Continued rise in business productivity and competitiveness of Indian economy is likely to inflate incomes in the country by almost three times over the next two decades, according to a latest McKinsey study.

The rising income levels would lift 291 million people out of poverty and create a 583 million strong middle class in the next two decades, a report from McKinsey Global Institute reveals.

If India maintains the growth momentum over the next 20 years, income levels would almost triple, it added.

"Average real household disposable income will grow to Rs 3,18,896 (a year) by 2025 from Rs 1,13,744 in 2005," the global consultancy firm said.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com

Microsoft Corp has intensified its pursuit of a deal to take over Yahoo Inc, asking the company to re-enter formal talks, the New York Post reported on its Web site on Friday.

While the two companies have held informal deal talks over the years, the latest approach signals a new urgency on Microsoft's part, the paper said, citing unnamed sources.

The approach follows an offer Microsoft made to buy Yahoo a few months ago, the Post reported, but Yahoo spurned the advances.

The Post said Wall Street sources put a roughly $50 billion price tag on Yahoo.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com

If working women want to know about the conditions prevailing at their workplace and whether they are being discriminated vis-à-vis their male colleagues, here is a website created and maintained by experts from the country’s three top institutes, including the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. The website gives them, among other things, a chance to learn about whether the salary they draw falls short of the salary they should be getting and understand why this gap prevails.

Developed as a tool for cross-country research on the condition of women at workplace, the website, www.womenpaycheck.com, provides contents that unravel how working women in the country are being discriminated on the basis of their wage structure and promotion. Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Information Technology Professionals Forum are the other institutes that are collaborating on a joint research project detailing condition of working women and their pay and promotional prospects.

“The effort is to bring transparency regarding information related to women workforce. Women have to negotiate several things at the workplace and many of them have to lose out on various counts. Through the website we are trying to build up a data bank that will highlight the condition of women professionals in the country so that the gender issue is scientifically tackled,” said Biju Varkkey, professor with the Personnel and Industrial Relations Area at IIM-A.

Among other things, the website also details on the protection offered by Indian laws when it comes to sexual harassment at workplace. It also attempts to reveal whether like European countries, working women in India also prefer male bosses to female. The website will publish web contents on the nature of gender discrimination and the amount of wage gap of men and women employees after gathering data through an online questionnaire .

The questionnaire will also help researchers gather data regarding their career growth in an organisation and the impact of maternity leave on their career growth, among other things.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com