The Second Coming Of Corporates
In an important intervention recently, former BBC director James Harding said that technology was “disrupting democracy”. With the recent instances of data breach and the Internet and Facebook being used to manufacture and influence opinions, this intervention was timely. Harding said that it was incumbent upon us to see that technology doesn’t destroy democracy.
While the recent revelations have been in the context of the last US elections, questions have also been raised on whether the mainstream parties here in India used the services of many such agencies to influence public opinion. Such agencies are much in demand for constituency profiling, data bases of caste and community numbers, and their expertise in psychological profiling of voters based on their social media behaviour.
When it’s being said in India that the next election would be fought on social media, and when parties put a premium on “genuine likes” on Facebook, and attach significance to social media following, the debate on technology influencing democracy acquires greater significance.
We have brought to you multiple stories on our website as the controversy broke and we will keep focusing on this developing story.
BW Businessworld, dear readers, is known for its cutting-edge corporate coverage. In this issue we look at a conglomerate that has been in India for more than 20 years and made its dominance known in many spheres. Samsung is known for the Korean enterprise.
In this issue, we look at how Samsung has made India their second home — for instance, India has its biggest R&D centre, outside Korea. Today Samsung says that it ‘makes for India’. It’s not that it has not faced reverses — for instance, Xiaomi overtook Samsung in the smartphone space. But Samsung has grand plans for the country, with its new thrust on IoT. Associate Editor Paramita Chatterjee looks at the group’s growth trajectory, evaluates the challenges, and meets up with the group CEO, for the first Cover Story.
Our second Cover is on the problems afflicting Corporate India. We did a survey of Corporate India and found that there’s a real lurking fear of the return of inspector raj. Also, the jobs front doesn’t look promising. The Modi government has a challenge at hand.
In our third Cover, we look at the distance that India must cover to become a complete clean tech economy. The cover package anchored by Correspondent Anurit Kanti takes off from the Clean Equity conference in Monaco that he attended, and met a host of global domain experts, and raised this important question vis-à-vis India.
In our fourth Cover, we look at Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s coming of age speech at the party plenary recently and put his claims on jobs, education, and agriculture to test with current statistics.
The issue also has some very interesting in-depth reports, including a must-read interview of
M. S. Swaminathan by Correspondent Prabodh Dubey.
All in all an issue that you will thoroughly enjoy.
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