Gartner's Hayward: RoI is dumb

That, and more is what Gartner's Senior Vice President Bob Hayward—he is also a personal advisor to Singapore's Infocomm Authority and the Shanghai Municipal Government-had to say to BT's Vandana Gombar recently.

If the Indian Government were to ask for your counsel, what would you tell it?

• Imbibe a research culture
• Encourage the development of intellectual property
• Chart a comprehensive e-governance strategy for the country, combining federal and state units
• Invest in physical infrastructure
• Grow the domestic it market
• Bring more maturity in marketing of it services

How about moving to open-source software?

I would encourage the government to look at open-source as an option but to ordain something like "thou shalt use open-source" is silly. There are areas where such software has its limitations-like high volume data intensive transactions. If you are looking at clean-sheet environment, open-source is often a good option. In cases where the original proprietary software is to be totally replaced, the switching cost would be so enormous that in a total cost of ownership calculation, proprietary software will score better.

Whether it is the government or the corporate sector, it is the ROI of IT investments that are being looked at, but you have issues with that....

Yes. ROI is not a very smart way of looking at it investments. I feel that typical business cases understate the costs and risks, as well as the benefits. These should be looked at through the lens of creativity and innovation, and how to take the business process to a different plane, rather than just the cost angle.

100 Years Of Ford-itude
A beauty-parade in Bangalore celebrates it.

4-wheels good: Iqbal Patni & his Model A Rumbleseat 1930

One for the road: Ford's David Friedman flagging off Giridhar Patnakar's Ford A Cabriolet 1929

Had you been reading this article in 1920-just think this writer is Philip K. Dick and bear with us-you may well be looking at an article headlined "India accounts for 25 per cent of Ford cars sold globally.'' Actually, that line isn't some form of (time) warped (science) fiction. According to car historian Manvendra Singh, it is fact. "From 1910 to the early 1920s India is believed to have imported 22,000 Ford cars and trucks," he says. "What with Maharajas and sundry princes patronising the car."

Some of these cars, and others of more recent vintage gathered against the majestic backdrop of Bangalore's Palace recently, participants in a vintage and classic cars rally organised by Ford India to celebrate the brand's centenary. The oldest car on display was a 1915 Tin Lizzie belonging to Ravi Prakash, the Secretary of the Karnataka Vintage Cars Association. "I picked this up a couple of years back, in non-running condition, for Rs 1 lakh. I spent a couple of lakhs restoring it; today, this model could fetch Rs 50 lakh and I have had such offers-not that I am selling," says Prakash.

Model As (one with a thermometer build into the radiator cap that could be read from the driver's seat), station wagons with wooden bodies, WW ii vehicles with spades, axes and rifle holders, and (would the show have been complete without them?) Ford Mustangs were all there. Bangalore, claims Hormadz Sorabjee, Editor of AutoCar India, which partnered Ford for the show, is classic Ford country. True enough, of the 31 vintage and classic cars that participated in the rally, 23 came from the city. Ford India's Managing Director David Friedman, who was seen examining some of the classics closely, was visibly moved. Who wouldn't be?

-Venkatesha Babu

SELF-WORTH
Patriot Games
A self-confessed desire to save Indian companies makes S. Gurumurthy Mr Fix-it.

Mr Mediator: We'd call him a knight, only it isn't swadeshi

Swaminathan Gurumurthy, 54, chartered Accountant, RSS-hand for the past 31 years, convener of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, an organisation with the avowed objective of promoting India's economic self-reliance, Reliance-baiter and, in his most recent avatar, India Inc's mediator-of-choice is used to exactitude in his choice of words. Or others'. Even as I congratulate the man for brokering the L&T-Grasim Industries deal (for details, see Cementing The Future on page 62), I realise my mistake. "There was no professional involvement; only the assertion of a moral right," says a hurt Gurumurthy. "I did not charge a single paisa, so how can you call me a broker?"

Mediator is a better word, and Gurumurthy is a good one, although he doesn't make a vocation out of it. Still, it is in his role as an unpaid arbitrator, that the commerce graduate from Chennai's Vivekananda College-known for its erudition, much like the city's Loyola College and Madras Christian College are known for their state-of-cool-has made the news in the past few months. First, at the behest of Sripad Halbe, a well-known lawyer, he intervened in the Bajaj family spat. For those who came in late, Shishir Bajaj wanted to untangle cross holdings so as to leave his son with a clear line of succession-that meant selling his stake in Bajaj Auto. Only, Bajaj Auto Chairman Rahul Bajaj and his younger brother Shishir couldn't agree on the price. "I have always brought fighting families together, but it is a difficult task," says Gurumurthy. "There isn't just an economic angle, but an emotional one too."

In l'affaire Cemco, it was Chennai's ace eye surgeon S.S. Badrinath of Shankar Netralaya, a common friend of Gurumurthy and A.M. Naik, who requested that the chartered accountant play the go-between, something the man was only too willing to do, he says, to prevent 16 million tonnes of cement production capacity from passing into the hands of a MNC. If the Grasim deal had fallen through, the odds were high that L&T would hive off the cement company and sell a strategic stake to a foreign cement major.

The numbers whiz from a village near the town of Villipuram in Tamil Nadu would have probably remained just another good-at-math chartered accountant had it not been his association with the Indian Express Group's Ramnath Goenka. Along with the paper's then Editor Arun Shourie, the trio took on the government and Reliance Industries. Gurumurthy, whose firm Gurumurthy and Associates still audits the books of the Indian Express Group continues to take on India's largest corporate group: as recently as January 11, 2003, he wrote to Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, reported to be one of his good friends, over a December 1992 issuance by Reliance of Non Convertible Debentures (NCDs) to 34 companies which, he alleges, are shell companies controlled by the Ambanis. The issue of fraudulent preferential allotment is being investigated by India's securities watchdog SEBI and the Department of Company Affairs.

However, his own credibility has been diluted some with reports of his lobbying for one of Reliance's rivals, the Essar Group, and for friends like C. Sivasankaran of Sterling Computers, and his consequent fallout with now Disinvestment, Information Technology, and Telecommunications Minister Arun Shourie.

Gurumurthy claims all these reports are targeted at discrediting him and maintains that he has no differences with Shourie and that they still remain friends, only that the two have very different roles to play. He also refutes stories about his lobbying efforts for Essar, although he admits to lobbying for swadeshi causes. "What is wrong if I present a point of view which I feel strongly about, as long as I am not making any personal gains from it?"

Nothing at all; only, if you are S. Gurumurthy, Reliance-basher, swadeshi espouser, and a man with access to Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee, Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, and the Shankaracharya of Kanchi you'd better watch what you lobby for. You may just get it.

-Ashish Gupta

CELLULAR ALPHABET
Where's The Main Course?
The PM's China visit is a start and only that.

Vajpayee's taste for China: We didn't know he liked Chinese

Go ahead, call us cynics, but everytime something is labelled historic, our eyes glaze over and we get that funny feeling in our heads. Apart from reams of bureaucratic fine-print-surprise, surprise, this was in the Indian dailies, not some government documents-regarding sharing of legal information, India recognising the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of China, China allowing Changgu in Sikkim as a border trading point ("This is de facto recognition that Sikkim is part of India," droned experts on a hundred television shows), and the two countries agreeing to study each others educational systems, the only tangible takeaway from the visit seems to be China's decision to allow the entry of Indian mangoes. As for the rest, here's a quick reckoner.

Will the visit help bilateral trade?

Well, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao did suggest that the two countries increase the volume of their bilateral trade to $10 billion by 2005, but given that this figure should be $7.5 billion by the end of this year, that's a target that would have been achieved anyway.

Will Chinese companies invest in India?

Beijing did announce the creation of a $500 million fund for investments in India, but given China's factor advantages, this doesn't make much economic sense.

Does market-access become easier for Indian firms now?

The companies that have made a mark-NIIT, Dr. Reddy's, Aptech, Aurobindo-did so when relations between the two countries were less than cordial. With Infosys' attempt to open a Shanghai office tangled in red-tape, the visit changes nothing.

Will India and China forge a front at September's WTO meet at Cancun?

The two sides do agree on issues related to agriculture, trade-related intellectual property rights, and public health and investment, but there has been no formal agreement on this.

-Ashish Gupta

The J&J Case
The CBI chargesheets its top execs.

J&J's N.K. Ambwani: He's not talking

Two years after it stated that it was investigating whether J&J India's senior executives flouted the Drug Price Control Order, thereby evading taxes, on June 28, the CBI filed a chargesheet alleging that five senior executives of the New Jersey-based multinational's Indian arm, CEO N.K. Ambwani, President of the Pharmaceutical Division, A.V. Dangi, and Executive VP and Company Secretary R.R. Mallar violated the DPCO and evaded taxes to the tune of Rs 45 crore.

India's small scale sector, and the drugs manufactured by it, do not fall under the purview of the DPCO. The CBI chargesheet claims that J&J "floated N.R. Jet Enterprises for fraudulently availing benefit of price exemption on scheduled drug formulations and availed such exemption by way of false declarations". N.R. Jet, CBI officials say, was controlled by J&J through four investment companies. They point to the fact that Coldarin, acquired by J&J globally, from Knoll Pharma in 1997 for Rs 21.5 crore, was transferred to N.R. Jet in India for a mere Rs 5,000 as further evidence.

For its part, J&J, always a secretive company, maintains that it disagrees with "the characterisation of the activities of our companies in recent media reports with respect to certain pharmaceutical products that we market and sell". A spokesperson says that the company is co-operating with government agencies, but refuses to elaborate. The case is likely to be heard on July 12, but our feeling is, we haven't heard the last of this.

-Ashish Gupta