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Eric Bellman's intervew with Rajiv Lall, chief executive officer of Infrastructure Development Finance, India's largest infrastructure financing company. Lall says the conditions are right for power development to be the next telecom of India's growth story, with some of the same impact that telecom has had bringing mobile phones to hundreds of millions of people in India. IDFC expects 20% growth in net profit in 2010 and 30% in 2011.

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India is an attractive place for foreign investors with the country moving up 23 places in the ease of doing business rankings of the World Bank. Growth is faster than China since 2015, and GDP is expected to double to $5 trillion by 2030, according to government think tank NITI Aayog. Corporate deal making from foreign investors exceeds that in China. Mergers and acquisitions targeting Indian companies reaching a total of $93.7 billion in 2018, up 52% from last year, according to Dealogic. Overseas purchases were $39.5 billion for India in 2018 compared to $32.8 billion for China. In comparison to China where trade tensions are increasing, India under the Modi government has improved the ease of doing business- implementing a new bankruptcy code, easing foreign direct investment rules, introduced a nationwide goods and services tax to replace a hodge podge of taxes in different states. In the consumer sector Unilever NV made purchase of a malted drink brand Horlicks from GlaxoSmithKline PLC as part of a $3.75 billion deal. Softbank led a $1 billion investment in OYO Hotels. In infrastructure Tata Steel made a $8.3 billion acquisition of steelmaker Bhushan Steel. Reliance Jio's aggressive push in mobile with low prices is leaving the telecom industry ripe for mergers and consolidation- Bharti Infratel acquired Indus Towers for $6.5 billion. Closely held family companies are also selling out their controlling stakes. ...

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China's efforts to promote trade with India. Visit by Premier Wen to New Delhi. Deals made include a loan from China Development Bank to help Reliance ADA group purchase power-producing equipment from Shanghai Electric Group Company. The two companies signed a $10 billion agreement in October 2010 for Reliance to buy power equipment. India sells mostly commodities such as iron ore and imports Chinese power and telecom equipment and manufactured goods at this stage. Trade estimated at $60 billion is tilted in China's favor because of cheaper manufactured goods imported from China. Premier Wen calls for expanding trade emphasizing the advantages of combining China's strengths in engineering and infrastructure with India's strengths in information technology and pharmaceuticals. His point: the 21st century is the Asian century, and both India and China can make great achievements. India sees the advantages of using China's strengths and cost competitiveness in telecom, power and other areas as it seeks to boost its development of infrastructure. Wen's visit follows visits by the UK's Cameron, US's Obama, France's Sarkozy, all pursuing trade and investment with India....

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Continuity and stability mark the choices for the new cabinet in India of PM Modi. Retaining their Ministries are-Jaishankar at the Foreign Ministry, Nirmala Sitharaman at Finance Ministry , Amit Shah at Home Ministry, Rajnath Singh at Defense, Narendra Modi at Atomic Energy and Space Agency and the Personnel, Public Grievances Pensions Ministry, Also continuing are Nitin Gadkari at Roads, Transport and Highways, Piyush Goyal the Commerce Ministry. Prahlad Joshi formerly in parliamentary Affairs is now at the New and Renewable Energy Ministry plus the Consumer Affairs, Food public distribution ministry. Hardeep Singh Puri retains the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Sa Newcomers to Cabinet-Shivraj Singh Chouhan three term Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh in central India is the new Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Ministry a critical ministry in a still rural country. Ram Mohan Naidu (TDP &NDA Andhra Pradesh) is the new Aviation Minister Jyotirao Scindia was placed with the Telecom Ministry. Kishan Reddy was given the Coal and Mining Ministry. Lalan Singh close associate of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is the new Fisheries, Animal Husbandry, Dairying and of Panchayati Raj village local government. Sarbananda Sonowal is new Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways with the job of building modern shipping logistics for exports in the way China has done. Ram Vilas Paswan from Bihar at the Ministry of Food Processing. ...

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Swaminathan Iyer in the Times of India looks at the Hindenburg report from another angle. It brings a sort of self-discipline at a crucial time for the Adani enterprises in coal, renewable energy, ports and logistics. By taking note of the criticisms where Adani enterprises can benefit from scaling down the level of debt it puts the company in a better situation for the future. After two decades of breakneck expansion it provides the kind of pause needed to rationalize the entire business operation and put it on a stronger basis. As Iyer points out the Adani and Ambani story in ports logistics and telecom show a delivery of results that few other companies were willing to do. It is this kind of endeavor that made it possible for China to build a large economy over two decades. This also requires companies to take stock of the situation and impose self discipline and the measure of their future success depends on how they meet situations such as these where they are being tested and weak areas that need attention become apparent. ...

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The Comptroller and Auditor General of India's investigation into the issue of 2008 telecom licenses shows that this was mismanaged, leading to a loss of $39 billion in revenue for the Indian government.

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IBM in the Indian IT services market. How it is winning buisness in the Indian telecom market. Latest addition Vodafone. It has Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular. It has Delhi International Airport, Apollo Hospitals, and DLF. IBM plans to invest $6 billion to set up infrasructure, hire more employees and build up education and training.

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A potato farmer in the Himalyan foothills is able to buy his first refrigerator using his Jio smartphone, even though he lives in a remote part of  India with no paved roads or indoor plumbing. Jio is the company founded by Reliance Industries head Mukesh Ambani, that is changing the way India shops and how it accesses the internet. Jio brings 4G technology to India and dramatically brings down data prices. To do this Reliance used its past success in executing big projects. It was designed to be a network that reached 18,000 cities and towns, and 200,000 villages, some lacking electricity, requiring 200,000 cell towers and 150,000 miles of high tech fiber optic cable. The project is now essentially completed, according to the company. This may be the biggest one it has tackled. Starting in polyester yarn and textile business, and in oil refineries, the company sought to diversify into digital platforms to compete with the likes of Google and Netflix. Ambani sees Jio not as a telecom business but as a digital platform and plans to use it to sell advertising, sell content, and financial services, also selling high speed broadband services. Ambani's project was designed to give India the opportunity to leapfrog into 4G and high speed internet and do this along with expanding the access through lower prices in the market to reach millions of people in remote regions of India including rural areas. Low cost access to data helps level the playing field between the rich and the poor. There are about 390 million internet users in India, penetration of 28%. This is now changing rapidly as prices drop - the potato farmer who bought his first fridge did this on his phone, connecting online with Jio which built a tower nearby that beamed nearly unlimited 4G data for about $2.10 a month. Jio has now signed up 215 million subscribers with its low cost service. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone are larger competitors but it is Jio that has revolutionized the market in India, and which now enables companies like Amazon to use the new 4G services to build its retail online business.   ...

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The first year of the Modi administration in India brings a sense of moderation to high expectations following the election, considering the many problems that need to be tackled. It also brings some help in the form of lower oil prices coming at a critical time for the Indian economy, which is overly dependent on oil imports. This enabled the government to cut fuel subsidies and control its budget deficit. By April 2015 inflation declined to 4.87%. Foreign direct investment increased by 25% to $28.8 billion in 2014-2015 fiscal year. Major steps include deregulating prices of diesel, petroleum and cooking gas, increasing foreign ownership limits for defense and insurance sectors to 47%, and opening 125 million new bank accounts for poor households. Coalfield leases and telecom spectrum allocations which suffered from lack of transparency and sold at low prices under the previous administration were reallocated in a transparent process.

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Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd. has agreed to acquire Infotel Broadband Services Pvt. Ltd. Infotel earlier won the rights in a government auction for wireless broadband space. Mukesh returns to telecom industry after 5 years now that the agreement with the Anil Ambani Reliance ADA Group not to enter each others sectors has been scrapped. Reliance ADA, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Essar are focussed on the 3G broadband serivices. With Infotel Mukesh Ambani makes a entry into 4G or fourth generation services. He sees this as an opportunity to push India in an accelerated pace into the digital world, and it will require large scale investment of a kind that he has made in the past using the latest technologies. The Indian government raised $8.23 billion in this auction. Infotel agreed to pay $2.74 billion for its nationwide bandwidth, Qualcomm won rights in 4 regions for $1 billion, Bharti agreed to pay $720 million for 4 areas, and Aircel $747 million for eight areas. ...

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The slow pace of internet broadband access in India with introduction of 3-G services coming in 2011.

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India's Supreme Court criticizes Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for failing to respond for more than a year to a request to investigate allegations about improper awarding of telecom licenses. Telecom licenses were sold by the government in 2008 to politically connected companies, at rates far below the market rates. The Auditor General's report showed that licenses were awarded in a way that "lacked transparency and fairness."

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Much of the information Friedman says comes from Ruchir Sharma could be seen through simple observation. By the time it is written about so much has already happened. For example Tech firms crowding out innovative new firms starting from scratch is happening since 2000, from the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. By the time the concept makes it into the economics textbooks many years later it is obsolete. In economics textbooks of the eighties crowding out referred to governments crowding out private firms in the competition for capital. Concepts of comparitive advantage in economics textbooks were similarly obsolete when Japanese and Chinese competition in the last three decades brought into play a very different model of competition of subsidized private and state run companies focussed on dominating key industries that never made it into textbook economics and theories of experts. Comparitive advantage theory in textbooks were too simplistic not able to account for real life situations in which a determined national competitor could move up the ladder every few years in sophistication and technology to compete in products at many levels. The old textbooks simply said Portugal would make wine because it had some advantages and America with its advantages in steel production would make steel. This kind of theory put many people to sleep as other nations took over American markets- first steel, then electronics, then telecom, and then renewable energy. To protect American workers Robert Lighthizer and other American negotiators of trade with China, Japan, South Korea, used their own head and observation of what was happening. This was a better guide to the best response to protect American workers. Doing what makes sense, doing what works for final delivery point to the intended beneficiary, the American worker, or European worker, or Indian worker, provides a better way to get things done.   ...

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About 500 million smartphones are expected to be sold in China in 2015, according to IDC. Xiaomi has gained a firm foothold in China among young people and a fan base similiar to the way Apple is seen in the U.S. The next phase of growth is in countries where there is still room to grow with a large number of people without smartphones. Founder Lin Bin is a former Google executive. He has hired another Google employee Hugo Barra to plan the next stage of expansion overseas. He says Xiaomi will continue to focus on areas other than Europe and the U.S. where there are weak telecom carriers. Xiaomi's pricing model is based on selling quality smartphones with many features at lower prices. In the U.S. and Europe where large service providers offer large subsidies to users of smartphones Xiaomi cannot compete because its pricing advantage disappears. This means taking on the market in places such as India, Indonesia and Brazil where there are many people looking for a smartphone at a smaller price. One obstacle is that Xiaomi has few patents, and competitors are likely to mount paten challenges in these markets. In India, the second largest market, Ericsson has mounted a patent challenge leading to a court order suspending sale of Xiaomi phones. Xiaomi's strengths in China lie in savvy use of the internet and media to market its phones, using some of the methods used by Apple. ...

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President Goodluck Jonathan as "Mr. Clean" aroused many of the same hopes now aroused by the election of Buhari as president of Nigeria. Under Goodluck Jonathan Nigeria's foreign reserves declined from $50 billion to $33 billion, and there is $1 billion in the sovereign wealth fund. About $20 billion in pilfering of state funds was reported by the Central Bank of Nigeria, but no action was taken by Jonathan. Indians may pride themselves on a better performance, yet prime minister Singh of India, seen as "Mr. Clean," allowed auctioning of telecom licenses in the second term, that had to be cancelled because of corruption. Throughout emerging markets not just in oil producing countries, poverty remains entrenched, because funds that should go into infrastructure and services are misused, which creates a disincentive for foreign investment, further adding to the problems in these countries. India and Nigeria are the two fastest growing countries in the planet, and the unspoken fear is that the demographic dividend with so many young people will be wasted by corrupt and inefficient management of the economy and resources of the two countries. The time lost in the last years of the Singh administration and the four years of the Jonathan administration will never be regained, the hopes of millions of young people are dashed again and again, and the goodwill of Europe and the U.S. eager to participate with the latest technologies in the development of the two countries, as they have done in China, is wasted....

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A detailed look and appraisal of the Tata's achievement and the vision and plans of Ratan Tata. See the Creation of Wealth a book about the Tata family and the epilogue written by Ratan Tata. And Conversations with Tata about Ratan's father Jamshedji Tata. Some of the achievements are the restructuring of Tata Steel, the acquisition of Corus, the Tata Motors Indica car and the first 1 lakh ruppee car the Nano a Ratna Tata vision coming true, the growth of Tata Consultancy in the software industry, the entry into retail, telecom, biotech, solar, and others, all meant to put Tata at the forefront of India's industrial development and to bring millions of Indians into the market economy. A lot of foresight is built into this, and now Tata believes in setting bigger goals following the example of China knowing that as India grows it will grow into Tata's larger projects. The Nano especially makes it possible to put a car in the reach of India's millions and by this way helping build a large auto manufacturing industry in India for the first time, and enlarging a number of other industries like steel. And Ratan Tata is not content with what tata achieved with the Nano, he wants Tata to reinvent the auto business. In the process of doing all this Tata has kept to its roots which is a strong social committment and a ethical foundation. Even the Jamshedpur Tata Steel restructuring was done by keeping the committments to education, health care etc for Jamshedpur. Tata is owned 66% by a charitable foundation and the ownership and management structure is designed such that even though the Tata family owns only 3% of the shares Ratan Tata manages the direction, goals and progress of the diverse companies which are independently run through management groups that oversee the companies. These management overseeing structures are the holding companies Tata Sons and Tata Industries staffs, and the Group Corporate Office headed by Ratan Tata and which has 9 senior executives who sit on the boards of the companies and act as mentors, nentoring managers and supporting corporate social responsibility values. ...

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After a general debacle the Congress party gains ony 44 seats in India's parliament, the lowest since independence in 1947. The BJP party under Modi gains 282 seats and sweeps the north, centre and west of the country, and parts of the south and east. Younger voters in overwhelming numbers voted against inept governance and corruption under the Congress led government of Manmohan Singh and party leader Sonia Gandhi.

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Restricitons on FDI facing Vodafone's acquisition of Essar in the telecom industry are likely to become a thing of the past as India is hungry for foreign investment. The latest figures are $15 billion FDI in 2006, with $6 billion in manufacturing, with a target of $25 billion in 2007. The FDI to GDP is 1.5% compared to China's decade long 3%.

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Reliance Jio launches a high speed broadband service in India with annual plans for subscribers ranging from $10 to $118 a month for speeds from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. The prices are about one tenth of prices in Europe and the U.S. In 2016 mobile network prices dropped after Reliance introduced lower pricing. The new launch provides streaming services using high speed internet. Reliance Jio is taking on telecom companies, as well as streaming platforms. It is now the largest telecom company in India with revenue of $1.6 billion in the quarter ending June 30, 2019.  The free trial offer from Reliance Jio is 100 Mbps connection free, along with Jio apps. There is a 100 Gigabyte quota, with free 40 GB at a time 24 times- a total of 1000GB free. The only charge is a refundable deposit of 2,500 rupees ($35) for the router. Giveaways include high definition or LED television  and 4K setup box. 15 million people have registered for the service. Reliance Jio is aiming for 20 million residential users and 15 million businesses across 1600 towns in India. Reliance playbook is to launch aggressively with low prices and establish a dominance in the market. It did this in 2016 with free trial offer bringing in 100 million customers in the first 6 months. Today Reliance Jio service has 340 million customers who spend 30% more than other operator's such as Airtel and BSNL.   By cutting data prices in India sharply to one tenth of world prices Jio has created a completely different market and one in which there are only 3 or 4 smaller competitors in that space. Bringing down prices for users and enabling India to jump ahead in internet use in ways similar to that of South Korea, Finland, China.   ...

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India has reduced imports of oil from Iran from 12% in 2011 to about 9% by the end of April, 2012. A senior state department official from the U.S., Carlos Pascual, will be in India in mid May 2012 to assess the energy situation and see what specific energy facilities in India need to do. Some of the refineries in India are designed to handle only the kind of heavy oil Iran supplies. For the U.S. the issue is keeping up the pressure on Iran during the talks in Istanbul, Turkey, on Iran's nuclear program. For India it has the vital trade and economic relationship with the U.S. balanced against cultural ties to the region and the need for oil supplies.