Five of the country‘s top Chief Information Officers (CIOs) were honoured in the presence of a galaxy of peers and captains of industry at the CIO Awards function held in Bangalore last Friday.
Konkan Railway Corporation CIO Sharad Saxena received the award in the Business Process Improvement category, while Tayco Electronics‘ CIO Sanjay Handu bagged the Business Decision Support award. Hughes Software Systems‘ Adesh Goyal was adjudged the best in the Human Resource Development category. Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation CIO Subbarao Hegde received the award for the best Supply Chain Management, while BPCL CIO Ashok Sinha and Hegde were shared the award for the best customer management, according to an official release.

The awards were organised by the Technology Media Group (TMG) which runs the TMG channel. The company also publishes the CIO magazine, a monthly publication targeted at CIOs, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and senior management from varied

Among those who attended the function were Karnataka IT Minister B K Chandrashekar, Nasscom president Kiran Karnik, NIIT chairman Rajendra Pawar, Britannia CEO Sunil Alagh and Kerala IT Secretary Aruna Sundararajan.

TMG president Achal Mehra said that the awards aim to accord recognition to the growing contribution of CIOs and their significance within the organisation.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association has asked the central government to pass a legislation making it mandatory for conditional access set top boxes to be set up at the customer end to receive pay channels.
In a memorandum to I & B minister Sushma Swaraj, the NCTA has maintained that currently encrypted channels are decoded at the cable TV headend and are then distributed as free to air channels in the basic service. Having a CAS at the customer end would be an effective anti-piracy measure, as all locally originating content will have to pass through the CAS filter. According to the NCTA, Swaraj had, in a meeting on 30 August this year, agreed to pass an order making it mandatory for all encrypted channels to reach the willing and subscribing end customers only through a conditional access set top box.

The feature films screened through this mandatory CAS will generate huge revenues for the film industry, the NCTA has noted in its memorandum.