The New Boom

Better Off Than Dad

Services Sector: Growth Engine

Faces: Adventure Capitalists

Adapters: Tradition Meets Technology

Industry: Being Indian

Careers: Techies Line Up For Jobs Online

The Scindias: Will Power
The contentious will of Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia virtually disinherits her only son Madhavrao Scindia. This controversy threatens to mar the reputation and respectability of one of India's best- known and highly regarded royal families.

Gujarat: Shaky Regime
Confronted with a monumental disaster, the Gujarat Government is at the centre of relief operations. Was its reaction timely and efficient? Could more lives have been saved?

And Greed Hits Home
More than anything, it was corruption that killed people in Gujarat as buildings constructed by getting around norms came crashing down.

Public Sector: Shotgun Exit
First large PSU where workers agreed to leave the company.

THE NEW ECONOMY: CAREERS

Media Convergence
Making It Rich In Media

Shailendra Jit Singh CEO, Jalva

Qualifications: Computer programming diploma, copywriting or video-editing skills

Starting Salary: Rs 10,000-15,000 a month

Employment: Not available

Revenue:New business in India; Globally worth $200-300 million

Weaving stories rather than spinning yawns for your multimedia presentation, adding that groove to pep the e-learning video, ''re-purposing'' the content on your portal-all in a day's work?

For the 25-member unit of Jalva Media, a provider of ''rich media'' solutions to traditional media companies and new media portals ''to enhance the end-user experience on the web'', it's probably true. Digital media convergence is the new kid on the it block.

Jalva provides companies with an end-to-end solution encompassing production, encoding, indexing, archival, distribution and streaming of digital media assets. Snuggled in California's Silicon Valley with an office in Mumbai, it outsources content provisioning services including digitisation of audio and video content in several formats like Windows Media, Real Player and MP3.

This is a fertile field for html programmers, copywriters, video editors and even computer diploma holders who undergo rigorous aptitude tests and a month's training.

Take Sundarajan, 30, who burnt the midnight oil in studios as a video editor for a meagre salary. He is now Jalva's video compression expert, using his editing background to ''produce'' rich media content for the Internet. With a 90 per cent salary hike, he's not complaining.

Remarks Jalva's 24-year-old CEO, Shailendra Jit Singh: ''The Rs 200-300 million global market has a growth potential of eight times by 2003. In two years, an estimated two-thirds of the work will be outsourced to India.'' No wonder he can't stop smiling.

-Himanshi Dhawan

Medical Transcription
Prescribing Profits

Karan Khosla(far left) Director, Health Scribe, India

Qualifications: Graduate, ability to recognise foreign accents

Starting Salary: Rs 6,000-8,000 a month

Employment: 6,100 in 1999; 1,60,000 in 2008 (projection)

Revenue: Rs 300 crore in 1999; Rs 11,000 crore in 2008 (projection)

The words flow through the headphones: agiolipoma, toxo-plasma. They spurt across the screen, following the blinking cursor. It's not a doctor at work; it's only a medical transcriptionist (MT). The medical transcription is a permanent, legal document that states the result of a medical investigation, facilitates communication and supports insurance claims. It is incumbent upon doctors in the US and Europe to preserve the medical records of their patients.

Instead of putting them on paper they dictate the details of the patient like medical reports, clinic notes, consultation and lab reports and other details to a recorder or a voice mail system and send it to the MT. The information then is transcribed, punched into a computer and sent to the concerned hospital.mts are people who transcribe the words of doctors into digital files-a job that was earlier done locally but is increasingly outsourced.

Typically, doctors in the US dictate their diagnoses of patients and possible course of action into a tape. These tapes are digitised and sent over the Net to India where MTs transfer the information into data files that are sent back to the US. Given the time zone advantage, an MT in India works while his doctor client in the US sleeps. So everybody's happy-but for a price.

MTs form a $6.6-billion business worldwide and the potential is enormous. ''Hospitals in the US generate reports for patients like a lab report, case history or even a discharge summary but since it is a very tedious process they outsource the work to parties like us,'' says Karan Khalsa, director of HealthScribe India, Bangalore-based subsidiary of HealthScribe Inc, the US corporation that pioneered MT in India. Low costs (13 cents a line in India compared to 50-60 cents in the US) is of course a propelling factor.

Around 6,700 US hospitals scramble to convert medical records into electronic formats. The US employs some 2,70,000 MTs and their availability is falling by about 10 per cent per annum. No wonder Indian labour is just what the doctor ordered.

-Stephen David

MetroScape
Random Readings
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra would rather be "accurate" in his latest undertaking, a book of Kabir's poetry in English, even if he says "Kabir's greatest hits may not have been written by him at all".
more...

Looking Glass

Kolkata: Restaurant

Bangalore:
Art Exhibition

New Delhi: Play

Who says Indian theatre is dying? Playwrights--both veteran and budding--in the country had a chance to interact with those from the Royal Court Theatre, London, at its first residency workshop in Bangalore recently.
It was a fortnight
of enrichment, concludes Principal Correspondent Stephen David in Despatches.

"I was very much against the idea of India," says William Dalrymple, author, The City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. In conversation with INDIA TODAY's Sonia Faleiro, he talks about his old girlfriend, Delhi and his "enormously exciting" next book, The White Moghuls in Interviews.