Anil Ambani recently made a presentation to a select group of investors, laying out ambitious plans for the group’s future. An interesting aspect of his presentation was the forceful declaration that he, obviously in contrast to his older sibling, does not draw a salary from any of his group companies and his compensation would be based on their profits and market price. He also said that none of the companies has any cross-holding or related party transactions. About the ADAG group’s prospects, he said, Reliance Communication’s (R-Com) 777 scheme had successfully sold a million handsets priced at Rs 1,234 in a week and is now pitching for a subscriber base of a whopping 100 million. Indeed, R-Com has also cleaned up the billing mess that it inherited during the demerger. Reliance Tower and Flag Telecom, which already have 11,000 telecom towers, plan to install another 20,000 in a single year. He also painted a bright future for the power sector, saying that India will be gas surplus in the next three to five years, at which time it has an opportunity to become the lowest cost producer of fertilizer and power in the world. If the long-term pricing of gas were in the region of 3.2 mmbtu, India could generate gas-based power at Rs 2/unit.

Cracking down

Business imperatives are finally forcing Yahoo!, Google and other networking sites to drop their rigid defence of free expression on the Internet. Networking sites, which are the most “happening” meeting ground for today’s youth, usually refuse to interfere with hate campaigns or sexually explicit postings and also have a long process of dealing with abuse. Only China has succeeded in arm-twisting them to toe its line. MySpace, a social networking site, has recently been forced to drop its rigid stance. Mark Huffman of ConsumerAffairs.com says that it agreed to remove “thousands of convicted sex offenders from its membership rolls” after a stiff letter from several US state attorney generals. It did this by cross-checking the list against a national database of 600,000 persons convicted of sex-related offences. MySpace, however, insisted that it would hand over information about individuals removed from the list, only if the police produced a warrant. Meanwhile, it is facing lawsuits by the parents of several young girls who were sexually assaulted by MySpace members. There were 100 such assaults in 2006. In India too, networking sites have realised the importance of cooperating with the police. For instance, Orkut has nominated an official to liaise with the Mumbai cyber-crime cell after violence had erupted over a couple of hate campaigns. Clearly, businesses find it easier to recognise the need to circumscribe individual freedom when it threatens to hurt the bottom line.

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