GURGAON: Increasing commercialisation of areas and ill-maintained transformers have landed Gurgaon in serious power trouble.

Sample this: DLF alone has about 300 commercial establishments in residential areas. Out of these, nearly 60 are guest houses, which at times use as many as 10 ACs. The transformers, installed way back in 1988, are unable to take this kind of load and collapse. The result: Burnt transformers and cables and power cuts that sometimes stretch to 15 hours. We have written to HUDA to take up the issue. Such premises should be sealed, said DLF City RWA president Saurabh Chawla. Rampant usage of online boosters by residents worsen the crisis. We face power cuts for about five hours daily. Residents who use online boosters have forced authorities to cut power twice a day when the water pressure builds up, said Archana Agarwal, a Phase-III resident.
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MOHALI, India - Bangalore is known to people outside of India as the place that handles customer calls from around the world, but this small Punjab town is the future for those answering.

In the past five years, more than 100,000 young Indian graduates have made the move to Bangalore, or the suburban New Delhi city of Gurgaon, to answer calls from credit card holders, make sales pitches or maintain records.

The jobs are eagerly sought with pay from 500 to 1,000 dollars a month, compared to per capita annual income in India of around 600 dollars.

But late hours far from home led to high staff turnover and companies found that a good salary was not enough to attract employees who were increasingly eager to return to small-town India.
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NEW DELHI, MAY 29 (PTI)
Rohan Bopanna will be aiming to gather the pieces and build his career all again from the scratch as he enters as the top seed in the four-week USD 25,000 ITF Satellite mens tennis circuit beginning at the National Tennis Academy in Gurgaon near here tomorrow.

Bopanna, on the comeback trail after undergoing a surgery on his serving shoulder, will be hoping to grab maximum points on offer in the circuit and push his ranking back to top-400 where once it had been.

First of all, playing tennis four weeks at any level is not going to be easy. The heat will make it that much more tough, and there are going lot more players wanting to win. I am not going to put pressure on myself. But it is going to be a great four weeks and I am looking forward to it, Bopanna, who arrived in the city this morning, told PTI.
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NEW DELHI: Theres good news for those looking to own property around Delhi. Residential property prices in Haryana have started coming down. In the past one week, prices in Gurgaon have come down by around 10%, and in towns like Sonepat and Kondli by as much as 30%.

The downturn in prices is due to a combination of factors partly because speculators are looking to book profits, thus suddenly increasing supply, and partly because the new Hooda government in Haryana is delaying change of land use for acres acquired by developers, putting their projects in jeopardy.

A senior broker said prices on Gurgaon-Sohna Road were down by over 10%, to less than Rs 2,000 per sq ft from Rs 2,300 some time back.
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Gurgaon, May 24: AS GURGAONS wait for Metro continues despite an in principle approval by the state government, the Millennium City is set to get another mass rapid transport system — the IRBT.

The Rs 2,239 crore IRBT proposal, already cleared by the NCR Planning Board, is on the verge of getting cleared by the Planning Commission after remaining in cold-storage for over two years.

The IRBT which is expected to link Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh had been stalled as the UP government refused to pay its share towards the project. But with the Mulayam Singh government giving in principle approval last week, the project for the NCR region has got the go-ahead.

In a meeting last week, Haryana government officials asked the Commission to expedite the matter as the state had cleared the proposal long back, said P.K. Mishra, member secretary of NCRPB. Work on the project will begin once the Planning Commission gives an in principle approval. We are positive about getting that soon, he added.

New Delhi, May 26 : India could become a manufacturing hub for IT hardware if Minister of State for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal has his way.

I was in New York four weeks ago and met the CEO of Cray computers. He wanted to know if his company could manufacture supercomputers in India, Sibal said Thursday on the sidelines of a function at which US giant GE and heart surgeon Naresh Trehan inked an MoU for establishing a $250 million MediCity in suburban Gurgaon.

He came here two weeks ago and we had a discussion. He said hed be back, Sibal added.
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GURGAONS shopping mall boom may have started showing signs of fatigue, but the Haryana government will allow malls to be set up in municipal areas across the state.

The Haryana government reasons that besides regulating the haphazard growth of small shops, these malls will also be a good source of revenue generation for the municipalities. The government will now be able to license out more land to private developers.

Developers, however, are a bit sceptical. Newly developed areas or roads abutting highways or important roads are the ideal location for malls. Municipal areas are generally overcrowded and laden with traffic and other infrastructure-related problems and having shopping malls there could be a dicey proposition , said N.K Sehgal, vice-president of Ansal Properties and Infrastructure Ltd.

Putting so much of an infrastructural burden on municipal areas may not be very beneficial in the long run, he added.

At a time when urbanisable land is in short supply in Haryanas flagship cities like Gurgaon, the governments move could prove critical in the long run. In Gurgaons case, for instance, the construction of shopping malls would now be sanctioned within the municipal areas, which largely comprise Old Gurgaons colonies. Till now, all the shopping malls in Gurgaon were sanctioned either in controlled areas or HUDA sectors.

More: cities.expressindia.com

Theres good news for those looking to own property around Delhi. Residential property prices in Haryana have started coming down. In the past one week, prices in Gurgaon have come down by around 10%, and in towns like Sonepat and Kondli by as much as 30%.

The downturn in prices is due to a combination of factors — partly because speculators are looking to book profits, thus suddenly increasing supply, and partly because the new Hooda government in Haryana is delaying change of land use for acres acquired by developers, putting their projects in jeopardy.

A senior broker said prices on Gurgaon-Sohna Road were down by over 10%, to less than Rs 2,000 per sq ft from Rs 2,300 some time back.

This means the price of a three-bedroom flat in the area is down to around Rs 32 lakh from around 35 lakh. Property dealers say that if the trend in Haryana persists, it could dampen prices in other NCR towns like Noida and Ghaziabad.

More: economictimes.indiatimes.com

Gurgaon : AS IF the ever decreasing footfalls were not enough, the sudden slump in the number of popular brands willing to open shop in Gurgaons upcoming malls is sending shockwaves through the builder community.

Reality checks have already started throwing up the reasons behind the malaise with many builders already going in for mid-course corrections and change in marketing strategies.

DLF, for one, seems to have realized the mistake it made by selling out the showrooms in its Mega Mall that opened in July last year. Learning from our Mega Mall experience where almost all of the outlets were sold off, almost half of the outlets in our upcoming Grand Mall will be leased out, says a DLF PR personnel. Mega Mall, that opened with DT cinemas and a food court, struggled to attract crowds because those who bought the showrooms took long to open shop.

Once an outlet is sold off, buyers take their own time to open shop and that may harm a malls overall reputation, she adds. JMD Regent Plaza, the latest shopping mall to open shop on Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, seems to be facing the same problem which DLF Mega Mall has battled ever since it started operations. Open for around four months now, Regent Plaza is struggling for footfalls with not many outlets starting operations.

Regent Malls developers are defensive. Almost half of our mall is sold out while the other half is being leased out, claims Virendra Gera, head of JMD Groups Marketing Divison.

NEW DELHI, MAY 18: Maruti Udyog is exiting the diesel car market for now by discontinuing the production of the diesel variant of Zen this month. It had recently stopped producing the diesel Esteem. Maruti Udyog sells over 500 units of Zen diesel and 100-200 units of the diesel Esteem in a month.

Marutis agreement with Peugeot of France for import of diesel engines has ended. However, the company has announced plans to manufacture 1 lakh diesel engines per annum at a new facility in Gurgaon by 2007. The last batch of 500 units of Zen diesel have rolled out this month.

Marutis absence from the diesel segment is crucial because the share of diesel segment in the passenger car market has gone up to 21% in 04-05 from 13.7% in 1999-2000. With MUVs, the overall diesel market has risen from 9% to 33%.