Diageo and United Spirits Finally Reach a Deal

After months of negotiations, Diageo, the world's biggest spirits company, has reached a deal with India's United Spirits.

The two companies will announce an agreement after stock markets close in India on Friday, said one person briefed on the negotiations. Britain's Diageo will buy 25 percent of United Spirits, and then make an open offer for another 26 percent of the company to gain a majority stake, per Indian market regulations, this person said.

The entire deal will be worth $1.8 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. This figure could not be immediately confirmed. Shares of United Spirits rose more than 6 percent in early trading in India Friday, anticipating the announcement.

From \'Superpower\' to \'Time for a Reboot\'

Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesA panel at the World Economic Forum on India during the World Economic Forum summit in Gurgaon, Haryana, on Nov. 7.

GURGAON â€" To understand the pall that slowing growth and seemingly paralyzed policy making has cast over business sentiment in India look no further than a panel held at an economic conference here this week: ‘‘Rebooting India.''

By contrast, two years earlier, at the same conference hosted by the World Economic Forum, the high and mighty of Indian business and government were discussing happier topics like ‘‘India: What Kind of Super power Will It Be?''

Corporate India and the country's policy makers once strode confidently across the world stage, projecting a confidence that some critics said bordered on swagger. But those days are long gone. Now, many executives and investors have turned dour and critical, mostly about the country's beleaguered public officials. And policy makers for their part are increasingly defensive and have, in turn, been criticizing the media and investors for being too negative.

The change in mood was on stark display at the Economic Forum's annual three-day conference, this year held in Gurgaon, a booming city south of New Delhi. The event, where attendance was down about 10 percent from a year ago, has long served as a place for corporate titans and top policy makers to glad- hand while giving a nod to India's problems that still need attention like weak infrastructure or inefficient judicial system.

This year t he camaraderie was visibly absent, particularly at the panel on rebooting India. Executives and government officials got into testy arguments about how economic growth had slowed from a roaring pace of nearly 10 percent before and after the financial crisis in 2008, to a projected 5.5 percent to 6 percent this year.

‘‘We are in a situation where inflation is high, there is no growth, growth has come down, we keep revising growth down and the fiscal deficit is high,'' N. Chandrasekaran, the chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest technology outsourcing company, said on the panel. ‘‘None of the things we are doing is working.''

Not so, retorted the country's newly minted law minister, Ashwani Kumar, who argued that the country was on the comeback trail and would soon prove its detractors wrong. ‘‘Through a series of bold policy initiatives, transparency in government and regulatory reforms, we will be able to get back to 8 percent growth by 2015-16,'' Mr. Kumar told the audience.

On the same panel, Mr. Kumar also fielded skeptical questions and sarcastic comments from Rahul Bajaj, whose family runs one of India's largest motorcycle producers named after the family. He criticized the government for impeding investments. And Mr. Kumar also received flak from the moderator, Shekhar Gupta, the editor of the influential Indian Express newspaper, who chided the governing Congress Party for being too hostile to foreign investors and companies.

Mr. Kumar brooked none of that criticism, saying it was the result of ‘‘negative'' media coverage. He pointed out that officials recently pushed through several changes like cuts in fuel subsidies and relaxing restrictions on foreign retailers and airlines.

But his response was a tacit admission that the government has only belatedly awoken to India's economic problems. The changes came after years of deliberation and were widely seen as an effort to forestall a downgrade of the country's debt to junk status by credit ratings agencies. Moreover, a number of other more pressing proposals including laws to modernize the insurance sector, land transactions, taxes and other areas, remain stalled in political inertia and opposition by various interest groups.

Some executives said they give the government credit for trying to push for change, especially since the current coalition of political parties in power in New Delhi does not have a majority in Parliament. But they said officials have yet to prove that they can implement their agenda, such as allowing foreign supermarkets to set up shop in India, a decision that New Delhi has left up to individual state governments.

‘‘We have to wait and see how these are taken forward,'' S. Gopalakrishnan, the executive co-chairman of the outsourcing firm Infosys, said in an interview. ‘‘The principles are announc ed, but the implementation is left in many cases to the states.''

Several executives said delays have cost India investment, especially from overseas, as many companies have chosen to focus their efforts on other countries that have better infrastructure and are easier to do business in. Anil Gupta, a management professor at the University of Maryland, said foreign direct investment as a proportion of India's gross domestic product had fallen by more than half in the last five years, to 1.6 percent, and was now much lower than in countries like China and Indonesia.

Vasant M. Prabhu, vice chairman and chief financial officer of Starwood Hotels, said while most companies he knew about were not giving up on India, many were investing elsewhere for now.

‘‘Companies have alternatives and they are not going to just sit there,'' he said. ‘‘They are going to where they can get things done. That's where India loses out.''

Still, at least one Indian executive, Vineet Nayar, said he was pleased India had slowed down because that was turning public attention to the economy, which in recent years many Indians assumed was on auto-pilot and did not require any major changes. Now, he said policy makers and opposition lawmakers would be forced to debate and outline new economic proposals ahead of national elections scheduled for 2014 because voters are increasingly anxious about the pace of job creation and high inflation.

‘‘What this is doing is it is putting the economic agenda center stage,'' Mr. Nayar, who is vice chairman and chief executive of HCL Technologies, said in an interview, adding later: ‘‘We have to go through this pain to get the large gain we are expecting.''

Still, the conference was not entirely downbeat. On Wednesday night, the government of Haryana state, home to Gurgaon, treated those attending the forum to a musical show featuring Bollywood music and Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics at a flamboyant entertainment venue called Kingdom of Dreams.

Orient Express Rejects Takeover Bid and Names New Chief

A $40 tablet, by selling in places Silicon Valley barely notices, may change the competitive landscape.

The inexpensive device is called a Ubislate 7Ci, made by a London company called Datawind. Its initial market is schools in India. After a rocky start, Datawind's newest device is a fully functioning 7-inch tablet, with a touch screen, Wi-Fi capability, a microphone and camera, a headphone jack and a USB port. In other words, pretty much everything you need to be fully functional on the Internet.

In a test, it sent e-mails, downloaded two books and a first-aid guide, took and sent pictures, and offered several games without difficulty. There is a video that shows it in action, and another that lists its internal specifications.

Every criticism a Western reviewer might have with this tablet (the keyboard is small for big American fingers, the camera resolution is low, the software has lots of ads) must also meet with the riposte, “Yeah, but…it's only $40.” For people who can't dream of owning even a first-generation iPad, it's more than enough.

“The biggest problem we have with this device is that none of the decision makers, the reviewers, or the trend setters are our customer,” said Suneet Singh Tuli, the chief executive of Datawind. “Personal computers caught on in the U.S. when the price got to about 25 percent of the average person's monthly income. In India, where people make $200 a month, that is about $50,” added Mr. Singh, who was born in India and raised in Canada.

In truth, that may not be the biggest problem Datawind faces. An early version of the product was of lesser quality. Datawind accepted more than 2.5 million orders to buy the device when it was announced, and had no capacity to manufacture at that scale. It even took money from some customers and then delayed shipment to them by up to 12 weeks, owing to manufacturing problems. The company was criticized by the media in India.

Mr. Singh says that 80 percent of the prepaid orders have now been delivered, and those customers were given a higher-end unit at no charge. If so, Datawind could regain its credibility. Its next challenge is to meet a government order for 100,000 units, destined for India's schools, by the end of the year. After that, he expects to compete in an order for five million units for schools.

Inexpensive devices are likely to come to the United States and European markets with some of the hardware costs offset by advertising or by content sales through the device. “Google's Nexus 7 tablet is $199 now, but people are saying it will be a $49 device in a year or two,” says Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner. “Content sellers will underwrite hardware costs, so that devices eventually end up being free to consumers.” Stacy Smith, Intel‘s chief financial officer, said his company expected to see such tablets, and will compete for the business.

Mr. Singh say s his cost of assembly for a Ubislate is about $37, and he sells it to the Indian government for $40. He keeps the price low by using Google's free Android operating system and cheap semiconductors found in low-end cellphones. In addition, he says, his company figured out how to make its own touch panel to fit behind the liquid crystal display screen. The LCD is still manufactured by an outside company.

Eventually, he says, the government will equip nearly all of India's 220 million students with a tablet, along with low-cost Internet connections, and that other countries will follow. Printing and distributing books costs about $15 a year even in a poor country, so a device like the Ubislate that lasts just three years and offers a bigger range of possibilities can be competitive.

Those prices are significantly less than the One Laptop per Child computer, which as of 2011 had issued more than two million machines, costing about $200 each, mostly to the developing world. Those laptops, called XO, are manufactured by Quanta Computer of Taiwan.

Big sales to schools can help underwrite the cost of a mass-market product for adults in India and elsewhere, at a slightly higher cost that is offset by ads or possibly things like phone companies offering devices to get people on calling plans.

Mr. Singh is a long way from that level of mass production, but another competitor is likely to flood the rest of the world with cheap tablets soon. That could lead to an explosion of novel applications, similar to the online car sales and recruitment business that are moving into Africa thanks to cloud computing. Datawind has sponsored an applications contest for students, which generated a point-of-sale system for street vendors, who make $100 a month or less.

Any rival would need a cheaper tablet to compete with Mr. Singh, or it could just get used to a lot of ads.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction :

Correction: October 20, 2012

An earlier version of this post misstated where Datawind's chief executive, Suneet Singh Tuli, was born. He was born in India, not Canada. He was raised in Canada.

For Seniors, a College Checklist for November

For this week's installment of The Choice on India Ink, we present our Counselor's Calendar, designed to keep students on track during the college admissions process.

We've asked Darnell Heywood and Jen FitzPatrick, the director and associate director of college counseling at Columbus Academy in Gahanna, Ohio, for admissions advice for high school seniors. - Tanya Abrams

Seniors often need to brace themselves around this time of year, when relatives all ask the same question: “So, where are you going to college next year?”

In our experience, this is the last question seniors want to hear. They want a break. They need a break. Many feel vulnerable, as this question has been posed to them hundreds of times over the last three months.

If you know a high school senior, take a pledge that you will be the person who asks about something else - anything else. That high school senior will turn into a little boy or girl again who just wants to hug you w ith their eyes. They may be approaching college in six months, but right now, they are still children in high school.

Seniors, here is your college admissions checklist for November:

Assess Your Progress Toward a Strong Finish

Finish your first semester on a strong note in the classroom. Colleges know that you often start your academic career at their institution in the same way you finished at your high school.

You should also continue to show teachers and other adults in your life that you make wise choices in and out of school and demonstrate that you are ready for the independence that you will have as a college student.

Next, place yourself into one of the following two categories:

- Not There Yet: You have procrastinated or need more time to prove yourself to colleges; it is important to recognize that college admission is within your reach.

- In the Waiting Room: You have written and rewritten essay s, requested transcripts and teacher recommendations, sent scores and perhaps completed your interviews.

Checklist for Seniors Who Are ‘Not There Yet'

It's not too late, and you're not alone. Students move through this process at different speeds, and there is not one definitive deadline for all colleges.

Please note that the only definitive deadlines are for financial aid, and you and your parents must meet these deadlines to qualify for money. If you put yourself in the camp of “not there yet,” please follow these basic instructions to complete the process:

Take Standardized Tests, Before It's Too Late

Register for the SAT or ACT before the late registration deadline passes. (Please note that some SAT test dates and deadlines have changed for students in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy.)

Request Supplemental Materials for Your Application

Request teacher recommendations and transcripts from your counselor as soon as possible. Most schools require three to four weeks advance notice to process these materials.

Complete Your College Applications

Nearly 500 colleges and universities accept the Common Application, which students can use to apply to a number of colleges and universities. You may also use your prospective college's online application by going directly to the school's Web site.

If you need help paying for applications or standardized test registration fees, ask your school counselor if your family qualifies for fee waivers.

Checklist for Seniors ‘In the Waiting Room'

You have handled the process part of the college application very well, which in so many ways shows that you are ready for the independence you will have next year. Take a moment to celebrate the work you've done. This is a milestone, and you should be proud of yourself.

If you've already hit the submit button and applications are out of your hands, this time can be wrought with anxiety as you wait to hear your fate. No matter how much you want to know the answer, you cannot speed up time; you will not know until the college releases their decisions. Some things to consider:

Keep Your Options Open

It's not too late to make last-minute additions and revisit and reaffirm the choices you've made. Now is the time to make sure you have applied to an appropriate list of colleges that will afford you choice.

Prepare Next Steps After Early Decision

If you have applied under an early decision plan, use the next few weeks to work on the applications you will file if you are deferred or denied in the early decision round. Do not submit these applications yet (you do not want to pay the fees at this point) but have them ready to go. Do not lose time because of poor planning.

Mind the Deadlines

Be aware that some colleges use Jan. 1 as a deadline. If fireworks are bringing in the New Year outside, it is really too late to be working on these app lications.

Follow Up With Teachers and Counselors

Here's a well-kept secret: teachers and counselors like school vacations, too. Most of them have been working tirelessly all semester to support your application process. Let them know before winter break if you have additional applications you'd like to submit.

Now is also a great time to thank your teachers for their support. A kind word or a note goes a long way.

You've come so far. You've done so much. You're so close to the finish line, but this process is a journey, perhaps the largest and most important school project you've ever done.

Recognize that regardless of the outcome, this process has value in and of itself. You will learn something about yourself along the way that will help prepare you for college.

Do you have any college admissions advice for seniors? Would you like to share your thoughts about the school year? Please join our discussion on The Choice.

This post wa s prepared in consultation with the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, a membership organization.

Image of the Day: Nov. 8

Strdel/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesThe Umaid Bhawan palace in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, lit up in the early hours of Thursday morning, for the birthday bash of model Naomi Campbell's boyfriend, Russian billionaire Vladimir Doronin.

For Indian-American Candidates, a Disappointing Election Day

Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressAmi Bera at his campaign office in California in this Oct. 26, 2012 file photo.

For decades, Indians have carved out successful careers as doctors and engineers in the United States.

But Tuesday's election suggests they shouldn't switch to politics.

Of six Indian-Americans, all doctors and engineers except one, who ran for the U.S. Congress, five fared poorly in the elections on Tuesday, with only one contender likely to win a seat.

Dr. Ami Bera, a Democrat and physician, looks poised to defeat the incumbent in the Seventh Congressional District of California, and become the third Indian-American to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The race is still too close to call although Dr. Bera leads by 184 votes as of Wednesday morning.

“I am running for Congress because I know it must be a place for service, not personal gain,” Dr. Bera said on his Web site. “I know things can be different. Together, we can create a more compassionate, sensible and sustainable America.”

One of the election promises of Dr. Bera, a first-generation American citizen whose parents hail from Gujarat in India, was to “save Medicare.” He was endorsed by former President Bill Clinton and the Sacramento Bee, the local newspaper.

Other Indian-American candidates were less successful.
Four Indian-Americans Democrats - Manan Tr ivedi, Jack Uppal, Syed Taj and Upendra Chivukula - lost their bid to join Congress. A fifth candidate, Ricky Gill, a small business owner and a Republican, also lost.

Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressRepublican Congressional candidate Ricky Gill, center, in Lodi, California, in this Oct. 4, 2012 file photo.

In addition to Dr. Bera, Dr. Trivedi and Dr. Taj are also physicians whose campaign promises included reforming health care. Mr. Uppal and Mr. Chivukula are engineers.

There was, however, a small win for Indians looking for a victory.

A young Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard, became the first Hindu-American on Tuesday to be elected to the House. The other two Indian Americans who have been elected in the past have not been Hindu. Dalip Singh Saund was a Sikh and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal converted to Christianity.

Ms. Gabbard, an Iraq war-veteran, is not of Indian origin but has a mother who is a Hindu.

Marco Garcia/Associated PressTulsi Gabbard, left, is congratulated by fellow Democrat Col leen Hanabusa after her election to the House of Representatives on Tuesday in Honolulu, Hawaii.

“Although there are not very many Hindus in Hawaii, I never felt discriminated against,'' the New York Daily News quoted Ms. Gabbard as saying. “I never really gave it a second thought growing up that any other reality existed, or that it was not the same everywhere.”

The two highest-profile Indian-American politicians are both Republicans and converts to Christianity: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was raised a Hindu, while South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was raised a Sikh. There are estimated to be 600,000 to 2.3 million Hindus in the United States, most of them Indian-Americans.