Indo-pak Match tickets in Black

NEW DELHI: When all eyes are on the India-Pakistan semifinal clash, cricket fans at Mohali complain about the unavailability of tickets at the counters on Sunday.

The fans are angry and allege that the tickets are now being sold at a high price in the black market.

However, there have been numerous reports of a thriving black market in tickets with prices rocketing so that a 5,000-rupee ticket was being sold for as much as 25,000 rupees.

"For a match as big as this one, we cannot do anything about black market tickets," said PCA joint secretary GS Walia.

"As far as we are concerned, we only gave the tickets to those who stood in the queues and bought them. We cannot keep track if they sell these in (the) black (market)."

Salary hike for Wipro Employees

BANGALORE: IT major Wipro said that it has completed some organisational changes it had planned and has assured employees of its IT business salary hikes across the board.

"The operating plan for the businesses has been completed. Continuing our design principle on having a single axis, we took advice from an external strategy consulting firm to finalise how to goal service lines and business units. This is now ready and will be shared with the leadership teams by next week," TK Kurien, the new CEO, said.

"A cross-functional team is working on the data review and structure finalisation to migrate all our data to the new organisation structure by middle of April," he added.

He also said that he would update the employees on the timing for salary increase process for the IT business by the first week of April.

In a bid to catch up with peers and improve its topline growth which has been lagging peers, the company had announced during its third quarter results that it will align itself to create a "bolder, simpler and leaner" organisation.

Wipro discarded its joint CEO model and appointed Kurien as the sole CEO earlier this year.

A Short interview with the Living Legend Warren Buffett

BANGALORE: On the second day of his India trip on Wednesday, Warren Buffett was a busy man, having a brief chat with the Karnataka CM before a factory visit to the only Buffett investment in India, TaeguTec India, a high-end tooling company. After pounding the shop floor, addressing employees and planting a sapling, it was time for a meeting with city CEOs. Before leaving for Delhi, the 'Sage of Omaha' spoke exclusively to TOI. Excerpts.

Q. We noticed that when you were planting the tree, there was a different Warren Buffett, different from the persona of an investor or a philanthropist. You seemed to open up in a different way.

A. Well, I like to think that I open up even otherwise (laughs). But part of life is to plant trees that other people will sit under. Somebody planted a tree for me long ago in the form of an educational institution and I sat under that tree, metaphorically. The same happened in one area after another in my life.

Q. The chairman of Infosys, Narayana Murthy, talks of compassionate capitalism. Is philanthropy going to be the compassionate side of capitalism?

A. I think philanthropy should be part of humanity. I don't relate it to capitalism or to business. When you have everything that you possibly could need yourself and other people need what you have that is of no use to you and has enormous use to them, I think you need to do something about it.

Q. Philanthropy till now largely has been an individual effort. As it becomes bigger, it might become an institutional effort with its own systems, processes, checks and balances. Will it take away from the spontaneity of the individual effort that it is today?

A. No, I don't think so. What we are encouraging is more individual effort. We are not asking people to join us or to give to what we believe in. We are encouraging people to enjoy giving and do it their own way. They can do it when they want, with whom they want. Maybe they can learn from each other. I have learnt from other people I have met. It's not designed to centralize anything. It's designed to encourage people individually and in their families to do the things we found so enjoyable.

Q. In India, the greatest potential is in the infrastructure sector. Would you be looking at gas, power, steel, utilities in general for investment? You did say on Tuesday that you would look at making one big investment a year in India.

A. I would like to make a big one, but it will have to be in a field that I understand. A company in which I have a good feeling about where it will be in 5/10 years, competitively.

Q. From what we have read, gut instinct plays a large role in your investment decisions. Many investors like to kick the tiles, go to the shop floor to see if an investment makes sense. Are you that kind of an investor?

A. No, I look at the people who run it. I would not know what to do if tomorrow morning you make me in charge of a plant (laughs). But I do know who should be in charge of it.

Q. Your only investment in India so far is in Bangalore-based TaeguTec. Would you future investments here be in such specialist, high-end manufacturing companies?

A. These kind of companies will do very well. But there are a whole group of companies that will do well in India. So, I will not limit my interest to something like this.

All 6 reactors at Fukushima reconnected to power lines

TOKYO/FUKUSHIMA: Japanese workers struggling to avert a nuclear disaster on Tuesday succeeded in reconnecting all six reactors to power lines at the quake-hit Fukushima plant, marking a significant progress in the tedious task of bringing the radiation-leaking complex under control.

The development came as the tsunami-hit northeast was again jolted by a series of powerful quakes, including two measuring 6.6 on the Richter Scale.

In a major relief in their efforts, engineers working overtime at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant reconnected all six reactors to external power, the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company said on Tuesday, according to Kyodo news agency.

The progress was made despite the efforts to restore power and cool down spent nuclear fuel pools being hampered by the detection of smoke at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors.

However, TEPCO cautioned that a lot of work still needed to be done before electricity can actually be turned on at the plant.

The company said workers are checking all additional equipment for damage to make sure cooling systems can be safely operated.

Authorities earlier sought the help of the US military in tackling the "extremely tough" situation at the plant, close to which highly concentrated radioactivity was detected in iodine and cesium in seawater, sparking fears about food safety.

TEPCO said the seawater pollution in the region had expanded, but the country's nuclear safety agency said there were no immediate health threats.

The amount of radioactive iodine reached 80.3-fold of the standard level at the point 8 km south of the plant and 16.4-fold at the point 16 km south, Kyodo news agency reported.

The Fukushima prefectural government denied the possibility that seafood from the area was distributed to markets saying fishing had not been conducted near the nuclear plant, where emergency workers battled to avert a widespread disaster by trying to reconnect power lines and cool overheating reactors.

The critical restoration work at the plant was stalled on Monday after smoke rose from No. 2 and No. 3 reactors, fuelling fears of fresh radiation leaks from the area rocked by the March 11 quake of magnitude 9 and devastating tsunami that left over 22,000 people dead or unaccounted for in Japan's northeast.

Firefighters and the self-defense forces (SDF) on Tuesday also managed to throw in 18 tons of seawater into the nearly boiling storage pool that is holding spent nuclear fuel. The move succeeded in cooling the pool to 50 degrees Celsius, according to TEPCO.

The pool was throwing up steam possibly carrying radioactive elements into the air.

Tata Power to build India's first floating solar plant

MUMBAI: Tata Power on Tuesday said it will be building the country's first low-cost, high-efficiency floating solar plant in partnership with an Australian company which invented the technology.

Sunengy, the Australian company, and Tata Power will begin constructing a pilot plant that uses the Liquid Solar Array (LSA) technology from August this year, a press release issued here said.

LSA uses traditional concentrated photovoltaic technology but rather than mounting the cells on a frame, it is made to float on water, making it low-cost, cyclone-proof and less tedious as it does not involve any land acquisition, it added.

"It effectively turns a dam into a very large battery, offering free solar storage and opportunity for improved water resource management," the inventor of the technology and Sunengy's Executive Director aInd Chief Technology Officer, Phil Connor, said.

Tata Power's Executive Director, Banmali Agrawala, confirmed the tie-up for the "nascent technology" and said this is a part of the company's effort to invest in clean and eco-friendly technologies.

Rumors about Dr.Abdul Kalam's Death

NEW DELHI: Abdul Kalam, Abdul Kalam death, Abdul Kalam passed way and other similar key words were among the top 20 searches on Google Trends India on Tuesday after a false rumour that the former president had passed away.

Kalam was also one of the top Twitter trends, which made its way to other social networking services.

It was A P J Abdul Kalam's advisor, Dr Hafiz Saleh Muhammad Alladin, who died on Monday night at the age of 80. It seems that some people mistook the news for the former president's death.

Russia, China call for immediate ceasefire in Libya

BEIJING/MOSCOW: China and Russia have called for an immediate ceasefire in Libya expressing concern over civilian casualties in the military strikes by allied forces in areas controlled by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

"China noticed reports of civilian casualties from the multinational military action against Libya and is very concerned with this," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a news briefing.

"We urge (the sides) to do everything to end the violence," Russia defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov told visiting US Defence Secretary Robert Gates after closed-door talks with him. He added that Moscow believed Libyan civilians had been killed in the Western air strikes.

Both the countries, along with India, Brazil, and South Africa, abstained from last week's UN Security Council vote approving international military involvement in Libya, which aims to protect civilians against Muammar Gaddafi's forces.

China is opposed to "abuse of force causing more civilian casualties".

According to reports from Libya at least 64 Libyans had been killed and 150 others wounded by the missiles and bombs fired by the foreign forces over the weekend.

The majority of Libya's civil airports and seaports were destroyed.

"The UN resolution on no-fly zone over Libya aimed to protect civilians. We oppose abuse of force causing more civilian casualties and more serious humanitarian disasters," said Jiang.