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LEGISLATION Will he, won't he? Six days after the Union labour minister, Satyanarayan Jatiya, made his pro-labour posturing, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee took the contentious issue head-on, declaring that ''radical changes'' in labour laws were needed to make Indian corporates ''globally competitive''. Brave words, considering that he was speaking at the 36th session of the Indian Labour Conference on April 14, 2000. Given the government's track record, Vajpayee's rhetoric is a lot of hot air. The radical amendments made two years ago to 15 labour legislations, including the Industrial Disputes Act, the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act, and the Minimum Wages Act-all of which facilitate easier retrenchment, longer working hours, and the use of contract labour-have been hanging fire. Instead, the government has only made minor changes to the Trade Union Act, 1926, making the registration of new unions more difficult. Tinkering is, clearly, not helping a situation, where an estimated two lakh industrial units are sick and need restructuring. Labour leaders, however, are digging their heels in. Says D.L. Sachdev, 52, secretary, All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC): ''The government is trying to take away the little security that the labour is left with.'' Labour comprises a huge section of the vote-bank. And given the Vajpayee Administration's iffy majority, it's a moot question whether it will dare to cut the Gordian knot. -Biju Mathew ENTERTAINMENT It's a duet, industry-style. Sony Music is singing it with the Chennai-based AVM Audio. Tips Cassettes is humming it with the Hyderabad-based Swarna Sudha, and the RPG group's Gramophone Company of India has joined the chorus with Singapore's Pyramid International. The reason: an estimated Rs 300-crore market that's clipping faster than the national rate of 2-3 per cent a year. A mix of strategies is at work to strike the right note. For instance, Sony Music's deal with AVM gives it the production and marketing rights to 1,600 titles in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. Tips, on the other hand, has not just bagged 190 titles from Swarna Sudha, but also a network of 20 authorised dealers. In contrast, the Gramophone Company has signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Pyramid, giving it access to the overseas audio rights of Pyramid's extensive catalogue of Tamil songs. Points out Sridhar Subramanium, 36, Director (Marketing), Sony Music: ''The south was an obvious choice because of its rich regional music and a strong film industry.'' That apart, piracy is lower, and profit margins, better in South India. Without doubt, music to the marketer's ears. -Deepan Joshi & Nita Jatar Kulkarni E-CULTURE The ''Mami'' in Mylapore has known it for some time now. And Mastercard has just confirmed it. That e-mail makes distant hearts grow fonder. In answer to a Mastercard-sponsored Asia-Pacific survey, 85 per cent of the Indians polled said that e-mail was their preferred means of staying in touch with family and friends; half of them also participated in on-line chats, and more than a quarter sent photos via e-mail. Hardly surprising for a country which has sent legions of software engineers to the US. The survey-which polled 5,447 adults in 13 countries over December 4-30, 1999-found that 71 per cent of Indians spent an hour or less in cyberspace, but only 17 per cent used it to look for jobs, 29 per cent to shop on-line, and a mere 13 per cent to bank on-line. When not sending e-mails, the Indians preferred to conduct research over the Net or simply to get news. But only about a quarter of the Indians believed in chatting with strangers on-line. However, there was little doubt about the Net's impact. A majority (58 per cent) believed that the Net had forever changed their lifestyle or habits. The flip side? One-fifth of the Indians surveyed said they spend less time with their families because of the Net (61 per cent said there was no change). In Asia-Pacific on the whole, only 12 per cent said that the Net was eating into their family time. The solution to the problem, ironically, is again virtual. -Raman Kapoor TECHNOLOGY It's come, in Hyderabad, to a mobile phone near you. WAP (a.k.a. Wireless Application Protocol)-a new mobile Internet technology-took off last month, courtesy Tata Cellular. Branded WAP, the service makes it possible for the denizens of cyberabad to surf the Net using their WAP-enabled mobile phones. The company has set up a WAP server in Hyderabad, and the subscribers can tap into it by clicking the service button on the scroll menu of their new WAP-enabled handsets. Tata Cellular says that of its subscriber base of 60,000, an estimated 5,000 who use the Net are ready to make the switch. At the moment, it has about 100 WAP users, although the service is free until the middle of May, 2000. Despite WAP's novelty and ease, it could prove slow to take off. For one, the WAP-friendly handset costs upwards of Rs 22,900 (although Motorola has launched one for less than Rs 10,000), and the Websites accessed must be WML (Wireless Markup Language)-enabled. Besides, data is transferred at the rate of 9.6 kbps, which makes even small data-transfers prohibitively expensive. To speed up transmission, Tata Cellular plans to introduce General Packet Radio Switch (GPRS) stacks which transmit data in packets, and faster than in the current linear flow. Says Ajay Pandey, 39, Vice President (Marketing), Tata Cellular: ''This third generation technology will be in place by March, 2001.'' There's a revolution in the making, and it is pocket-sized. -E Kumar Sharma CYBERSPACE They are the Long John Silvers of the cyberworld, who surf the World Wide Web, hijacking unsuspecting names. They are the cybersquatters, who capture domain names in the hope of selling them back to their legitimate owners for a packet. Microsoft Corporation and Yahoo! fell victim to it, so did India Today (BT's sister publication), Nestle India, Tata Group, and Philips India. But thanks to the 18-month old Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN), it's becoming harder for the cybersquatters to ply their trade. ICAAN itself does not do any dispute resolution. Instead there are three approved providers of dispute resolution; the Canada-based e-Resolution, the US-based National Arbitration Forum, and The World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. In the past few months, a string of cybersquatters have been evicted. Philips India, the Tata group, and even Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Chandrababu Naidu, have managed to boot their virtual impersonators out. Says Praveen Anand, 44, IPR attorney: ''with ICANN you get final relief within 45 days of filing the on-line complaint.'' Time for cybersquatters to log out? -Mily Chakrabarty
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