The language newspapers are more likely to shape important economic issues and articulate them in the vernacular media since it is the vernacular media that predominantly represents the rising 200 million middle class. This view was expressed by the governor of the Reserve Bank of India Y.V. Reddy at the council for foreign relations at New York on Saturday while sharing his views on India’s economic development in its broader social context.

Referring to the shifting balances, Dr Reddy pointed out that "so far, the discussions have percolated from the English media to the vernacular with the divide between the English media and the vernacular corresponding roughly to a socio-economic or urban rural divide." Dr Reddy pointed out that 17 leading English newspapers have a combined circulation of 6.3 million and readership of 17.9 million, while 54 leading vernacular newspapers in India have a circulation of 21.4 million and a readership of 197.2 million.

So, important issues are most likely to be articulated and shaped by the vernacular media and distilled up to the English media. Dr Reddy pointed out three issues as critical for maintaining the momentum of growth with stability, namely infrastructure, fiscal deficit and agriculture.

He said while the business class and the policy makers have been rightly agitating for the poor state of infrastructure, there are reasons to expect a "satisfactory outcome" because funding is not a serious problem. He recalled that when he mentioned this in Basle, one of the comments he got was "with miserable infrastructure India is already competitive in many areas. I should wonder what happens if the infrastructure really improves."

On the fiscal position, Dr Reddy said that the issue of power subsidies and ensuring quality and delivery of services with regard specially to education and health, need to be addressed.

He reserved his real fears for agriculture, which he said was "perhaps the most difficult."

He said that "legislative, institutional and attitudinal changes to supplement enhanced public and private investment may be needed." The RBI, he said, was redoubling its efforts in revitalising the rural cooperative credit system by strengthening regional rural banks, providing incentives to commercial banks for investments in rural economy and in mounting a study of legislation and implementation of non-institution money lending as it is the single largest source of credit to farmers.

However, Dr Reddy emphasised that the most dynamic element of reform is the mix between public and private ownership of enterprises. The rebalancing of public enterprises is not dramatic, but the entry and threat of the private sector and a diversified ownership of public enterprises through partial disinvestment meant a change in both the operating environment and internal business culture of these enterprises, which until recently had employed and retained the largest pool of the best and the brightest.

Tech Mahindra Limited, which was formerly known as Mahindra-British Telecom Limited, and is one of the global leaders in providing end-to-end IT services and solutions to the telecom industry, is planning to foray into the lucrative e-security products market.

"The company will be developing information security and identity management products. They currently have about 150 people working as e-security consultants in Mumbai. Tech Mahindra is now on an expansion drive and is planning to increase the headcount to 300 or 350. Once these people are recruited, the team will be involved in the development of e-security products. The products should hit the market in about a year’s time," said sources close to the development.

Tech Mahindra will also develop generic e-security product patches, which can be incorporated in all critical applications across all verticals. Having started its business with British Telecommunications plc. (BT), a large shareholder and one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, Tech Mahindra appears to be looking to widen its client base within the telecom ecosystem with the development of such e-security products.

"The company is trying to expand their market reach and increase their non-BT customer ratio. The company will now be competing with other global e-security players," added sources. Experts suggest that the implementation of security solutions has not kept pace with the rate of networking between organisations, resulting in misuse of data and increase in electronic exploits among corporates.

Tech Mahindra partnered with Intel to launch a "next-generation telecom solutions lab" at their Pune development centre to help develop telecom software solutions that will be hosted on Intel.
The company had also announced an alliance with VeriSign to provide end-to-end security for mobile content delivery.