Features

Sometime in the late-1990s, just months after Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai won two major international beauty pageants, a fashion consciousness started taking shape. For the uninitiated as also for common people, this was reckoned to be the turning point for Indian fashion. But the more discerning and the more aware know for certain that none of this would have been possible had the fertile ground not been laid another ten years earlier through a rather low-key initiative of the Indian...

There are natural disasters, and there are those that are man-made. The ones usuallly most catastrophic are natural disasters that are compounded and accentuated by man-made factors. When Mumbai was ravaged by just 900mm of rain over a 24-hour period leading to almost 450 fatal casualties, one might have thought that planners and policymakers would have sat upright and taken note of the ecological degradation in their own backyards: that of the wetlands both within the city limits as well as...

In September this year, German testing and certification giant TÜV SÜD announced its entry into the advisory domain for textile manufacturing in India to, as the organisation claimed, drive product innovation, process and production management across the textile value chain from fibre to garment. Sooner or later, the global industry leader had to enter the Indian market. The reasons were put in succinctly by the Senior Vice-President (Consumer Product Services) of TÜV SÜD South Asia, Suresh...

The drop in oil prices and the overall demand downturn has been taking a toll for a while now, and the numbers that were announced by the ministry of commerce in September were discouraging: India's overall exports declined 20.7 per cent to $21.3 billion in August compared to the corresponding month last year. Textiles exports too shrank by about 7.3 per cent to $1.28 billion in August. The textiles industry, like 22 other sectors which have declined, has reasons to worry. During September...

Early this summer, a couple of incidents threw the issue of Bangalore’s lakes back into the limelight. Not that they ever deserved to fade away from the headlines, but a couple of bizarre happenings at two lakes, and an order from the National Green Tribunal (NGT) over unauthorised constructions has since ensured that the issue does not disappear all over again, as many lakes themselves have. Buried and gone Close to 50 major lakes have lost their character due to developmental activities, some...

There is a supply chain management (SCM) axiom that says that it is all about having the right product in the right place at the right time at the right price. Competition has ensured that manufacturing keeps pushing the bar in productivity and efficiency, and marketing becomes more aggressive and precise. Today, survival depends considerably on how much a company is able to streamline it all – from the beginning till the end. It’s a lot about logistics. Logistics is defined in Wikipedia as “the...

In mid-2015, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) carried out a well-publicised event in New York city’s Times Square. It crushed seized ivory items weighing one ton (equivalent to 2000lbs or 907kg), as crowds cheered on and photographs with the hashtag #CrushIvory flooded Twitter. Then came the post-event rhetoric about how “we’re not just crushing ivory; we’re crushing the blood ivory market.” It would seem illegal ivory trade had already come to a grinding halt. The New York event...

The annual odyssey of migratory birds is unique, spectacular, fascinating. It is also fraught with danger, not just from poachers and hunters and the new threat called climate change, but from us too – people who wouldn't want any harm to come to these creatures. The newest nemesis for these birds is our insatiable need for energy. Hundreds of thousands of birds die annually from electrocution the world over, and tens of millions of birds from collision with power lines alone. Just as the...

It's getting better; maybe marginally, but better nonetheless. The global apparel industry is expected to grow at 3.5 per cent. The rate of growth will be the same as that last year, marking a leisurely but steady recovery process. In 2013, the industry had grown at 3 per cent, and 2.5 per cent the previous year. The period between 2008 and 2011, during the peak of the global downturn, had seen the growth rate of the industry dwindling to a paltry 1 per cent. The worst, on the face of it, is...

News about solar and wind energy have been making headlines over the past few months. And not because renewable energy is a focus area of the present government in India, but because it’s a need-based practice that is fast catching on at the global level. There are reports of cities meeting most of their energy demands through solar/wind energy, and there are examples of governments making a push for renewable energy at the policy level. It is not that climate change has suddenly become the top...