Australia bets on Indians to triple tourism revenue

0 Comments read Business and Trade, Travel
Gold Coast Photo Credit: © Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 14.10.2011 (Business Standard): Tourist arrivals declined by 6% in Australia after attacks on Indian students. Australia is luring high-spending Indian visitors to triple its tourism revenue from AU$820 million to AU$2.3 billion by 2020.

Australia’s image as a welcoming country suffered a setback following attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney, and subsequently tourist arrivals declined by six per cent to 17,565 in 2010. However, Tourism Australia is now determined to bring back Indian tourists to its shores.

Tourism Australia’s 2020 India Strategic Plan launched today at the annual Australian Tourism Directions Conference in Canberra aims to triple the growth of inbound Indian travellers, including students, from around 145,000 to 400,000 in the next 10 years.

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Indian firms line up for coal mining joint ventures in Australia

0 Comments read Business and Trade

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 8.10.2011 (Business Standard): High quality coal, good infrastructure, political stability and the ease of doing business has made Australia the preferred coal supplier for India, with many Indian private companies acquiring mines and setting up joint ventures to tap into the continent’s vast reserves.

“With large high-quality reserves of all coal types, Indian investment is a valuable component in the rapidly expanding Australian coal industry,” Arun Kumar Jagatramka, chairman and managing director of Gujarat NRE Coke, told this correspondent.

Gujarat NRE Coke owns and operates two hard-coking coal mines in New South Wales. It produces 1.5 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of coking coal and plans to increase it to around six mtpa by 2015. This would make the company one of the top 10 hard-coking coal producers in the world. “With rising demand for coal of all forms and the emerging supply challenges of Indonesia, India should continue to seek opportunities in Australia”, says Jagatramka.

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Veena Sahajwalla honoured for `green steel’ technology

0 Comments read Environment & Development, Health & Science
Prof. Veena Sahajwalla. Photo Credit: SMaRT@UNSW

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 30.09.2011 (Business Standard): Indian-born engineering professor, Veena Sahajwalla, whose research led to the commercialisation of a world-first “green steel” manufacturing process, has been honoured with the Nokia Innovation Award at the 2011 Telstra NSW Business Women’s Awards here today.

Sahajwalla, who is the Director at the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at The University of New South Wales (UNSW), is helping the materials industries combat environmental challenges with technology that reduces carbon-emissions and uses recycled rubber tyres that would otherwise go to landfill in electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking.

Growing up in Mumbai, Sahajwalla didn’t think of anything as waste. “In India, we used and recycled just about everything.” Values ingrained at an early age have paid off. She has been developing an environmentally friendly process that uses recycled rubber tyres as a partial replacement to coal-based carbon for EAF steel making.

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