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NOVEMBER 2004 |
IN THIS ISSUE |
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Publisher's Note
There is no question India has made remarkable strides in information technology. Nevertheless, mundane conveniences in the developed West can be a disarming reminder that India still has a long way to go. Take Yahoo! Maps — an everyday tool as commonplace as morning cereal in the West. Nothing similar exists in India. Now that’s history, thanks to an Indian teenager in Stanford, who has helped develop MapMyIndia, a fully functional analog of digital mapping device like Mapquest. Now with a click, you can access expandable, flexible and zoomable digital maps of say, Nariman Point in Mumbai or Connaught Place in Delhi very similar to Yahoo! Maps. What’s remarkable about this is Rohan Verma, the Stanford sophomore behind this website, is all of 18 years. In the cover story of the month’s issue, Rohan described what this website can do, and where he wants to take it. The tremendous hue and cry over outsourcing and job worries has prompted drastic cuts in the annual quota of H1-B visas. Now guess what? It turns out that all H1-B visas for the year have been snapped up on the first day of availability, giving pause to all those critics and analysts who had been saying this was simply a backdoor device to import cheap labor which was quite unnecessary at a time of economic distress and growing ranks of the unemployed. Our India correspondent Siddharth Srivastava presents a thoughtful analysis. Mahatma Gandhi may be India’s revered, beloved father of the nation, but remembrance of this remarkable man has been reduced to meaningless ceremony. Give credit to South Asian organization SAALT, which decided to mobilize an astonishing, broad-based U.S. wide effort to bring together thousands of volunteers on Gandhi’s birthday. Ankur Agrawal, who helped organize the effort, writes about SAALT’s National Gandhi Day of Service in this month’s issue. We wish all our readers a very happy Diwali. |TOP| MAIN FEATURE  Mapping India:A Digital Godsend By Rohan Verma  Whether you live in India or travel, getting form A to B means getting detailed directions beforehand, otherwise you are in trouble. As India enters the globalized world, that clearly won’t work anymore, says Stanford sophomoreRohan Verma, who has helped launch India’s answer to Mapquest: Map My India. In September 2004, MapmyIndia (www.mapmyindia.com) introduced to India an online, interactive, searchable digital map portal of the entire country. Now sitting anywhere in the world, users can search and see the map for any part of India, from the remotest village to the most popular tourist destination, to the streets of India’s largest cities. Along with this, MapmyIndia allows users to instantly see on the map restaurants, hotels, hill stations, beaches, banks, hospitals and much more. This article is a behind-the-scenes view of MapmyIndia – where we started from, what our vision is, what we offer, and what all we dream of for the future. Online mapping is now ubiquitous in the U.S. and Western Europe. For a tourist, a business traveler, or even a local resident wanting to know how to get to a particular destination, all one has to do is log on to Mapquest or Yahoo Maps, and they see all their questions answered on an interactive map. On the other hand, nothing like this existed in India. In my first year at Stanford University, and during my travel in the Bay Area and around the country, I saw how Internet mapping had completely revolutionized everyday life and business in the U.S. I realized then that Internet mapping held enormous potential and benefits for India as well. But how would this dream come true? This is where CE Info Systems comes in. CE Info (www.mappls.com) is one of the pioneers who brought GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology to India more than a decade back. With the aim of empowering Indian businesses through location-based intelligence, CE Info set about systematically mapping out the entire Indian territory. Today it possesses one of the largest digital map and data repositories of India, unparalleled in breadth and depth of coverage of the entire country. For more than a decade CE Info has been providing location-based solutions to businesses in all industries, from FMCG to Telecom, and had emerged as a leader in providing GIS-based solutions for India. Now, it wanted to empower the entire public – residents, NRIs and tourists – through this large digital map and data repository, and give back to the country to which it belonged. And so we set out over the summer of 2004, giving birth to MapmyIndia. This is what MapmyIndia offers today. Our single-minded focus for the future is to improve and innovate constantly, so that we can provide increasing benefits to the Indian public, diaspora and business. We aim to lead the Internet mapping industry in India along the path it has traversed in the Western hemisphere, and then take it to newer heights. In the future you may see MapmyIndia offered on cell phones, in car navigation systems, and for people in India where technology has not permeated into, even map books that offer the same ease-of-use and power that the MapmyIndia portal offers. The MapmyIndia team is completely committed to seeing and showing India on a map…like never before… - Rohan Verma is currently a sophomore at Stanford University, majoring in Electrical |TOP|
INFOTECH INDIA  iSoftTech Team to Join Yahoo ... CISCO Woos Telecom Firms ... New IT Parks ... ISRO, Boeing in Talks ... L&T, BEL to Develop Radar ... Cognizant Hikes Investment ... Tiruchi BHEL Turnover Up — Here is the latest on information technology from India iSoftTech Team to Join Yahoo Internet giant Yahoo, Inc., will own a 25-member high-skilled software professional team in Chennai after it acquired U.S.-based Stata Labs. Chennai-based iSoftTech, which has a dedicated team of 25 software professionals working for its client Stata Labs, has decided to transfer the entire team to Yahoo, Inc following the latter’s deal to acquire Stata Labs. iSoftTech, which develops software products for overseas clients (mainly in the U.S.), had recently developed Bloomba, a search engine to assist e-mail users find contacts and attachments, for Stata Labs. Babu said iSoftTech would receive a significant amount from Yahoo, Inc., for the transfer of the 25-member team. “Our team was valuable,” he said, but refused to divulge the amount the company receive from Yahoo. “I’ll not say that payment is insignificant. In fact, we will receive a substantial amount,” Babu said. iSoftTech, which reported a turnover of $1.4 million in the year ended March 2004, will be left with 55 software professionals after the transfer of 25 employees to Yahoo, Inc. The 55 employees are working on various projects for iSoftTech’s other eight clients, Babu said. Currently, Yahoo owns a development center in Bangalore. After the acquisition of iSoftTech’s team, the Chennai center will become the U.S. Internet giant’s second facility in India. CISCO is selling the equipment the world over and is a market leader in that segment. Asked whether the company had done any survey on selling the equipment, he said the service providers might have done a survey. The equipment could provide multiple services like screening a particular movie wanted by a particular customer for a nominal fee, he added. The services could be introduced in the country in a year’s time and customers might have to pay Rs.1,500 per month to the service providers for the services rendered, he said, adding customers’ telephone bills might come down as they would be using broadband for their Internet connectivity. The first IT park will be constructed on a 3.5-acre property, with an investment of Rs. 500 million. Located about three km from TIDEL Park, it would have a total built-up space of 300,000 sq feet and 100,000 sq feet parking space. The construction of this park was likely to be completed in 10 months, the report said. The other three IT parks are to come up in Nandambakkam (250,000 sq ft), Karapakkam (150,000 sq ft) and on the IT corridor of Chennai, Sholinganallur (250,000 sq ft). “We have come to a broad agreement with Boeing,” he said, adding that a formal pact would be signed with the American company soon, with government approvals required at hand. The Bush Administration had recently approved a license authorizing Boeing to engage in discussions and share data with ISRO on the division of responsibilities for possible joint cooperation in the development and marketing of communication satellites. “We have exchanged some notes. But the concrete proposal has to come from the U.S. side now. I have told Boeing to find a customer. They say they are trying to look around. They are having a few proposals. When that’s sharply tuned, we will take it up,” the ISRO chairman said. He said under the agreement, Boeing would make use of ISRO’s satellite bus and some of the former’s payload components would be integrated into it and that would then be launched for a third country. “The brief is to build a prototype of the radar from scratch in 18 to 24 months for evaluation by the army,” L&T sources told reporters here. DRDO’s prime radar development agency, Bangalore-based Electronics and Radar Development Establishment will provide the concept design of the radar. BEL, which has strength in electronic warfare and radar systems, will build electronics equipment for the project while L&T would provide mechanical parts and integrate the radar. A tripartite agreement was signed recently by the three players, sources said. The Nasdaq-listed Cognizant will also be setting up a new training academy in Chennai, the company said here. The expansion is to meet the strong demand for offshore services, said Lakshmi Narayanan, its president and CEO. The new facilities will add about 830,000 sq.ft. of space to house 9,000 employees, as well as about 100,000 sq.ft of educational space for use by Cognizant’s training academy, he said in a statement here. “Cognizant expects to spend approximately $76 million on the expanded construction program and land purchases, an increase of about $34 million compared to the expansion program announced in December 2003,” he said. Gordon Coburn, chief financial officer, Cognizant, said the robust growth this year necessitated the expansion of capacity in Chennai, Pune, Kolkata and Bangalore, as well as to construct a training academy in Chennai. Cognizant had completed its first phase of expansion last November, which provided space for close to 6,000 employees. Phase-two, launched earlier this year, is to construct 600,000 sq.ft of development space. The BHEL’s Tiruchi unit had reported a turnover of Rs. 19.8 billion in the year ended March 2004. The Tiruchi unit, which is the biggest unit of power equipment maker BHEL in terms of operations, will also be despatching 210,000 metric tons of boilers this year, compared to 162,000 metric tons of boilers in 2003-04 fiscal, BHEL executive director M.K. Mathur, told reporters here. In the next fiscal, the Tiruchi BHEL will be supplying 260,000 metric tons of boilers. “We are (Tiruchi unit) growing at a compounded annual rate of 25 percent,” he said, adding that the unit had also increased the production capacity by investing Rs. 2 billion at the unit for modernization, purchasing equipment and implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning package.
U.S. ECONOMY
 Going, going ... Gone! Vanishing H1-B Visas - By Siddharth Srivastava A full year's quota of 65,000 H1-B visas, slashed from the earlier cap of 195,000, was reached on the very first day, with no signs of respite, writes Siddharth Srivastava. First day, first show, all tickets sold out. We are not referring to a much-awaited Bollywood movie release here, but H1-B visas, which provides for passage of temporary skilled Indian (mainly software) workers to the U.S. A full year’s quota of 65,000 H1-B visas, slashed from the earlier cap of 195,000 due to protests by American workers in an election year, has been reached on the very first day the new allocations opened, with no signs of respite in the near future. Indeed, media comment here has centered round presidential hopeful John Kerry’s use of the word “outsourcing” as a pejorative to describe U.S. handling of Afghanistan through Pakistan, during the first television debate with President George Bush. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes applications for the H1-B program, is no longer accepting petitions for visas for initial employment for this fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1, 2004 to Sept. 30, 2005. This is the first time the 65,000 cap has been reached on the day the new quota opened. According to reports, U.S.CIS had received petitions amounting to 71 percent of the annual cap by Aug. 18 this year and the remainder was received in the weeks since then. Based on applications already received, the State Department will issue the H1-B visas throughout the coming fiscal. This means that fresh applicants will have to wait for the 2006 quota. Reacting to the early filling of the quota, National Association of Software and Service Companies, India’s top association for software firms, has said new and start-up software firms will be affected in a major way due to filling up of the annual limit for the controversial guest worker program through H1-B visas. However, NASSCOM expects any new administration in the U.S. to immediately relax the H1-B visa norms, allowing more information technology professionals to fly to the U.S., its president Kiran Karnik said in a statement. “At the macro-level, I don’t see this having a major impact on the industry. However, new and start-up IT firms certainly will face a problem,” Karnik said, adding that he “expects some form of relaxation in the norms by Jan-Feb 2005 after the new administration takes over in the U.S. “The U.S. industry also recognizes the need to have more professionals to service their industry,” Karnik said, adding that the slashing of H1-B visas was “too huge and unrealistic.” A Times of India report datelined Washington says that news of the first-day filling of the H1-B quota has “stunned” the tech industry. “At this point of time, the economy is showing an upsurge and there is a shortage of tech workers in certain areas. The cap should be raised to at least 90,000,” said Andy Iyengar, CEO of Sysfour Solutions, a New Jersey-based IT services company. Iyengar warned that the reduced cap would simply result in the flight of more jobs from the U.S. But he did not foresee any change in U.S. policy in the next few weeks given the election season and the controversy surrounding labor issues. However, he warned that there is an acute shortage of tech workers in several new high-tech areas as evident in job notices on sites such as monster.com. The report says that news that the cap has been filled on day one of the fiscal year is particularly dismaying to students who have just graduated and are hoping to get H1-B visas via employment offers following their training period. Many businesses and corporations are seeking an exemption from the annual cap for foreign students graduating from U.S. schools with masters and doctorate degrees, but domestic labor groups oppose the proposal and are in no mood to relent even if there is a mismatch between skills and U.S. needs. Observers here view the limit on H1-B visas as likely to affect Indian software firms, which have a large number of clients in the U.S., though it would bring more offshore work to India from the U.S. The restriction will curtail the flexibility to reinforce onsite teams at various stages in the software development lifecycle (system requirement study, testing and implementation phases) if adequate and proactive planning is not in place, says a statement by Satyam Computers, which has large U.S. clients. However, it is felt that big companies like Wipro, Infosys, HCL and Tata Consultancy Services have already built robust H1-B visa banks, with a shelf life of 6 years, in anticipation of a shortage; it is the smaller IT firms that will really have to grapple hard for new business as well as servicing current clients. Wipro Technologies, for instance, has already 1,000 visa-ready professionals based in India, waiting for their onsite assignments in addition to around 2,000 employees who are already in the U.S.. Infosys is estimated to have close to 7,000 H1-B visas of which only about half are currently utilized and it has also applied for about 4,000 fresh visas in the current year. According to Laxman Badiga, chief executive (talent transformation) of Wipro Technologies, “We knew about the problem since October and today we have quite a number of visas. Each H1-B visa is valid for six years. Additionally, the availability of L-1 visas (used for intra-company transfers) can mitigate a situation like this.” But, the overwhelming view is that the limit on H1-B visas will drive back more offshore work to India, without affecting overall business. “The offshore component has grown for most of the IT companies in 2003-04,” said Badiga, who added that the lowered visa cap would facilitate “transfer of knowledge” as people from the client-side would spend more time here training people at the offshore delivery centers. According to Anu Sharma, vice-president of human resources, iGATE Global Solutions, the restriction on the H1-B visas would drive more clients to get work done offshore. This, in turn, would lower costs. “With many companies operating on the global delivery model, this means more business. iGATE recruits local talent in all geographies, which reduces visa-related risks for its business,” she said. Indeed, the U.S.-India visa story has been mixed in the last few years, especially post-9/11. While the number of students heading to the U.S. indicates a perceptible drop, non-immigration visas issued for tourist and business purposes continue to rise at a fast rate. Most, however, expect a revamp of the current regime once the new government is in place in the U.S. That won’t be too long even as there seems to be a realization in the U.S. that anti-outsourcing wont work. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently vetoed offshoring bills, while independent research indicates that if U.S. labor shortfall is not met, the U.S. economy will lose $2 trillion by 2010. - Siddharth Srivastava is the India correspondent for Siliconeer. He is based in New Delhi. |TOP| OUTSOURCING:  Outsourcing Digest: Siliconeer presents of the latest news from the world of outsourcing. Nobel Guru Goes Anti-BPO Mainstream economists do acknowledge that someone’s gain is someone’s loss. The assumption that “the gains of the American winners are big enough to compensate for the losers” is not always true, says Paul Samuelson as quoted in The New York Times. Trade, in other words, does not always work to all parties’ advantage, says the 81-year-old Nobel laureate in economics and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, there are others like Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve; N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Jagdish Bhagwati, a leading international economist and professor at Columbia University, who disagree with his view. Samuelson asserts in the essay for the Journal of Economic Perspectives that there is a false assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the US economy will benefit in the long run from the outsourcing of call-centre and software programming jobs abroad. He has written the essay with the hope of contributing economic nuance to the policy over the debate of outsourcing and trade. Up to now, Samuelson said, “The gains to America have outweighed the losses from trade, but that outcome is not necessarily guaranteed in the future.” The Nobel laureate notes that Americans these days feel insecure and uneasy about work as the economies of China and India have emerged on the strength of their low wages, increasingly skilled workers and rising technological prowess. It is a hot issue which, he feels, will not fade away in the times to come. Jagdish Bhagwati and two colleagues, Arvind Panagariya, an economics professor at Columbia, and T.N. Srinivasan, a professor of economics at Yale University, have already submitted an article to the journal that is partly a response to Samuelson. Theirs is titled “The Muddles over Outsourcing.” They do not dispute the model that Samuelson presents in his journal article. But the magnified concern, Bhagwati said, is that China takes away most of American manufacturing and India most of high-technology services business. Looking at the small number of jobs actually sent abroad, and based on his own knowledge of developing nations, he concludes that outsourcing worries are greatly exaggerated. While North America continues to remain the primary destination for software exports with a dominant 70 percent market share, Indian software firms are gradually increasing their presence in the European market and aggressively tapping new markets like Japan, Nasscom said. IT exports contribute to the country’s total invisible receipts and are also posting continuous growth. This indicates strength of the software sector as the driver of overall foreign exchange reserves, Nasscom said. The IT exports sector posted a 30.5 percent growth in fiscal 2003-04, clocking revenues of $16.3 billion, it said. North America, which accounts for over 55 percent of the global IT spend, represented 70 percent of the country’s software exports in 2003-04, with Europe ranking second at 22.25 percent of total exports, it said. North America remains the dominant market for IT-enabled services (and business process outsourcing services, accounting for over 80 percent of the country’s ITES-BPO business in the country, Nasscom added. While Indian companies are gradually increasing their share in the European market, they are now aggressively exploring new markets like Japan, Germany and France, it said. Over the next few years, the Asia-Pacific region would emerge as a key target region for Indian software and services industry, it said. Fueled by the success of the U.S.-based health care firm Aetna moving its claims adjudication process to India, many other organizations want to tread the same path. According to the Global Insurance Outsourcing report released by the ValueNotes Outsourcing Practice, which looks at outsourcing, currently around 63 percent of India’s insurance outsourcing revenue comes from the US. Some of the top players in the insurance vertical are WNS, HTMT, EXL, ICICI OneSource and GTL. The report emphasizes the potential for insurance outsourcing with over 1,500 property and casualty insurance companies and 1,300 health insurance companies in the US alone. Globally, the banking, financial services and insurance vertical is the fastest growing segment in outsourcing. India’s BFSI outsourcing revenues in 2003 stood at $1.1 billion, constituting 2.5 percent of the global BFSI outsourcing, stated ValueNotes. It estimates that the Indian insurance outsourcing revenues are likely to grow to $790 million by 2007, from an estimated $367 million in 2003, reflecting a compounded average growth rate of 21 per cent. Several large Indian service providers have, through organic growth or acquisitions, set up centers in the US, Canada and other places that qualify as “near-shore” outsourcing destinations and are therefore more acceptable to first time outsourcers. “India has thus much to offer as an offshoring destination,” said Nilesh Paranjape, senior research analyst, ValueNotes. NEC Solutions, an affiliate of $47-billion NEC Corporation of Japan, and Niteo Partners Inc, a consulting, solutions and systems integration subsidiary of NEC Corporation, have established Niteo Technologies Ltd in Chennai to integrate offshore software delivery and BPO capabilities into its solutions business in the U.S. “NEC and Niteo now have offshore capability required to quickly launch new and existing customers on high end enterprise systems, business intelligence, corporate performance management etc,” Ichimura said. The company could now provide its customers quicker and cost-effective solutions managed from the US, utilizing offshore resources. “We can also support other global NEC divisions from our facilities in India in the future,” he said. In the past, NEC was operating through partners in India. Sources say the share-transfer proposal of Convergys Information Management has recently been cleared by the government. While Convergys India representatives refused to confirm or deny the move, Convergys US did not respond to ET’s e-mail queries. The $2.3bn billing and customer services giant started its operations in India about three years ago in Gurgaon with a modest headcount of 200. It now plans to ramp up to 20,000 employees by the end of next year. With this, it might emerge as the largest call center in the country next year. SOCIAL WORK:
Gandhi Day in U.S. By Ankur Agarwal INSET (TOP): SAALT volunteers from the Indus Women Leaders helping build a play-ground in the San Francisco Bay Area. INSET, BOTTOM: A playground being built from scratch by SAALT volunteers in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Thousands of volunteers from over 250 organizations joined SAALT in its eight-city birthday celebration of Mahatma Gandhi, writes Ankur Agarwal.On October 2, 2004, the Sixth Annual National Gandhi Day of Service drew thousands of volunteers around the country to conduct service activities in their local communities. Over the past six years NGDOS has grown to become the largest volunteerism event in the South Asian American community. In Houston, New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Orlando, Philadelphia, and many other areas, individuals helped with post hurricane clean up efforts, cleaned up parks, visited nursing homes, and participated in bone marrow and voter registration drives. South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow, a national, non-profit organization dedicated to the full and equal participation by South Asians in the civic and political life of the United States, organized NGDOS with the assistance of volunteers around the country. As a member of the SAALT Board of Directors and national co-chair of NGDOS I have been proud of being able to provide opportunities for South Asians to become engaged in our communities here in America through our SAALT activities. It is very important for our community to come together and really give back to a country that has provided so much opportunity for our families. By organizing events like the National Gandhi Day of Service, we hope to foster habits of community service that volunteers will carry through their lives. Speakers at kickoff events Oct. 2 invoked the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in their remarks. Born on October 2, 1869, Gandhi’s life was dedicated to the universal messages of unity among all people and the moral obligation to “be the change you wish to see in the world,” a concept that resonates with South Asians around the country. “Gandhi’s dedication towards creating positive social change is important for South Asians to remember and follow,” said Deepa Iyer, executive director of SAALT, at the New York City gathering. The day’s events reflected one of Gandhi’s other messages that “[t]he best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” This is what we hope happens for everyone on this day. We hope each person finds a little bit more of themselves than we already knew; a little bit that says to us how fulfilling it is to help those who are less fortunate than us. A voice that tells us not only how much our services are appreciated, but how much they are constantly needed, not just today, but on an ongoing basis. In the Bay Area, Chandni Patel, a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, visited the Charappal House, where she and other volunteers visited with residents of the senior citizen home. “My experience at the Charappal House was great,” Chandni says. “I wouldn’t have ever thought about volunteering at a senior citizen home on my own. I learned something new about myself today. “Afterwards, I felt really good and I hope to continue volunteering and visiting my new friends at the home.” Bay Area first time NGDOS flagship coordinator, Subha Varadarajan, never knew how much impact she would have on so many individuals from organizing this event. “NGDOS went extremely well and I had no idea how rewarding this experience would be. I was very nervous in the morning but those butterflies all disappeared when I saw the look on faces of the senior citizens. They were so excited to have us there and take them out for lunch and ice cream. I even received a letter from one of their daughters telling me how grateful her mom was for the day we shared with them. I found out today that this is really what loosing yourself in the service to others is all about,” says Vardarajan. Volunteers from all over the country were sharing in similar experiences as they were helping “be the change.” Ruby Dhillon, a volunteer in Boston who led cleanups at local parks, expressed similar sentiments. “Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the Boston parks clean-up was the tremendous impact that the volunteers had made over the course of just several hours. Throughout the day, kids were running up to us and thanking us for making their park a cleaner and more enjoyable place — providing real encouragement for the volunteers to work hard.” Volunteers had extra incentive to contribute their time and energy in Orlando, Florida, where they removed debris created by Hurricanes Charley and Frances at the campsite of the Girl Scouts of Citrus Council. Local Orlando SAALT coordinators, Varsha Das and Shobana Daniels, were honored to be able to help fellow victims of the Hurricanes get the campsite ready for the Girl Scouts. In Houston, volunteers ended their day of service with the unveiling of a Gandhi statute at a local park. Houston coordinator, Pauravi Shah, felt this was a noble way to reflect on Gandhi’s message and legacy after their day of service. Boston flagship city coordinator Sid Kumar reports that volunteers “constructed two picnic tables and four benches for a school for delinquent children, cleaned over 15 acres at local parks, sorted hundreds of pounds of food at a homeless shelter, served dozens of individuals at a local soup kitchen, and spread AIDS and domestic violence awareness to individuals throughout the Boston community.” SAALT volunteers and flagship city coordinators have been planning this year’s event for over six months. “We designated coordinators in eight flagship cities to identify service projects and recruit volunteers from area universities and organizations. It is a wonderful opportunity for students and community members to take leadership roles to organize local service events.” says Rajani Tendulkar, national co-chair of NGDOS. Atlanta regional coordinator, Dhruti Contractor, says that she decided to get involved in NGDOS because it presented “a great way to bring various groups in the South Asian community in Atlanta together and bridge gaps through community service.” SAALT has partnered with many national organizations to help build these bridges and create a more unified voice. “One of SAALT’s overarching goals is to develop South Asian coalitions among organizations and community members that transcend religious, ethnic or linguistic differences,” Tendulkar adds. “By building these coalitions through NGDOS and our other programs our belief is that we will help facilitate collective action and bring about broader community change.” This idea is central to another one of SAALT’s new initiatives, its Community Through Unity project. This project will bring South Asians from many communities together to develop sustainable efforts for confronting the root causes of bias and counteracting discriminatory policies. Since Sept. 11, bias incidents and hate crimes against South Asians have skyrocketed. In fact, a recent survey conducted by New California Media and Amnesty International reveals that nearly a third of Pakistani Americans say they have experienced discrimination in the last three years. “The daunting new challenges facing our community in the post-September 11th world call for new strategies and coalitions,” says Iyer. “We can no longer take our rights for granted, or be silent as they are taken from us. SAALT is committed to facilitating community organizing and fostering civic engagement to create positive social change.” Since its inception in 2000, SAALT has evolved into an organization that has firmly established a foothold in the broader South Asian community through volunteerism and policy development programs, as well as community education and organizing efforts. In order to be more effective in addressing these efforts SAALT has also announced a major advance for the South Asian American community nationwide with the establishment of a full-time office in New York City. “We are excited to announce that our community now has a strong national voice, positioned to promote and protect the rights of all South Asians in the United States,” said Nicholas Rathod, the SAALT Board Chair. SAALT’s goal is to initiate programs that address policy issues affecting our community, and that provide opportunities for leadership development, volunteerism, and civic engagement. Through events such as National Gandhi Day of Service SAALT has made a tremendous contribution to the South Asian American Community and has helped bring our service and dedication to the forefront of the community. SAALT looks forward to many more years of successful NGDOS events. SAALT’s Sixth Annual National Gandhi Day of Service was made possible with the generous support of Citibank and ChevronTexaco. In addition, several corporate and individual donors supported events in their local communities. SAALT is a national non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the full and equal participation by South Asians in the civic and political life of the United States. Pictures from the events, as well as additional information about city events, are available by contacting Ankur Agarwal at ankur@saalt.org. - Ankur Agarwal, an engineer with Advanced Micro Devices in Silicon Valley, |TOP| HEALTHCARE  A Healthy Move:TB Screening - By Arnel Reyes, MD High occurrence rate in the makes tuberculosis screening an essential step in treating the disease, writes Arnel Reyes, MD, who urges you to get screened. School is in session! That means school health forms are due — so let’s talk about tuberculosis screening. Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that usually infects the lungs. Doctors believe that about 10 to 15 million people in the U.S. have latent TB. This high occurrence rate makes screening an essential step in treating the disease before it develops into active TB. Recently, a five-year-old boy came in to see me for a school physical. I did a tuberculosis screening, required for the school district. To my surprise, he turned out to be positive on his TB screening test, even though he was raised in the United States his entire life, and his parents were negative. The bad news: While cases of TB are dropping slightly nationally, California continues to have the highest rate of TB in the nation. Over half of these cases involve foreign-born patients. The Mexican and Filipino communities have the first and second highest incidence of TB in the state of California. The good news: Most people don’t have active TB disease, and inactive TB, known as latent TB, is not contagious. The symptoms we normally associate with active TB are cough, fatigue, fever, night sweats and weight loss. A chest X-ray with positive lab cultures can diagnose pulmonary TB, but TB can also spread to other areas of the body, including lungs, nervous system, lymph nodes, heart and kidneys. A good case in point is the patient in his 50s who came to me with blood in his urine. When all the tests were completed, he was found to have TB in his kidney system. He had been exposed to TB as a child, and the TB was reactivated at a later stage in life. This is a rare case, and screening for TB is the best way to keep your family healthy. The most common test is a skin test, which indicates exposure to TB but not necessarily active TB. Unfortunately, a large number of immigrant adults are already positive due to past vaccinations or past exposure. If you have always been negative on the TB screening, a new positive skin test conversion requires immediate action. There are treatment programs for people with active TB and people with positive skin tests, and our health system requires that people with TB take antibiotics. The best news is that nearly all people who take their medications as prescribed will be cured. For those who are known to be positive for latent TB and not newly diagnosed, a very recent chest x-ray showing no active infection is normally all that is needed to get clearance for your school or employer. Here is what you can do to join in the effort to rid our nation of TB. Get screened for TB. Be prepared to go over a health questionnaire as part of your TB screening If you are given a skin test, make sure you will be able to have it read by the clinic 48-72 hours later Get a same-day chest X-ray if you have had a positive reading in the past. If your doctor decides to start you on medication for a new positive skin conversion, make sure you take your medicines as instructed for the duration. Report any serious side effects to your doctor. Take lab tests as directed by your doctor Finally, learn as much as you can about this treatable disease. One good source of information is Kaiser Permanente’s Web site: |
MapmyIndia is an interactive map portal which endeavors to make people “location-aware” about India, by answering three location-based questions: where is a place, how to get to that place, and what is around that place. We try to make it as easy as possible for an internet user to get these answers. The location search [Figure 1, (r)] on the MapmyIndia homepage allows users to search for any place in India, right from a state to a city to a village to a street or locality in a city. As of now, MapmyIndia offers street-level details (i.e. locality, street and places within a city) for about 30 major cities in India. More and more cities are being added all the time. Once a user enters the information, he is able to see his desired location on a highly detailed, interactive map. Now the user can zoom in and zoom out i.e. see the map at a highly detailed level (up to street level in major cities), or at a low detail level which shows more area (like state and country levels which show those entire regions on the map). The user can also pan i.e. scroll left, right, up and down to see more areas beyond what the current map view shows, similar to how one scrolls up and down a Web page. The map and routes feature [Figure 2, (below)] allows users to see the map between any two places, see all possible routes on the map, and also for limited circuits, get step-by-step directions. We will be offering more and more circuits and intra-city routes as time passes. 
Finally, MapmyIndia makes it easy to instantly see on the map of any area, restaurants, hotels, airports, hill stations, beaches etc. with details. This is called the category search [Figure 3, below] which can be accessed on the right side of the maps.
Even businesses have a lot to gain from instant internet mapping technology such as what MapmyIndia offers. Displaying one’s location on an interactive map can lead to a manifold increase in everything from quality of customer service (imagine a bank that can easily tell its customers where its nearest branch is, and how to get there) to radically increasing physical sales (a hotel located in a prime location can best show this on a detailed, interactive map, which gives visual perspective to an online visitor). Thus, the MapmyIndia business model is based on solutions we offer to businesses that can benefit from having their locations displayed on an interactive map. Any business / hotel / institution can display its location on an interactive map, through a link present on their Web site, called Maplink. For large chains, such as banks /ATMS/hotels, MapmyIndia provides them the technology and product to show all their locations on a searchable, interactive map right from their website, called the enterprise/store Locator. Finally, MapmyIndia will be providing business listings, a location-based Yellow Pages, that helps users see for example, what all restaurants are in an area of New Delhi, and where exactly each of these are. Businesses prosper by being able to instantly show their online as well as physical location.
