Walk into the third floor corner office of Pramod Bhasin, president and CEO of Genpact, and a partly-hidden framed set of pictures of over 50 colleagues attracts attention. All of them, including the women, have donned fake thick moustaches and a mole on their left cheeks. The frame has telling caption: I want to be like Pramod Bhasin. Bhasin, embarrassed a visitor has spotted the frame, carefully hidden behind another frame, rolls his eyes animatedly.

The goofy visage behind the slight frame belies the hard-as-nails drive behind the 54-year-old, who is credited priming a fledgling back office gig of General Electric when the concept of business process outsourcing was still gobbledegook into a $500 million independent enterprise, which is Genpact today.

Nippon Paint has confirmed that they are planning to establish their bases in the Indian cities of Chennai and Gurgaon.

The company added that they expect these plants to be commissioned in the first quarter of 2008.

This would make India the 16th country to have Nippon manufacturing units. Nippon wants to have a presence in the Indian market considering it is growing at an impressive pace and there is a lot of room to grow in the near future.

Nippon Paint is planning to invest Rs 80 crore in the next two years and would initially sell only a few products from their globally available range. They are aiming at appointing 50 exclusive dealers in South India and would expand further in stages.

ATS Infrastructure Ltd, which operates in the Noida-Greater Noida region, is one of the few companies in the NCR whose projects have an ICRA-Naredco rating. In an industry where developers take pride in the number of projects they have launched, ATS does only a few projects, but delivers them on time before going on to the next project. In this interview with Sanjay Kr Singh, Getamber Anand, MD of ATS, says what would appear like heresy to the developer community: a correction is round the corner, and SEZs are not a real estate opportunity.

Whats the situation in the Noida property market?
Prices in Noida today range from Rs 3,000-3,500 per sq ft. Rs 4,000 per sq ft is the price for ready-to-move-in property. Over the past one year, prices have risen by about 30-35 per cent. Now prices have stabilised.

Have they fallen?
No, they have not fallen, but there is no visible rise at present.

Is the Noida market for land and built-up property over-priced?
In the NCR the top two areas are Gurgaon and Noida. Noida is still more reasonably priced than Gurgaon.

Nippon Paint, a Japanese paint and coatings manufacturer, will invest about Rs 160 crore to set up two manufacturing units in India.

Proposed at Chennai and Gurgaon, the units will start production from 2008 and will cater to the decorative and automotive paint segments. Both units will have a minimum capacity of 20,000 tonnes and will have facilities to scale up to 40,000 tonnes, according to a company press release.

Besides catering to the Indian market, the units may also export, primarily in South Asia where Nippon Paint does not have a manufacturing unit.

Ideally, you should have bought a plot or apartment in Gurgaon in the mid or late nineties. If you woke up to Gurgaons potential after 2002-03, prices were already rising and soon skyrocketed beyond the affordability level of many buyers.

Now, you might get a second shot at owning a property in Gurgaon. A new integrated masterplan for Gurgaon and Manesar was published on July 11, 2006. Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) has allowed one month for the public to file its objections, after which the masterplan will be notified.

Whereas the old masterplan encompassed an area of 9,881 hectares, the new one covers 33,726 hectares (3.4 times the previous area). To the existing 57 sectors, 58 new sectors have been added. These will be developed by 2021, and are expected to house a population of 37 lakh.

New Delhi : DRIVING down the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway at night is going to be a different experience, once the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) is through with its project.

The expressway, with world-class powerful lighting, double the illumination level of any highway in the country, will open for commuters in phases by the end of this year.

Twenty-metre-high octagonal poles and 1,000-watt light fixtures, all imported from Dubai, are being installed at present. These are being used for the first time in India on any highway, said officials of JPDSC, the company in charge of the Rs 20-crore project.

New Delhi : Real estate firm GTM Builders and Promoters Ltd is targeting a revenue of Rs 500 crore in the next three years from eight projects that the company is presently developing in five different cities, which includes a hub of educational institutes in Jaipur.

We are developing eight real estate projects at present. We are targeting a revenue of Rs 500 crore during next three years from these projects, companys vice chairman cum managing director Tushar Kumar told reporters.

However, he refused to comment on the investment that the company would be infusing to develop these projects.

The company, which posted a turnover of Rs 30 crore in 2005-06, has two projects each in Jaipur, Dehradun, Kashipur (Uttaranchal) and one each in Gurgaon and Nainital.

Capital-based firm is developing a hub of educational institutes in Jaipur in 1.36 lakh sq ft of area.

CHANDIGARH : Security at the swank Gurgaon malls in Haryana will be beefed up in the wake of the recent blasts in Mumbai as authorities feel these shopping plazas could be soft terror targets.

A direction to this effect has been issued by the district magistrate, Gurgaon, after authorities have found that the malls lacked adequate security.

Stating this here on Friday, an official spokesman said security guidelines had been issued under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, for all shopping malls and multiplexes in Gurgaon.

He said closed circuit televisions would be installed at entry and exit points of malls, and the tapes preserved for at least a month. Control rooms, also to be set up, are to have direct connectivity with the area police and district police control rooms.

Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) Managing Director (Rpt) Managing Director E Sreedharan today said that the corporation was not in favour of having a monorail in the national capital.

We are not in favour of having a monorail in the national capital as it would not be feasible, Sreedharan told reporters on the sidelines of a CII seminar on mass rapid transit system here.

The Delhi government had proposed to set up a monorail system in view of the forthcoming 2010 Commonwealth Games to be held in the national capital.

Sreedharan said that a monorail system would not be able to take in a large amount of traffic as is being expected during the games.

The proposed monorail system was to cover around 60 kms across Delhi and was to serve as a feeder for the Delhi Metro.

Rs 1,800-cr expressway to transform rural areas like Jhajjar, Sonepat into industrial hubs.

After Gurgaon, the next big boom in Haryana is around the corner. This time, the Rs 1,800-crore Kundli-Manesar-Palwal expressway that may perhaps be the largest single road contract awarded in the country will be the trigger.

Once the by-pass is constructed, rural areas like Jhajjar, Sonepat and Rohtak will get transformed into industrial hubs.

In a decade, Jhajjar will become another Gurgaon, said Haryana State Industrial Development Corporation (HSIDC) spokesperson Jeevan Bhardwaj.

The corporation has awarded the contract to DS Constructions on a BOT basis and the concession period is 23 years and nine months. The project is expected to be completed in 2009. The expressway route is Kundli-Sonepat-Bahadurgarh-Jhajjar-Gurgaon-Faridabad-Palwal.