced by growing scrutiny of
outsourcing and her ties to Indian-Americans, who do aggressive fundraising for her campaign. IIT
officials said they understood the "last-minute change" in Clinton's hectic schedule. Among the
hosts of the IIT event are leaders of McKinsey and Headstrong, which provides outsourcing
consultancy services.
Outsourcing is "a global trend, and businesses in the U.S. and India benefit from it immensely," said
Ashu Garg, a Microsoft vice president of marketing and IIT alum.
"We believe it needs to continue but at the same time recognize there are social costs in the U.S.
and it's worth the debate on how the transition is managed."
Democratic and Republican presidential contenders have been meeting quietly with people on the
other side of the issue, too, including Blinder and boosters of U.S.-based engineers.
"When push comes to shove, the candidates don't know what to do about it. They don't want to
anger the business community in any way," said Ron Hira, author of the 2005 book, "Outsourcing
America," and an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
"There's not a silver bullet. But part of it is lack of political courage to say what's good for these
companies isn't always good for the country. It isn't business bashing."
But the lesson delivered by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., still smarts among Democrats. During his 2004
presidential bid, Kerry surprised even his own supporters and angered U.S. corporate leaders by
labeling those who seek offshore tax benefits as "Benedict Arnolds."
Today, Democratic candidate John Edwards, who often makes speeches about the threats of
globalization to the "have-nots," uses more tempered language.
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Yet, the issue is only poised to get bigger as business and labor interests begin their effort to shape
the candidates' agendas. Silicon Valley tech leaders intend to push their case for hiring skilled
foreign workers and against protectionist-sounding measures.
California primary
"What makes this issue of even more interest to us is you have a California primary that matters and
candidates can't just come to raise money," said Robert Hoffman, an Oracle vice president who cochairs Compete America, an alliance of tech employers seeking pro-business immigration reforms.
"One of the questions that our employees and the companies will want to know is what are these
candidates going to do to represent our innovative leadership" and preserve competitiveness.
And labor leaders, often key allies of Democrats at election time, also intend to put on the pressure
as the issue grows in voters' minds.
"You see a much broader swath of jobs going offshore compared to the last presidential election,"
said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. He said
so far he is not satisfied with any of the candidates' discussion of the issue.
The Republicans are more aligned with business, saying weaker U.S. companies will lead to even
more job eliminations.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney hired as a campaign adviser a former key George W.
Bush White House economist who in 2004 declared outsourcing is "probably a plus" over time.
"The problem is that there hasn't been any serious discussion by either party's candidates," said the
Hoover Institution's Whalen. "The Democrats angrily claim that Republicans don't care about
working men and women. The Republicans say the Democrats are just loony protectionists. It makes
for good sound bites and doesn't solve the problem."
Clinton Taps growing political clout Indian-Americans: Speaks Via Satellite
KGO-TV ABC 7
Pamela Tom
July 6, 2007
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=politics&id=5398301
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jul. 6, 2007 - Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is courting an influential
group in silicon valley. Indian Americans comprise less than one-percent of the U.S. population.
However, they have the highest annual household income of any ethnic group, almost $71,000
dollars.
Senator Clinton spoke via satellite, the only candidate of either party to accept the invitation.
Presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton spoke via satellite to 4000 attendees of the IIT global
conference. The conference reunites graduates of the Indian institutes of technology. With a scant
2.5 percent acceptance rate, IIT produces top scientists, engineers and future CEO's. As a group,
they are small but potentially influential in American politics.
Umang Gupta, Keynote Systems Chairman and CEO: "There's about 2.2 million Indian origin folks in
America and not all of them vote or could vote but to the extent, there's a pretty critical mass here
in Silicon Valley and in New York, they are beginning to have an effect on politics.
Hillary Clinton visited India when she was the first lady. Today she co-chairs the senate India
caucus. She supports more H1b visas for high skill workers but believes more Americans need to
prepare for technology careers.
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Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D) New York: "We need to continue to attract the best and the brightest from
around the world, but using the funds raised from the price of these visas to train Americans is
important as well."
Indian workers say they aren't stealing American jobs. They contend they contribute to the bay
area's economic growth.
Dilip Venkatachari, Google Dir. of Products, Mobile Ads: "A recent study indicated that 35-40
percent of all the jobs created in the Bay Area during the last economic cycle were contributed to
by companies that were either funded or led by IIT alumni"
At least 20-percent of IIT graduates come to the United States to work. While many settle here
permanently, the issue of outsourcing jobs overseas hits home. In her speech, Sen. Clinton had to
balance that hot topic without alienating her audience."
Hillary Clinton: "If the United States continues to outsource jobs to India in increasingly large
numbers, people will begin to feel insecure. There is a better way with leadership in the public and
private sectors."
Whether the audience thinks Clinton is that leader, she made sure she hit upon the top issues for
Indian-American voters: Immigration and foreign policy.
Hillary Clinton disses the Valley
Valleywag
Owen Thomas
July 6, 2007
http://valleywag.com/tech/yahoo/hillary-clinton-disses-the-valley-275637.php
In elections, some voters matter; some don't. And Hillary Clinton has just told a powerful Silicon
Valley constituency -- graduates of India's most prestigious technical school -- that they just don't
rank an in-person visit. Clinton was supposed to give a keynote speech in Santa Clara today at the
Indian institute of Technology 2007 Global Alumni Forum, an event sponsored by Google, Yahoo,
Cisco, and Microsoft. But earlier this week, she announced that she'd be MIA. What's she doing
instead? Why, she headed off to New Orleans, where she's vying with Barack Obama for AfricanAmerican votes at the Essence Music Festival. Good luck with that. Sure, Clinton's still going to
address the IIT conference -- by satellite. That will hardly lessen the sting for the IIT alums, a
brainy group which includes venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Rajeev Motwani, the Stanford
professor who advised Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And it also can't send a good
message to sponsors like Google, which surely counted on Clinton's presence to score them points
with the IIT engineers who make up a good portion of their staff.
GE CEO Jeff Immelt: India, globalization and the economics of scarcity
ZD Net
Dan Farber & Larry Dignan
July 6, 2007
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5595
The influence of India on the technology industry was on display at the Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) Alumni 2007 Global Conference taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center
in the heart of Silicon Valley. The IIT is India’s premier technology university and its toughest. Last
year nearly 300,000 students applied and 4,078 were admitted. Among the cumulative 100,000 IIT
graduates, 25,000 are working in the U.S.
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General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt was the opening keynote speaker, and addressed
the U.S.-India relationship. During a lengthy introduction of Immelt, Rajat Gupta, chairman of the
Global Pan IIT Board, said, “No corporate leader is a stronger supporter of India than Jeff Immelt.”
Immelt lived up to the billing, declaring that GE and India are “destined to grow together” to the
receptive crowd of about 3,000 IIT alumni. He noted that GE probably employs the highest number
of IIT graduates of any corporation. The company has 50,000 engineers outside the U.S., and its
largest R&D center in Bangalore. “We are making it a global intellect, tapping into best brains on
global basis,” Immelt said.
In addition, GE has major investments in India, including a $500 million infrastructure fund that
Immelt said could double over time. GE is working with India on projects such as developing cleaner
coal technology, nuclear power and diesel locomotives. Immelt encouraged the U.S. to sign the
pending nuclear treaty on the table with India. “It’s one of those stupid, crazy political things,”
Immelt said.
About $50 million of GE’s $170 billion in annual revenue comes from emerging markets. India
currently accounts for less than $3 billion, but is projected to rise to $8 billion by 2010.
Immelt believes that India is well positioned for the 21st century to become more of a global
economic force. “When I joined GE in 1982, Japan was the absolute global threat.” Immelt said.
“My predecessor sent us to study Japan. The great companies turned out to be those that could
leave Japan., such as Toyota and Canon.” India’s global success will be judged on how well it can
“leave the country and become great global companies in the next ten years,” he said.
Part of globalizing is creating a win-win situation. “Can the standard of living in India grow by 100fold without the standard of living in the U.S. going down over time?,” Immelt asked.
He didn’t have a clear answer his own question, but described the problem. The U.S.
manufacturing base is hollowed out, the country has a $1 trillion trade deficit and the education
system isn’t graduating enough engineering students to compete globally, he said. “We are not
working hard enough to be exporters,” Immelt said.
India’s ability to find the win-win and to help enlarge the whole pie will determine if this is will be
the Indian century, he concluded. He gave India an edge over China and Russia in adopting a winwin approach.
For GE, globalization is about an exchange where everybody wins. “If we make money in a country
and for a country, we have the right to succeed,” Immelt said. “In the end we need to earn the
right to globalize,” he added, citing government regulation as part of the formula , especially in
areas such as energy.
India, as an emerging economy, still has much work to do create an environment for hypergrowth.
Immelt, who has met several times with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said India has to
upgrade its basic infrastructure, such as transportation and electricity, and improve its broader
education system.
“If India does those two things it has limitless potential,” Immelt beamed to the crowd. He added
that he is skeptical about India’s ability to improve its infrastructure. “The government hasn’t
cracked the code on how to do that yet, but private industrialists and states are moving to fill that
void.” Regarding India’s burgeoning economy, Immelt said, “The economy has gotten to the point
where the government can’t screw it up.”
Immelt noted that in the U.S. globalization is not a concept appreciated by the majority. He
suggested that in a vote yes or no on globalization 60 percent of Americans would vote no. “There
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is a lot of misinformation,” Immelt said. “Ultimately, we have to rebuild confidence as
industrialists. I worry about our fear creeping into our ability to make long-term industrial
decisions.”
Immelt got down to business in describing GE’s large footprint across multiple industries and how
he thinks about management and making investments.
“There are four categories that might change the world: Solving a problem, redeployment to where
profits get made, allowing people to achieve lower cost and allowing people to create new business
models,” Immelt said.
“If I had one dollar to spend today, I would invest in solving the biggest problem today–the
economics of scarcity.” Shortages of water, raw materials and natural resources fall into this
category. He cited the need to for energy independence, reducing greenhouse gases and
productivity and competitiveness as areas that GE and others will invest in for the next 10 to 20
years.
For example, GE will introduce refrigerators and lighting that consumes half of the energy of what
they consume today. The company is investing in healthcare, such as electronic medical records,
hybrid locomotives, as well as in coal gas and wind, solar, nuclear power and other “eco-driven
products that will earn money by solving society’s problems.”
Immelt’s motto seems to be, “Change the world and GE can profit at the same time.” As a part of
that goal, GE is focused on designing technology in emerging markets such as China and India to
take advantage of emerging market economics. The company is building a magnetic resonance
scanner in China that will cost $500 million compared to over $1 million today. “We couldn’t
engineer it in the U.S.,” Immelt said. “We have to think of emerging market economics.”
Immelt also talked about the need for new generation of leaders. He said the era of management
science focused on process management over the last 20 years is over. “The ‘who’ and ‘how’
generation era is basically over, replaced by ‘what’ and ‘where’ generation.” The ‘what’ and
‘where’ is about leaders who have more domain expertise and are better at choosing products and
regions to target. “Nothing about management is general any more,” he added. “Unless you have a
sense of domain or expertise, you just can’t lead in the world today–you need more courage,
decisiveness, the ability to build teams and to be committed to building a businsess.
Immelt offered his advice to graduates of IIT, who he said have too many choices today. “People
moving from company to company and theme to theme are not builders,” he said. “People need to
get into a technology that they are passionate about, with people they like. They should go to a
company or entrepreneurial startup and not leave for five years. They should see it through and
discipline themselves to not change their passion for five years.”
I doubt Immelt would mind if those IIT graduates chose to spend those first five years with GE.
JotSpot joining Google Apps revolution
ZD Net
Dan Farber
July 6, 2007
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5601
Google is adding JotSpot, which the company acquired in October 2006, to the Google Apps,
according to Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise. Google Apps
currently includes mail, calendar, instant messaging, Web page creation, documents and
spreadsheets.
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JotSpot will bring wikis and easy to build team Web sites to the suite. The company has been in the
process of moving JotSpot to the Google infrastructure to gain reliability and scale efficiencies,
Girouard said, but he didn’t disclose when JotSpot would become available.
Girouard was speaking on a panel at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Alumni 2007 Global
Conference. He said that Google is getting 1,000 to 2,000 new businesses per day signed up Google
Apps.
He also made the Google case that cloud computing–delivering services on demand–is at an “early
stage of an inevitable revolution” but will “drain the pond over time.”
He predicted that in the next ten years
it won’t make sense for people to build their own data centers. “It’s like building individual power
plants and having a vice president of electricity, he explained, channeling some of Sun CEO
Jonathan Schwartz’s best lines.
Girouard cited Amazon’s cloud computing effort, EC2, as a way to get scale and the cost advantage
of software-as-a-service without signing up for any particular application. He said that people have
been asking Google about running their applications an VMware on Google’s infrastructure.
I asked Girouard about Google becoming an infrastructure provider: “We have no plan, we are not
actively working on it, but we are courting developers who want to build applications that run on
Google. Gadgets have that utility flavor,” he said.
That said, it’s not hard to image Google using its data center prowess to host third-party
applications beyond gadgets and widgets and network services such as VoIP.
While Google will attract millions of small businesses and consumers, convincing corporations to
jump on the Google Apps bandwagon is a serious challenge.
“IT people have valid concerns. Some are based on real logic and some is cultural,” Girouard said
regarding companies who are hesitant to give their data to the cloud. “It’s not true that because
information is stored in the cloud that it is less secure. It will be more secure than what you could
do yourself for every scenario.”
He pointed to scenarios such as having a laptop stolen or lost as example of where cloud computing
is more secure. “We are in the early days of a revolution. More often small businesses participate
early. Culture barriers will begin to fade away. Marc Benioff [salesforce.com CEO] has been waging
a successful campaign for many years.”
Clearly, the cloud can be a safe way to store and more convenient way to access data, anytime and
anywhere, but privacy concerns and compliance issues will take years to resolve. Even then
companies will want to keep their most precious digital assets secured at higher levels of service
than currently offered by cloud-based vendors.
Small business in precisely where Google is having success with Google Apps, which costs a fraction
of traditional software. “There is no question that the larger the company the more likely it will
take time to move to hosted apps, but the economics are overwhelming,” Girouard said.
He noted that features such as archiving, compliance and legal discovery are issues for enterprises,
and a “drag on the revolution.”
“You could use whatever compliance system with Google Apps. The [revolution] will go faster when
it’s brain-dead easy to [adopt hosted apps] and you don’t have to worry about getting fired for
doing it. Archiving, compliance and legal discovery will be taken care of in the simplest fashion. We
are very focused on that,” Girouard said.
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At this point Google is partnering to address some of the shortcomings. The company recently
implemented a mail gateway for archiving email to another system. In addition, Google has APIs
that partners can be used to extract information for enterprise systems, but the solution falls short
of supplying what larger corporations need.
Girouard said that if archiving, compliance and legal discovery are functions that every company
needs, Google would want to develop its own solutions.
He also said the Google wants to produce fewer applications, preferring to add functionality, such
as presentations, as features in Google Apps rather than as discrete products. “The measure of
success is not about the next smash hit, but in extending the boundaries of what we already have,”
Girouard said.
Clinton Snubs Indian Tech Group
The Sun
Josh Gerstein
July 5, 2007
http://www.latestpolitics.com/blog/2007/07/clinton-snubs-indian-tech-group.html
Senator Clinton is going to telecommute to a major gathering of Indian-American engineers
tomorrow, instead of showing up in person as advertised.
Mrs. Clinton was billed as a keynote speaker for the meeting of 4000 alumni of the Indian Institutes
of Technology, which is set to take place in Santa Clara, Calif. Friday through Sunday.
"Her travel schedule changed so she won't actually be in California. She will still be speaking to the
conference via satellite," a spokesman for the IIT confab, Sean Mills, said a short time ago. "This all
happened yesterday."
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Philippe Reines, confirmed the last-minute change of plans. "Her
schedule these days is both very busy and very fluid," he said. "When it became clear that a trip to
California tomorrow was logistically not possible, the alternative of appearing and speaking via live
video link was suggested, so that the attendees can hear her deliver the same keynote address, and
then answer their questions."
Mr. Reines did not respond to a query about the specific scheduling conflict. Back in May, Mrs.
Clinton was announced as a speaker for the California meeting. The group has been selling
conference registrations at $250 a pop. The former first lady just announced plans to be in New
Orleans tomorrow afternoon to attend the Essence Music Festival and a companion discussion
event.
Mrs. Clinton's planned appearance at the IIT gathering was the lead of a story in The New York Sun
last month highlighting the senator's popularity and prodigious fund-raising among Indian
Americans.
While the IIT folks are putting on a brave face, saying they are "pleased that the Senator will still
be speaking," this seems like something of a dis to the Indian group.
I'm poking around to see what happened here, but here are some thoughts.
First, The New Orleans event is an opportunity to reach out to African-Americans, both grassroots
types and leaders. Given the challenge from Senator Obama, that is simply a bigger priority right
now than speaking to Indian Americans. [Update: On further checking, Mr. Obama was to speak to
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the Essence festival Thursday night. That probably tells you all you need to know about why the
former first lady felt the need to go.]
Second, Mrs. Clinton is already doing so well with Indian Americans it probably won't hurt too much
to lose a bit of face by not showing up at this session in person. Part of why she's doing so well is
because of the xenophobic research paper about Indian-American support for Mrs. Clinton that Mr.
Obama's campaign sent out a couple of weeks ago. He apologized, but the episode probably caused
some Indian Americans to give up on him.
Third, this may be an indication of how the Democratic presidential campaign is transitioning from
jockeying for money to jockeying for votes. While Indian Americans have been very generous donors
to Mrs. Clinton, there are a lot more blacks than South Asians in the American populace.
Fourth, the New Orleans discussion does look right up Mrs. Clinton's alley. It seems to be about
improving depictions of women in hip hop music. It should be a good platform for her to embrace
the popular art form while throwing a few zingers at the misogynists in the business. Call it a Mistah
Souljah moment.
Women IITians join hands
The Economic Times
Ishani Duttagupta
July 2, 2007
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Women_IITians_join_hands/articleshow/2166236.cms
Guess how Senator Hillary Clinton; GE CEO, Jeff Immelt; Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin; president of
University of California Bob Dynes and Rajat Gupta, senior partner, McKinsey are going to spend
next weekend. They’re all speaking at the high profile annual PanIIT meet which is being held in
Silicon Valley. The theme for this year’s conference is ‘Transforming the World through
Technology’ and it’s no surprise that the IIT alumni has chosen Silicon Valley to highlight this.
“The theme reflects the broader impact that IITians are having on society and business through
technology. In addition to the obvious technical successes, IITians are playing an increasing role in
financial services, consulting and new media. While part of that is a reflection of broader career
choices that IITians are making, it is also a reflection of the role that technology is playing in these
spheres,” feels Ashu Garg of Microsoft, who’s an IITian and one of the organisers.
Another highlight this year is the presence of US Presidential hopeful Senator Clinton at the PanIIT
meet. “IITians specifically and Indians in general are starting to become more involved both in the
political system here as well as working with to influence the direction of USIndia relations. There
would probably be no better time than now to build and cement this friendship between the two
countries,” feels Techspan CEO and alumni of IIT-Kharagpur Arjun Malhotra. Vinod Khosla, well
known venture capitalist and another IITian, too feels that the Indian community is becoming much
more active and visible in America and coming into its own in the public arena. He is also among
the speakers at the event.
And even as the annual PanIIT event becomes a must attend for high-fliers from around the world,
this year will also mark the first ever IIT Women Alumni Day on July 5 to initiate a new professional
network . It will also become the launching platform for the IIT Entrepreneur Circle to bring
together entrepreneurs from all the IITs to help the entire ecosystem companies founded by IIT
alumni rise to next level through cooperation among the founders.
It is felt that IITs’ women alumni are a unique group, winning entrance to India’s premier tech
schools on their merits and holding their own in a mostly male environment. Says Parvati Dev,
director SUMMIT at Stanford University School of Medicine: “There is an exceptionally strong
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network of IIT alumni throughout the world. Women are not excluded, but they are often not the
first to hear about networking opportunities.
In numbers, women IITians are few, and this reduces the chances that they will have opportunities
to meet and fraternise. Yet, when IIT women have assembled , even informally, they have found it
easy to share their professional experiences and lessons . This observation has encouraged us to
create a special event to bring IIT women together and to begin a more structured approach to
networking, learning from each other and developing women leaders. The event has been received
enthusiastically both by IIT alumni and the sponsors of the event.”
The theme of the women’s event is Learning to be Leaders. Participants will include high profile,
inspirational speakers from outside IIT, as well as numerous IIT women who have been very
successful in their own business, in large corporations and in academia. Three of the six panelists
Anuradha Acharya, Swati Bhattacharya , and Susmita Sur-Kolay , are from India.
Silicon Valley already hosts two organisations of Indian women - the Indian Business and
Professional Women (IBPW) and Indian Women Empowered (IWE). “Women in high-tech roles have
few role models, particularly within their own companies. Where they do find these role models,
they are inspiring , because it is easier to relate to the struggles of a woman who has become
successful than to a man with the same success. And success is not only about proficiency. It is also
about whether you have access to opportunities to be successful, and whether you have been learnt
to grasp these opportunities. It is clear that networks focused within professional or business areas
have high value in bringing opportunities to one’s attention or in connecting mentors and learners.
Women, in maledominated technology fields, stand to gain much through developing their network,
and being IITians provides an instant bond,” feels Ms Dev. While the IIT alumni network in US is a
very powerful lobby, the women IITians in Silicon Valley are increasingly feeling the need for
stronger networking to create a technical and career support infrastructure and while most of them
don’t feel excluded from the male alumni groups they are now coming together to create this niche
group of IITians who have shared similar things in life. The first event will focus on career
management and networking.
ON THE RECORD, Umang Gupta, Chairman, PanIIT USA
San Francisco Chronicle
Ken Howe, Alan T. Saracevic, Tom Abate, Ralph Hermansson, Jessica Guynn, Colleen Benson, Steve
Corder
July 1, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/01/BUG80QN2IG1.DTL&hw=IIT&sn=001&sc=1000
The CEO of Keynote Systems talks about the Indian Institute of Technology as engineering and
business alumni gather this week in Silicon Valley.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be among the speakers who will visit Santa Clara this
week when several thousand graduates of India's most prestigious university network, the Indian
Institute of Technology, gather for their alumni conference.
At a time when the India is exerting a growing influence on the world stage, the IIT Alumni 2007
Global Conference offers a chance to understand the experience of a group of business, political
and academic leaders who have played a particularly important role in Silicon Valley.
Representing this group of prestigious alumni -- who call themselves IITians -- is Umang Gupta,
chief executive officer of Keynote Systems, the San Mateo Internet tracking firm. Gupta came to
the United States during the Vietnam War and worked in the technology industry. He was one of
the first employees at Oracle in Redwood City before striking out on his own.
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In an hourlong interview last week, Gupta looked back on his three-plus decades of experience in
the tech industry, highlighted the accomplishments of his fellow alumni, and explained the genesis
and importance of the Indian Institute of Technology.
Q: Tell us a bit about the conference.
A: The seven IITs in India have probably graduated more than 100,000 alumni over the last 20 years.
We refer to those alumni as the PanIIT movement. We did one event in 2003 here in Silicon Valley
where I think we had more than 2,000 people. We've done subsequent events in Washington, D.C.,
and in Mumbai (Bombay) last year. And this one is going to be the largest, we think, with more than
4,000 people attending.
Q: This has been a powerful business network. How has it impacted the Indian business experience
here?
A: IITians (graduates of IIT) are not just in business. Lots are in academia. Subra Suresh recently
became the dean of engineering at MIT. We have many IITians who've done extraordinarily well in
businesses. Victor Menezes was senior vice chairman of Citigroup until recently. Ajit Jain is No. 2 to
Warren Buffett in the insurance business. So you have a network of people who are very wellconnected, obviously very talented individuals and graduates in the lead institutions in IIT, and
they certainly have quite an impact on both India and our future.
Q: With that broad a network, what are the common themes, common interests?
A: The biggest common interest is how they got into the IIT. Historically, 2,000 kids get selected
out of 100,000-plus by taking a joint exam. Then you go through a five-year process of going to
college together.
Even though you have seven different campuses, there are lots of intercampus activities. So we're
all really pretty well connected and you have the same bonds that somebody would have if you
came out of Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Dartmouth. Many IITians are also part of a particular
industry. In many cases, the IT industry. The other aspect is that being Indian immigrants here,
they certainly have quite an element of being connected.
Q: What things do you promote in common?
A: No 1, to galvanize and network alumni to help each other, like any other alumni organization
would do. No. 2, to help strengthen our alma mater, the IITs, through faculty recruitment, research
projects, donating back. No. 3 is contributing to both the local communities that you're part of, or
back to India to the extent that you can help in connecting between India and the communities that
you're part of.
Q: For Indians coming to the United States, what has been their experience regarding acceptance
here over the past 20 or 30 years?
A: I can use my experiences. I came here in 1971 as a graduate student. This was at the height of
the Vietnam War. I went to Kent State University and I absolutely had no angst or feelings of being
not accepted or being discriminated against. Academic institutions are always open, they're
incredibly liberal, and there's a great acceptance of folks coming from overseas. However, once you
leave the institution, and you get into the working world, each one of us has had different
experiences.
I was fortunate. I joined IBM as a sales guy. On the other hand, friends of mine would say that they
did feel discriminated against in those days. I came out here to Silicon Valley in 1978. I was
employee No. 17 at Oracle. I wrote Oracle's first business plan. I was Larry Ellison's first executive
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to leave to start a company of my own, which I then took public in 1993, called Gupta Technologies
and really the first Indian-run software company at that time.
But I was not alone. About the same time, Vinod Khosla started Daisy Systems and after Daisy
systems he co-founded Sun Microsystems and has been one of the most successful venture
capitalists in the world today. So we had a few entrepreneurs, I'm going to say probably a handful,
in the late '80s.
But in the '90s, the world changed. Completely. India started to deregulate. The Berlin Wall fell.
There was no competing ideology to capitalism. By that time, many IITians had gone through a 20year process of maturing in their particular jobs. Many of them had reached fairly good heights.
Rajat Gupta, who essentially graduated the same year as I did, ended up becoming head of
McKinsey (consulting firm) in the mid-'90s. Arun Sarin is now CEO of Vodafone. These are all
individuals who came to America in the early '70s but ended up working the ladder. You had others
-- some of us here in Silicon Valley -- who ended up becoming entrepreneurs. It took time. But then
the third thing happened, and that was the Internet.
Previously the river could only flow one way. You could send smart Indian guys out of college over
here, and you could get a job but there were limits. But with the Internet, you could actually send
the work over that made sense to do over there. And I know it's one of those things where
oftentimes people have different viewpoints. But it has dramatically impacted both America and
India for the good, because it has allowed so much of Silicon Valley to be able to take work that
otherwise it just couldn't have done economically here and move it.
Q: Is there any limit to the work that can be outsourced?
A: I've always felt there's a limit. But let's go back and think about it. The Japanese -- in the late
'50s, people would talk about early transistor radios being built by the Japanese. And everybody
said, 'Oh, these are just cheap Japanese transistor radios.' Eventually, they built some of the best
consumer electronics in the world. They did it because they ended up with a robust consumer
economy.
The same happened with cars like the Datsun. Everybody thought these were cheap little cars.
Eventually, when the local economy became big, they really started to become world leaders.
Now let's move back to semiconductors. People have yet to be able to really build the equivalent of
an Intel somewhere else. The same is happening in software. So what's moved overseas? SAP
development, Oracle application development, and those kinds of things have moved. But when you
want to build the next Google, you build it here. And many companies that may start over there
end up actually moving here.
You have to be close to that market. That's the reason why so many Israeli companies move here.
Without a huge home market, it is almost impossible to build a world- leader company. Period. And
those consumer markets for software, at least, just don't exist today in India or China or elsewhere.
Q: What is your take on Silicon Valley? What is it about the valley that makes it happen?
A: There's no place like it on Earth. It is a combination of an amazing academic setup -- Stanford
and Berkeley and others -- combined with venture capital that has over time grown up here, so it's
an institutional knowledge of how to invest, combined with companies that are at the center of
their industries, whether it's the Internet or enterprise software or the semiconductor or hardware
industries.
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A spirit has emerged over time, like the wildcat spirit emerged in Texas when oil was discovered.
Do similar ingredients exist elsewhere? Absolutely. Bangalore certainly has that entrepreneurial
spirit, along with a fairly good set of technology companies there in the context of India.
But when you combine all of that with the presence of a local home market and venture capital and
all those other things, we're still talking of a big difference. Austin certainly has a combination of
venture capital and universities. Massachusetts has those, but somehow Silicon Valley here seems
to definitely have a surfeit of everything.
Q: Some people would say this world that you describe has not dramatically affected America for
the good, although it may have affected India. Is there a global elite, a global technocracy that's
beyond nationalism?
A: Whether globalization is good or bad for America is a deeper question. America has no choice -and no country has a choice -- but to globalize today. America led the fight against communism for
the last century. What was that fight all about? Freedom of expression, freedom of property rights.
There's a certain ideology of how to run one's life, country and society and everything else. We won
that fight and with that win came a certain responsibility to help spread the notion of global
capitalism in a global way across the world. That's what we're doing.
The real question is how do we come out winners in the globalization battle? I think the only way
we're going to be winners is to continue to be highly competitive as an economy. Always be ahead
of the curve on technology. The ability to innovate, the ability to explore new frontiers. That's
what makes America.
Q: Cisco CEO John Chambers says the American educational system needs a lot of improvement. Is
that where that logic would take you?
A: Absolutely. We can't just retreat into a shell. We have to be able to build and win the battle for
globalization. The only way you do that is to help educate your citizens to be global citizens. You
improve your K-12 system. You improve your college education, and you continually raise the bar
for what you've got to do. And the bar for many of us, you know, was college. Many of our parents
never went to college. Frankly, our grandparents, some of them never even finished high school,
and so the bar just continues to go up.
Q: Why don't we move on to the root of the organization and what IIT is all about.
A: The IIT system got started in the 1950s as a result of an early decision by the first prime minister
of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who felt that in order to compete there ought to be this elite set of
engineering schools that would produce engineering graduates to create the heavy industry that
India needed. So the five institutes were started.
One of them in Kharagpur was helped by multiple different countries. Then after that, subsequent
institutes, the one in Kanpur, the one I come from, was helped by America. The one in Delhi was
helped by Britain. The one in Chennai was helped by Germany and the one in Mumbai was actually
helped by the Soviet Union at that time. 'Help' meaning a certain amount of financial help,
professors from universities would come.
I still remember many of my professors there were from either Stanford or MIT or Cal Tech or
elsewhere. I studied computer programming on the first computer ever brought to India.
It was an IBM computer, an IBM 1620, with punch cards and the whole thing. This was in the late
'60s. These universities started to graduate mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and
chemical, and then computer science graduates. As I mentioned, the process of getting into school
was a very, very competitive exam. My graduating class was about 300. There were five institutes
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in the beginning, so 300 times 5 is 1,500 people out of 100,000 selected to get in. And now there
are seven institutes, so there are about 2,000.
Q: Were these scholarships or were you paying?
A: We're paying, but they are heavily subsidized, no question.
Q: Why only 2,000 students?
A: Many people believe there should be more IITs. Within India there is a movement to add more
IITs. Others say there should not be more IITs if you want to keep them to extremely high
standards. I think over time there will be more IITs. But how many more it's hard to tell.
Q: Are we lifting up our brains in the United States in comparable ways?
A: My kids who go to school here, Ivy Leagues, and so there is absolutely no question that we
produce an amazing set of elite kids in some of our Ivy Leagues today.
I think ultimately the real question is: Are we lifting up the large majority of Americans to those
levels required to compete in the global world? We do a pretty good job of educating the broad
majority of our citizens compared to most other countries. However, we could and we should do a
better job.
Q: Where does the PanIIT organization come down on the immigration reform issue in the United
States?
A: The first thing to know about our group is that we do not consider ourselves a political
organization. We are first and foremost an alumni organization. To the extent that we have any
opinions relative to politics, they are generally noncontroversial, at least from our viewpoint. As an
organization, we believe America needs to retain its competitiveness. In order for America to retain
its competitiveness, immigration reform clearly needs to focus on improving the capability for
people who can help America going forward.
By and large, any immigration reform that helps to increase H-1B visas, any immigration reform
that helps to improve the likelihood of IITians and other graduates like IITians entering America and
doing well for America, as well as for themselves, is something that IIT supports.
Q: Is the H-1B program overly weighted to take advantage of Indian immigrants?
A: I think that has more to do with the nature of the outsourcing industry than the H-1B program. A
very large part of IT outsourcing is from India. The industry didn't even exist 15 years ago, and as it
started, much of that work has gone to Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro and Satyam.
However, I think as the world starts to add other countries for IT outsourcing whether they be
Bulgaria, Russia or China, the H-1B system will automatically start to become appropriate for
different countries.
Q: China seems to be the biggest emerging threat to your present IT outsourcing. Northern Africa,
Bangladesh, Pakistan and Eastern Europe seem to be emerging areas. How do you stay ahead of the
curve on that?
A: Ultimately, any industry has to stay ahead of the curve by constantly being ahead of either the
technology or events or sticking to its core competencies or doing better with its customers. In the
initial IT world, a lot of outsourcing was: Can I do something relatively simple or cheaper? Today,
the tasks require a certain level of quality that is much higher than say 15 years ago. So
maintaining cost-competitiveness and ensuring high quality are the keys to sound successful
outsourcing.
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Q: English fluency helps.
A: That's a natural advantage India has that I think is not going away soon.
Q: IT companies in India are trying to move up to research and development rather than being just
cost-cutting outfits.
A: I think you will always find the ability to go up the food chain is a lot easier than going down the
food chain. It is much easier to move from doing, let's call it SAP- and Oracle-style coding for an IT
shop in any of corporate America's Fortune 500 companies, to move up to do programming for
companies like Google or Microsoft where you are actually building parts of an operating system.
But, going the other way, which is to find rural Indians who don't necessarily speak English or even
if they do speak English, it's rudimentary English. They may have a B.A. degree, but that B.A. or
B.S. degree from a rural college in India is not the same thing as an IIT degree.
Q: Your group has a rising influence. What do you talk about and what are those things that are
important to you?
A: Is there something common that all Indians would generally say, 'Yes, this is something we should
stand behind?' It certainly would be immigration. We all believe that more immigration is good. We
should encourage more globalization, more openness. We must move forward with being able to
help be more competitive as a nation. Those are all things that IITians would unite on.
Q: How about domestic issues, health care?
A: Not at this point. Individuals absolutely do, but not as an organization.
Q: How has the environment changed in Silicon Valley in terms of the way folks who immigrate here
are treated. Is there racism in the valley?
A: I have not felt personally, or known of, instances of racism. This is an amazingly open part of
America. Silicon Valley is another meritocracy, very much so, and that's probably one of the reasons
why our IITians love being here, because they've been part of a meritocracy so long in the IIT
system. The answer is no. We haven't seen any racism.
Q: Is there a wall for advancement to the executive suite for Indians? Is that final frontier for
Indians to be at the top of the heap in the valley, to be the financiers and the venture capitalists?
A: It is definitely happening. I don't think Vinod Khosla is the only one who has done well as a
venture capitalist. Promod Haque of Norwest Venture Partners has done extremely well in the
venture capital industry. You have people who have done well with major corporations like
Vodafone, for example, or McKinsey. So I think that is definitely happening.
It just takes a long time. I think back to my days when I joined IBM. I could speak English reasonably
well and so was very well accepted by and large. But I never thought of myself as the guy who was
going to rise up the chain and finally end up being president of the IBM Corporation. I didn't look
like somebody who could be president of IBM and I never even thought that's what I wanted to do. I
just at some point left and said, "Fine, I'll start my own company and that's the way I'll do it." I
think there are a lot of Indians who feel that way.
Q: Has America become the place whose lunch everybody wants to eat? Does America get to eat the
world's lunch, or is America disadvantaged in the future?
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A: I think it's a deeper economic question. If you go back in history again when New York was in the
ascendancy and the Midwest and the West were just being discovered and people were saying,
"Well, gee, you know all the money goes into New York," the issue of deficits between New York
and Iowa never existed.
Why? Because we're all one nation. People thought it was OK. People could move back and forth
and move money back and forth. The globalists would argue that we are becoming one large globe.
And to the extent that has occurred, or to the extent that American values are going everywhere
and American capitalism is going everywhere and people are trading with each other in peace,
generally speaking in a way so that we can all improve our standard of living. Nobody has to eat
anybody else's lunch. There is plenty for everybody.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Umang Gupta
Age: 57
Title: Chairman and chief executive officer, Keynote Systems Inc.
Education: Bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at
Kanpur in 1971; MBA from Kent State University in 1972.
Work experience: Started his career with IBM in 1973. Joined Oracle Corp. in 1981 and wrote the
company's first business plan. Served as vice president and general manager of Oracle's
Microcomputer Products Division through 1984. Founded one of the early enterprise client/server
computing firms, Gupta Technologies Corp., which he took public in 1993. Chairman and CEO of
Keynote Systems since 1997.
Personal: Married to Ruth Gupta. Two surviving children, daughter, 25, and son, 18. The Guptas
support charities for the developmentally disabled, including the Raji House in Burlingame, named
in memory of their middle child.
Participating in this interview were Business Editor Ken Howe, Deputy Business Editor Alan T.
Saracevic, staff writers Tom Abate, Ralph Hermansson and Jessica Guynn, and editorial assistants
Colleen Benson and Steve Corder.
After IIT of excellence, IISc Age to descend on US
The Times of India
Chidanand Rajghatta
June 20, 2007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/After_IIT_of_excellence_IISc_Age_to_descend_on_US/articlesh
ow/2137150.cms
WASHINGTON: In geek circles in India and the west, it's the lesser known, or neglected, elder
brother -- a hoary institution that appears to have been on ice for a century while its flashier halfcentury old sibling scaled dizzying heights of enterprise and fame.
But watch out, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is stirring and flexing its muscle -- and history.
This weekend, the Bangalore-based institution founded by Jamshedji Tata in 1908 will celebrate its
first global conference in the heart of Silicon Valley, stomping ground for sibling IITians for more
than a decade.
Unlike the Pan-IIT meet, which will have Hillary Clinton as a keynote speaker for its July bash, the
IISc global convention will not have marquee political names or heavyweight CEOs.
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But it will be high-brow alright, with outgoing President Abdul Kalam inaugurating it via video feed
on June 22 in what will likely be his last major address to the community to which he once
belonged and to which he will return to shortly. The President, incidentally, never visited the US
during his term.
Also among the speakers at the three-day meet is James Morgan, chairman of the board of directors
of Applied Materials, Robert Birgeneau, Chancellor of UC Berkeley, and R. Chidambaram, Principal
Scientific Advisor.
IISc alumni in the US are only about 4000, unlike IITians, who numbers in the tens of thousands. But
then, IISc is also more rarefied - producing only 33,000 graduates in a century and earning a ranking
as the top school in South Asia in a recent ''Academic ranking of world universities'' study conducted
by the SJTU, China. It also boasts of something IIT has yet to achieve - India's first Nobel laureate in
science, Sir C.V.Raman, who was also its first Indian Director.
Just how old is the IISc saga? The story goes that Tata was inspired to start IISc after a chance
meeting with Swami Vivekananda aboard a ship taking them from Japan to the U.S in 1893. The IISc
proposal was first examined by Lord Curzon in 1898 and it was approved by Lord Minto in 1909.
Although JN Tata did not visit California (he was scouting steel mills in Ohio and Pennsylvania), the
heirs of his vision in Bangalore have now decided that they need to be heard in fecund Bay Area,
where the buzz is all about IIT.
"IISc has not been known for its branding," says Vas Srinivasan, vice-president for marketing at
Sonasoft and IISc alumnus tasked with building the institute's brand. ''When people here think of
Indian engineering and scientific talent, they think of IIT not IISc.''
Hillary pilloried for India 'connections'
The Times of India
Chidanand Rajghatta
June 16, 2007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Foreign_hand_Hillary_pilloried_for_India_connections/articles
how/2127053.cms
WASHINGTON: Some four decades ago, Indian lawmaker Piloo Modi famously walked into the
parliament wearing a sign around his neck that read 'I am a CIA agent.' He was mocking the
paranoia in those days about the 'foreign hand,' an expression that dominated Indian political
discourse and was used to stigmatize opponents for their alleged American leanings.
How things have changed. Here we are in 2007, and it is American politicians who are being
disparaged for their 'Indian connections,' while Indians are unperturbed by the American label. In a
particularly stark case, Presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is being derided by the Obama
campaign for her alleged Indian connections, including charges that she is benefiting financially
from such ties.
With the race for the presidential nomination heating up, the Obama campaign has purportedly
sent out a three-page 'research note' detailing Hillary's connections with Indian individuals and
companies in an effort to show that she has a poor record on outsourcing and protecting American
jobs.
The note is titled 'Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)'s Personal Financial and Political Ties,' a reference
apparently to a joke that she once made during a fund-raiser in a Sikh supporter's home that she
can run for a Senate seat from Punjab easy and win.
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The note also scrutinizes the Clintons recent financial disclosures to conclude that they have
benefited financially from their India connections. It cites the case of Bill Clinton collecting $
300,000 for speeches from Cisco Systems, a company 'Which Laid Off American Workers to Hire
Indian Techies.'
It also highlights one stray Indian holding in the Clintons financial disclosure totaling millions.
Apparently, as part of his ownership of a blind trust with WJC Investments, LP LLC, Bill Clinton held
between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of stock in an Indian company called Easy Bill Limited, which
belongs to the Hero group of companies.
Also under attack is the Clintons' connection to the Indian-American hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal
who has promised to raise millions for Hillary's campaign but who is 'alleged to owe the city of New
York millions in back taxes.' The note also cites instances of Hillary rationalizing outsourcing and
explaining that it brought jobs to both India and US.
"Bill Clinton has invested tens of thousands of dollars in an Indian bill payment company, while
Hillary Clinton has taken tens of thousands from companies that outsource jobs to India. Workers
who have been laid off in upstate New York might not think that her recent joke that she could be
elected to the Senate seat in Punjab is that funny," the three-page note fumes.
While such hatchet jobs and 'oppo' pieces are not unusual in US presidential campaigns, the Obama
campaign appears to have goofed on this one. The note was initially meant to be 'unattributed' but
some copies sent out by the campaign omitted the disclaimer and the episode was quickly outed in
blogdom.
What has surprised pundits is that Obama, while calling for a 'new kind of politics,' has allowed his
campaign to ratchet up such attacks against his main opponent, who leads him by more than 15
points in the polls.
Obama himself is trying to court the Indian-American constituency. Moves are afoot to promote
'South Asians for Obama' chapters across the country.
Meantime, Hillary Clinton is scheduled to give the keynote address at the Pan-IIT alumni in
California next month, further highlighting her Indian 'connection.' The IIT meet attracts some of
the biggest names in tech industry and showcases Indian presence in the American tech industry.
Hillary to interact with IIT alumni next month
Indiaedunews.net
Staff
June 14, 2007
http://www.indiaedunews.net/IIT/Hillary_to_interact_with_IIT_alumni_next_month_1344/
New York: Senator Hillary Clinton is set to take time out of her tightly packed presidential
campaign next month to interact with an influential alumni group of the prestigious Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs). Approximately 4,000 Indian Americans are expected to attend the
event, which is just one sign of the growing clout of the community in US politics.
In April, prominent Indian American hotelier Sant Chatwal announced that Indian Americans plan to
raise at least $5 million for Clinton's presidential campaign.
"Indians have never raised so much money to the best of my knowledge, and I've been living here
for 24 years," Chatwal said.
According to latest trends, Clinton is the Indian American community's favorite candidate for the
2008 presidential elections.
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Later this month, almost 1,000 people are expected to attend an Indian-themed $1,000 per plate
dinner for Clinton in Manhattan.
"This Indian community has come of age and they now understand they have to be involved in the
political process," said Meera Gandhi, a Manhattan philanthropist and socialite.
"We are the new wealthy kids on the block, so to speak. We feel we should have a stake in our
country's politics," she added.
There are also plans by some Indian Americans to bring in stars from Bollywood, for another Clinton
campaign event scheduled later this year, reported the New York Sun.
The Indian American community has one of the highest average incomes in the country, according
to the US Census Bureau.
In 2005, median household income for 'Asian Indians' in America was $73, which is 59 percent above
the national average. More than a third of Indian-American adults have an advanced degree
compared to 10 percent of the general population.
Overall, Indian Americans account for less than one percent of the population, but they aspire to
political influence beyond their numbers. (IANS)
Clinton Taps Newly Active Indian Donors
The Sun
Josh Gerstein
June 12, 2007
http://www.nysun.com/article/56332
Senator Clinton plans to take time out of her tightly packed presidential campaign schedule next
month to deliver a speech to a large and influential alumni group. The well-connected crowd,
expected to number about 4,000, hails not from the Ivy League or one of America's renowned state
universities, but from a school half a world away, the Indian Institute of Technology.
The unusual speaking engagement is just one sign of the growing clout of the Indian-American
community and how Mrs. Clinton is harnessing it to a degree previously unknown in presidential
politics.
In April, a prominent New York hotelier and restaurant owner, Sant Chatwal, announced that
Indian-Americans plan to raise at least $5 million for the former first lady's presidential campaign,
an impressive sum even at the overheated pace of this year's fund raising. Later this month, almost
1,000 people are expected to attend an Indian-themed $1,000-a-plate dinner for Mrs. Clinton in
Manhattan. There are also plans to bring in stars from India's film industry, known as Bollywood, for
another Clinton campaign event later this year.
"Indians have never raised so much money, to the best of my knowledge, and I've been living here
24 years," Mr. Chatwal told The New York Sun.
"We're all maxing out," a Manhattan philanthropist and socialite, Meera Gandhi, said.
The intense activity reflects a long-standing affinity for Mrs. Clinton on the part of many IndianAmericans, dating back to the state visit she and her husband, President Clinton, made to India in
2000.
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However, the new fund-raising prowess also demonstrates how, after a generation or two of toil,
another immigrant community has achieved the financial security and social confidence to venture
into the American political arena.
"This Indian community has come of age, where they now understand they have to be involved in
the political process," Ms. Gandhi said. "We are the new wealthy kids on the block, so to speak. We
feel we should have a stake in our country's politics."
"The stars are aligned, in a way," an Indian-American political organizer in New York City, Udai
Tambar, said. "The importance of money in politics is increasing over time, and at the same time
you have a community, the Indian and South Asian community, that has amassed a fair amount of
financial wealth."
Indian-Americans have the highest income, on average, of any racial or national origin group
tracked by the Census Bureau. In 2005, median household income for "Asian Indians" in America was
$73, 575, which is 59% above the national average. More than a third of Indian-American adults
have an advanced degree compared with 10% of the general populace.
Overall, Indian-Americans account for less than 1% of the population, but they aspire to political
influence beyond their numbers. In that respect, one often hears politically active Indians suggest
that they could be the new Jews on the American political scene. Ms. Gandhi describes her wellheeled cohort as "sort of like the Jewish community was 20 or 25 years ago."
Some Indians are taking things a step further, actually seeking political advice and common cause
with Jewish groups. They have sought organizing advice from the American Jewish Committee and
traveled to Israel with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
"The Jewish community and the Indian community have been working very closely together," a
former Agriculture Department official named last month as a national co-chairman of South Asians
for Hillary, Rajen Anand, said. "A lot of Jewish congressmen and senators are friends of India.
Steven Solarz was the first congressman to raise $1 million by mail from Indian-Americans."
Both groups share a concern about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. While Jews fear attacks
on Israel, Indian-Americans, most of whom are Hindu, worry about attacks on India perpetrated by
Islamists and about the threat of fundamentalism in Pakistan.
When Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley hosted a $200,000 fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton last month,
she was pressed about why America counts Saudi Arabia as an ally, despite its record of fomenting
extreme, "Wahhabi" Islam through religious schools in its country and elsewhere.
Among Indian-Americans, Mrs. Clinton has a clear edge in the early maneuvering for the White
House in 2008, but she is not competing unchallenged. Senator Obama of Illinois has also made
significant inroads, particularly with the younger set, which finds appeal in his multiracial
background. "His consciousness resonates more with the second and third generation," a Washington
attorney backing Mr. Obama, Dave Kumar, 35, said. "When he talks about the skinny kid with the
funny name, he's sort of describing every Indian-American kid who grew up in this country."
Playing off a term Indians and others use for the number 100,000, South Asians for Obama has
launched "One Lakh for Barack." It aims to line up a large number of small donations for Mr. Obama
and gather the e-mail addresses of supporters. "It's more of a grassroots effort," Mr. Tambar said.
So far, Republican presidential candidates have not made an aggressive effort to tap into IndianAmerican money or support, community members said.
"A lot of people are just waiting on the sidelines," an Indian-American cardiologist who was a major
fund-raiser for President Bush, Zachariah Zachariah of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said.
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The head of the Indian American Republican Council, Dr. Raghavendra Vijayanagar, said the
Republican Party has had "difficulty associating" with the high-achieving doctors, scientists, and
business owners of the Indian community. "They're signing up with the Democratic Party, when
actually they belong to the Republican Party," he said.
Modest efforts are under way among Republican-leaning Indian-Americans to raise funds for Senator
McCain of Arizona and Governor Thompson of Wisconsin.
A Washington lobbyist and international trade lawyer, Sue Ghosh Stricklett, said she is trying to
drum up support for Mr. McCain in part because of his leadership on immigration. "I feel legal
immigrants contribute in a big way to economic expansion. As an Indian-American, I don't want to
see racist outpourings on the airwaves. Without immigrants, the American economy would be
crippled," she said.
Ms. Stricklett said Republicans would be foolish to dismiss the claims by Indian-Americans that they
will raise $5 million for Mrs. Clinton's campaign. "I don't think it's hyperbole," the Indian-American
activist said. "It could happen on the Republican side because you have more people who could
write big checks. I just think they need to take the Indian community very seriously."
Another factor giving Mrs. Clinton a leg up is the presence of two Indian-American staffers at the
top echelon of her campaign. Mrs. Clinton's policy director, Neera Tanden, worked as a policy
adviser in the Clinton White House and later as an aide to the then chancellor of the New York City
schools, Harold Levy. The traveling aide who shadows Mrs. Clinton at nearly all of her public
appearances, Huma Abedin, is of Indian and Pakistani descent.
"They themselves have engaged the community and been an internal resource," an Indian-American
foundation director, Nishith Acharya of Boston, said. "That's been a huge difference for Mrs.
Clinton."
Mrs. Clinton's gambit to tap into the coffers of the Indian-American community is not without
political risk or potential pitfalls. Immigrants and other political novices often are less attuned to
campaign finance laws than longtime operatives. The scramble to tap new sources of campaign
funds can also attract rogue fund-raisers and donors.
In 1996, Democratic Party officials backing Mr. Clinton's re-election aggressively sought donations
from donors with Asian backgrounds. Millions were raised, but some of the money turned out to
have come illegally from overseas, including companies closely connected with the Chinese
government.
About two dozen people were convicted in ensuing prosecutions. Critics said some of the fundraising events, such as one Vice President Gore attended at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles,
should have raised alarm bells. One of those prosecuted was an Indian national living in California,
Yogesh Gandhi. He was sentenced to a year in prison after admitting to donating $325,000 from
money wired by a Japanese businessman.
In the wake of the scandal, most major campaigns and party committees adopted rules requiring
that donors be American citizens. When the flap subsided, candidates began taking contributions
again from green card holders, a practice permitted by federal law.
Mr. Tambar said that given the amount of money being raised this cycle, some donors are certain
not to follow the rules. "That's going to happen in every community. I just hope that's more the
exception than the rule," he said.
At the fund-raiser near San Jose last month, two men emerged in a hurry, explaining that they
needed to catch a flight home to India. They said they had not donated but were friends of some of
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the hosts. "We, as Indians, are great supporters of the Clintons," the director of a Mumbai-based
technology firm, Vijay Choudhary, said. "If Bill Clinton ran for president or prime minister in India,
he'd win."
When Mr. Chatwal announced plans for the Indian-American dinner for Mrs. Clinton later this
month, he advertised the presence of two prominent Indian business titans who do not live in
America, Lakshmi Mittal and Srichand Hinduja. "They can't give money," Mr. Chatwal acknowledged
in an interview last week. "It's to bring a little attraction."
Mr. Chatwal said he went too far when he told Indian reporters recently that he was putting his
new $40 million Falcon business jet at the senator's disposal. "We got to stay away from that," he
said.
Mr. Chatwal has a checkered business history that includes founding the Bombay Place restaurant
chain and filing for personal bankruptcy in 1995. After traveling with Mr. Clinton in India, Mr.
Chatwal was briefly detained there over an unpaid bank debt.
He has maintained close ties with the Clintons, who attended the wedding of one Chatwal son at
Tavern on the Green in 2002. Mr. Clinton was a guest at the epic nuptials of another son in India
last year. Mr. Chatwal is one of at least four Indian-Americans on a list of major funding "bundlers"
released by Mrs. Clinton's campaign.
While some issues important to Indian-Americans, such as a nuclear cooperation pact with India,
carry little downside for American politicians, others are more volatile. Many Indian-American
technology firms are actively involved in the shifting of work from America to India, where costs
are lower. In 2004, the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, got a
lackluster reception from Indian-Americans in part because he regularly railed against outsourcing
in campaign speeches.
Mr. Obama has referred to this practice as a form of "violence," but Mrs. Clinton has been more
sanguine. "We are not against all outsourcing. We are not in favor of putting up fences," she said in
2004 when an Indian-run firm with offices in Buffalo came under fire for shipping jobs abroad.
Speaking to executives in California last month, she called for more training for American workers.
However, the real applause came when she expressed her support for an increase in the number of
foreigners allowed to work at high-tech firms in this country. "Let's just face the fact that foreign
skilled workers contribute greatly to what we have to do and being innovators," she said.
While waiting for the outcome of the presidential race, Indian-Americans are savoring smaller
political victories, such as the addition in 2005 of an Indian festival, Diwali, to the list of holidays
recognized by New York City. "People listening to 1010 WINS hear, ‘Today, alternate side of the
street parking is suspended because of Diwali,'" Mr. Tambar said. "It's not a major policy issue, but
it makes the community more visible in the landscape of the city."
In Depth: Sizing up the Competition (transcript from broadcast)
Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria
Fareed Zakaria
May 25, 2007
http://foreignexchange.tv/?q=node/2054
Fareed Zakaria: Welcome to Foreign Exchange; I’m Fareed Zakaria.
First up, today’s college grads now face global competition for jobs. To discuss this we have the
former leader of McKinsey, one of the world’s largest consulting firms and a graduate of the MIT of
the East, the Indian Institute of Technology, Rajat Gupta.
Later, a monster has been terrorizing Korea and now it looks like it’s headed for America; and
finally, some of my own thoughts--all this on Foreign Exchange, where America meets the world.
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Narrator: This program is made possible through the generous support of the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, making grants to promote international understanding and address the root
causes of global poverty; and now--Fareed Zakaria….
In Depth: Sizing Up the Competition
Fareed Zakaria: Can America remain competitive in an increasingly globalized world economy?
What should we do about those 350,000 Indian engineers who come out of schools every year? We’ll
talk about all this with Rajat Gupta, the former head of the consulting firm, McKinsey & Company
and currently the Chairman of Pan IIT Global. Rajat, let’s start with--with the engineers. So India
produces they say 350,000 engineers; you and I both grew up there. A lot of these are car
mechanics; a lot of these are not trained engineers in the sense that we would mean a four-year
degree program. How should we think about the picture of engineering in India? I mean how many
trained engineers come out; what quality are they; how would you--how would you describe it?
Rajat Gupta: Well it’s a very, very good question just to say that I think this is characteristic of
Indian higher education. You do see some very elite excellent institutions that are truly
meritocratic and have an extraordinary selection process and maintain the integrity of that and
therefore are outstanding student bodies and outstanding institutions. IIT, IIMs, a number of
institutions like that fall in that; that is a small percentage of our overall 300,000--350,000
engineers. I think the challenge clearly remains both to grow the scale up even further and also to
grow the quality of education in almost every field.
Fareed Zakaria: How was it possible for India, one of the poorest countries in the world, to have
these seven or eight, maybe ten or fifteen institutions, that are truly extraordinary and are
producing graduates who are you know about as qualified as graduates of any institution in the
world?
Rajat Gupta: So very simple to just get a perspective on the IIT, roughly 150,000 to 160,000
students have graduated out of IIT since their inception. Just to also say that about one-third of
them or around 50,000 are in this country which is quite an extraordinary number and they have of
course contributed to every walk of life in the United States and globally. In India of course they
have contributed enormously to the development of that economy--not only in engineering but in a
vast number of fields.
Fareed Zakaria: Because many of these engineers then go on into management and--?
Rajat Gupta: Into management, into--into even politics, into administration and so on; I think that
one of the things that was done because they were created by a--an act of Parliament--these
institutions; they were given a fair amount of autonomy and one of the things that has happened of
course is that they have maintained a truly you know outstanding selection process which is high
integrity and so on.
Fareed Zakaria: And that’s the key?
Rajat Gupta: And that has been the key.
Fareed Zakaria: You take these competitive exams, a million people take them, and literally people
get numerical scores and they draw a line.
Rajat Gupta: Yes--yes.
Fareed Zakaria: And if you’re in the top 2,500 you’re in; if you’re not you’re out.
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Rajat Gupta: So having said that I think in a country like India of course you need to scale up. One
thing you have to say over the years in 50 years they’ve only doubled in size roughly and you know
that’s a very small growth rate, less you know one or two-percent growth rate per year for a
country like India which needs to grow much faster.
Fareed Zakaria: Is it possible to do that; you know let’s talk about the money issue. How can--how
were the IITs able to do what they did you know on budgets that certainly American standards seem
tiny without the kind of equipment, you know? Are we spending what--we spend all this money on-on science and technology for education. Is it all wasted? Can the IITs on a shoestring produce these
graduates?
Rajat Gupta: Well let me--let me say two things. One is that there is still a huge amount of
spending done in research in--in dedicated research labs in India, so you--you could really divert
some of that funding further in a combined research [teaching]. Second thing I think is that these
are about roughly 50 years old so a lot of the IIT alumni are coming out and coming to an age where
they want to give back. And they want to give back in every field; they want to give back naturally
like improving the quality of the institutions that they owe a lot of their success to like IITs so there
is the--there is this movement that was formed called the Pan IIT. Each IIT had their alumni
association; there’s a Pan IIT umbrella organization. It actually is dedicated to not only providing
the traditional alumni services that you would expect an alumni association to provide but also to
actually improve the quality, the governance of IITs all around looking at issues like how do we
insure that more research is--gets done? How do we insure that there’s better networking between
great universities out in--around the world and the IITs and so on? And crucially how do we improve
faculty?
Fareed Zakaria: You’re very familiar with American educational institutions as well. What do you
say to those Americans who are scared by these 350,000 engineers or the 600,000 coming out of
China? Do you think American education can keep Americans competitive and move them up the
value chain or are all these engineers going to take American jobs?
Rajat Gupta: Let--let me cycle back to say--I’ll start with 150,000 IIT graduates, 50,000 in this
country; these 50,000 graduates who come here have formed in many ways the--the backbone of
the tech industry in this country. They have actually been great contributors in academics, in
research, and as entrepreneurs in creating jobs in this country. So I would say that if you look at it
the net gainer certainly has been this country--the beneficiary of it; of course we all who came
have--owe a tremendous amount for the opportunities that have been provided to us in this
country. However I would look at the IIT alumni base and I’d look at people like [Inaudible], who
you know was the founder of Sun Micro-Systems; Dave--Dave [Inaudible] who is Sycamore; Bernard
[Gupta] who founded Info USA and I can go on for you know minutes on--on naming people who
have tremendously contributed to this economy, created a tremendous number of jobs, and if I
look at the net balance I would say it’s been very much in the positive sense for this country. It’s a
country that’s built on the success of immigrants.
Fareed Zakaria: But of course now the IIT graduates are not coming here; they’re staying at home
right?
Rajat Gupta: Many of them are staying at home. More and more of them are staying at home. We
need in this country to of course improve the quality and the quantity of our science and technical
education but also have to say that if we stop attracting the best and brightest from all over the
world in the--in technology I think we will really hurt the competitiveness of this country. So it’s
both sides; we need to improve our education and create jobs and so on. We also need to attract
the best and this country’s future has to be based on you know distinctiveness through innovation
as it’s always been and we should continue to invest in that.
Fareed Zakaria: Rajat, when you look at the world economy it seems as though nothing can derail
it. You’ve had 09/11; you’ve had the--the bust of the technology sector; you now have the bust of
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the housing sector; you have the War in Iraq; you have political crises in the Middle East; and yet
this is the strongest global growth we’ve seen in four decades. What’s going on?
Rajat Gupta: Well it is you know the fundamental forces in terms of you know certainly technology,
certainly the IT revolution, the communications revolution, the--the globalization in terms of you
know mega corporations. Last century it was the nation state; you could certainly see emerging
global champions--all of these take down the barriers that existed before and it’s a trend that
really cannot be stopped and should not be stopped because obviously a great amount of wealth
and great amount of standard of living has been improved in that process in almost every part of
the world.
Fareed Zakaria: When you were running McKinsey which is one of the largest global consulting
firms, did you find that when you talked to corporations they understood this new world that they
were getting into?
Rajat Gupta: I think increasingly so; what you see of course is that at a--at a sort of a granular level
you see a much more realization of a number of factors. One is first the most important one is the
shift in where the consuming world is. I mean think about the [OECD] world and the billions of
consumers or whatever the number is there in that world and then you look at the world outside it
and Asia and the emergence of the you know billion or so consumers who are coming into the--you
know middle class by definition of [OECD] $5,000 per year. Out of that billion most of it is in Asia
and most of it is in India and China, so that realization is--clearly has sunk in; the issue about talent
and human resources we just talked about that--has clearly sunk in. I think that the--the fact that
you can now through technology actually shift the pattern of trade not only in goods but in services
and you know it’s just beginning that revolution where you know only about you know less than two
or three-percent of the jobs that theoretically can be done from remote locations is done from
remote locations.
Fareed Zakaria: So we may be at the beginning of a--of an iceberg or the tip of an iceberg with
outsourcing?
Rajat Gupta: Yeah; I think so.
Fareed Zakaria: What about in your own industry? I look at a firm like McKinsey or Arthur Andersen
or any of these firms and you know couldn’t all this be done by Indians at a third of the price?
Rajat Gupta: I--I don’t think so; I think it’s like the type of services we do--do which is very much
geared towards top management and counseling senior management, etcetera--is a high contact
sport and to that extent it needs to be done that way. But that doesn’t say that--that there aren’t
a lot of support services, a lot of research activity that shouldn’t be done. We were one of the
early pioneers; we actually have a 1,000-person research organization in India and we started it 15
years ago.
Fareed Zakaria: So you in a way illustrate how American companies are using globalization and
outsourcing to stay competitive, right?
Rajat Gupta: Yeah.
Fareed Zakaria: You outsource some of your stuff to India but you keep some of it here, the higher
value stuff here?
Rajat Gupta: Yeah, yeah; we are you know we truly have had a global foot print for a very long
period of time. Our, you know partnership structure, our ownership structure has always been very
global and so in that sense we are not absolutely a typical organization.
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Fareed Zakaria: But is it true that American firms in general, I look at this globalized world you’re
describing and I see all the anxiety Americans have but I look at American firms and they have by
and large taken advantage of globalization better than a lot of other companies. And if I ask-compared to German or Japanese corporations-Rajat Gupta: If you look at global champions today and we took a snapshot of people who have
truly a global footprint, global presence, global share you know it’s significantly American
companies. But now you see global champions emerging from Asia certainly and--and other parts of
the world and you’ll see more and more of them. You’ll see already there have been Japanese
companies, Korean companies, and now you see Chinese companies, and Indian companies coming
along and they will also you know have a global footprint, will be globally competitive, will have a
global presence and so on.
Fareed Zakaria: You said that increasingly companies--management, top management understands
this new world; do you think governments understand it?
Rajat Gupta: Governments--I am--I’m not that familiar with it and I don’t interact with enough
governments to be able to say this but I do--another fundamental trend I think people-governments are increasingly understanding which is a different one which is that--that actually
most of societal problems cannot be solved by government alone and actually what we really need
to do is to bring what civil society brings, what private sector business brings to solve these
problems. I work a lot in health and what you see is that actually the most effective responses are
when government joins forces with civil society and business to bring something like that and global
fund is a classic example of--of that. So I think governments also realize the limits of what they can
do and the capabilities that some of these other sectors can bring.
Fareed Zakaria: When--when you tried to tackle the Global Fund which is the--the fund created to
try and deal with the--the major diseases that are--that are afflicting the developing world, what is
the most important thing in trying to cure you know--deal with these problems? You go into--you go
into Africa. You’re trying to deal with malaria, you’re trying to deal with AIDS; what is the--is there
a silver bullet?
Rajat Gupta: No; there’s no silver bullet. I had mentioned one thing which is that first it has to be
community based and locally based. It has to be run not only by the governments there but in
partnership as I said with civil society and with business. It has to then have an effective
implementation possibility--not only finances are important but the human resources. I mean the
biggest thing we see in more effective rollout of the programs we’re talking about is human
resources on the ground.
Fareed Zakaria: Good managers?
Rajat Gupta: Good managers and field workers who you know are trained in if you think about
these diseases you’re talking about making sure that the distribution system is there to get the
medications out, the qualified personnel to do the testing and so on and so forth. So the health
workers, especially the--I would say the non-physician health workers that can run the health
systems is very much a critical resource and you know today the global fund is saving 3,000 lives a
day; its impact is being felt. But these diseased kill you know more than 15,000 a day, so we’re
only about 20-percent of the way there. With the help of not only Global Fund but [Pet Far], World
Bank, many, many bilateral programs; so it has to be scaled up and the key there is human
resources.
Fareed Zakaria: What is the quality of--of management in--in America? You talk about human
resources; again you’ve seen it all. You’ve--you’ve seen American--great American firms, great
foreign firms. Is American management as good, better--are they--when I’m trying to think about
this issue of competitiveness how would you rate American companies.
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Rajat Gupta: I think American companies are outstanding. I mean as I said, more global-Fareed Zakaria: They’re not getting fat? They’re not getting--?
Rajat Gupta: Well you know not more than any other place. I mean you always have you know
people go through the best description of that is of course creative destruction. There is no--the
impermanence of excellence right; companies go through those cycles, institutions--economies go
through those cycles; so--.
Fareed Zakaria: But--but are the Asian companies more hungry; are they more--?
Rajat Gupta: At this moment yes; but that will also be a cyclical phenomena I think--at this
moment yes.
Fareed Zakaria: Do you think America should be scared about this--this new world and I know
you’re going to say don’t close down but--but how should it stay competitive? What--what should its
attitude be?
Rajat Gupta: Constant innovation--I mean I think if I--I remember the discussions when we were you
know--the Japanese companies were going to wipe us out and so on and I think what really saved
American companies and economies is constant innovation. I mean what we have done in--if you
just look at this process of creative destruction and innovation is what really creates the--the
momentum in--in this economy and in that sense the US still is very much at the forefront and the
root of that is actually our education system and that we are such an attractive destination. We
still attract the best and brightest from around the world--maybe not to the same extent as we did
a few years ago but we still do.
Fareed Zakaria: So you’re--you’re bullish on-Rajat Gupta: I’m very bullish. I am bullish on America. I’m bullish on the world. I think we can do-we are making--I mean having said all the problems and I mean I’m not a geopolitical expert as you
are so I see all the issues--Iraq and you know all the issues related with the situation, you know.
There’s more wars going on probably around the world today than any time after you know--since
the Second World War and lots of problems of society. But I see solutions; I’m a person who looks at
the glass half-full rather than a glass half-empty and I see lots of innovation. I see lots of impact
and I think we all should resolve to continue on that path.
Fareed Zakaria: Rajat Gupta, thank you very much.
Rajat Gupta: Thank you.
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