‘Crescita’, the annual conference of the BIM Trichy saw speakers from various sectors sharing their perspective on issues such as currency appreciation, inclusive growth, energy requirements, supply chain establishment, financial inclusion, effective communication with target audience and talent retention.
Mr BL Ghasolia, executive director-chief corporate finance, ONGC, who inaugurated the two-day seminar, outlined the energy requirements to fuel India’s burgeoning growth. He also advocated the need to tap alternative sources of energy.
The 200+ management students who attended the seminar also tuned in to issues pertaining to specific sectors such as the retail and communication.
B Venkataramana, VP-human resources, Reliance Retail spoke about how HR had moved beyond payroll management and data entry to drawing the image and culture of an organization. “Since the traditional HR can be automated or outsourced, the focus is increasingly moving to designing retention strategies”, said Mr. Venkataramana. This was especially important in the retail sector where there are too many jobs chasing few people, he said.
Mr Alvin Saldanha, national creative director, Shobiz Integrated Marketing Communications acquainted the aspiring media planners in the audience with innovative means to capture consumer mind-share. “Increasingly, press and TV advertising are playing a support function in driving consumer traffic to the net. Consumers today are not available in the same media and spot as before”, said Mr Saldanha. Companies were leveraging blogs, social networking sites and pod casts to attract consumers.
The diverse perspectives and chunks of advice from the speakers went down well with the students who kept the speakers on their toes by shooting them with a flurry of questions after each session.
During the day, the quizzing club of BIM organized BIM Quest, a corporate quiz event. The event was sponsored by Club Mahindra and was orchestrated by Mr. Lloyd Saldanha of Grey Caps. More than 100 teams from various corporate entities around the country participated in the opening round of BIMQuest. Top six teams comprising of Bhilai Steel, TCS, GE Money, Irevna, Cambridge Solutions and Sun Microsystems made it to the finals of BIMQuest. The finals had four rounds where the business acumen of the participants was judged to the core by the quiz master. The audience was kept wired to the quiz throughout by Mr Saldanha with loads of audience questions and witty comments. The team from Sun Microsystems emerged as the winners and won a cash prize of Rs 25000. The team from Cambridge Solutions came second and got a cash prize of Rs 15000. TCS team came third and got a cash prize of Rs 10000. All the winning teams got holiday packages from Club Mahindra worth Rs 15000.
Day 2 of Crescita 2007 had started with Mr T R Ramachandran, Country Head, Cards Division of Citibank Group, an alumnus of BIM, talking about various economic and financial trends related to the banking industry and its impact on India Rising.
Mr Moorthi Chockkanathan, Senior VP, Head Delivery, Hexaware Technologies sharing his views about the role of the IT industry in India Rising and what more needs to be done in that direction to sustain the growth rate.
Ms Punitha Arumugam, Head of Madison Communications, took over the stage next and shared her views on how the Media industry, in particular the impact of media agencies in India Rising. She also spoke about the dearth of talent in this sector due to pay scale being incomparable with the BPO industry.
The afternoon session saw Mr Hariharan, Associate Director, P & G India, share his views about the economic growth in general and how to sustain it but the emphasis was on the FMCG industry. He spoke about the growth of FMCG industry in India and how the changing demographics are affecting it now and how they will affect the growth rate of the industry in the future. He also shared few points on CSR initiatives of various companies that have a huge role to play in India Rising.
During both days of Crescita 2007, Government representatives, Mr R Christodas Gandhi, I A S (Secretary to the Govt of Tamil Nadu, Social Reforms) and Mr Ashok Vardhan Shetty I A S (Secretary to the Govt of Tamil Nadu, Rural development and Panchayati Raj) applauded the efforts of India Inc for the rising growth rate but spoke about the huge gap in the increasing divide between the rich and poor. They had a common view on the industry going in for inclusive growth that benefits all sections of the society and also would help in sustaining the economic growth over a longer period of time.
All the sessions were highly interactive as the students kept shooting questions at the speakers regarding their queries. The event came to an end with the valedictory function being presided over by Mrs Pamela Ramalingam, Director, ISoft Technologies
More details on www.crescita.in