The previous employment plan would have raised the branch’s overall headcount to 2,000 by the end of this year.  The Press Trust of India reveals that, according to the newer schedule, "the total strength could be between 2,500-2,700 employees" at that same point.

 

"In the first six months of this year itself, Yahoo! has added more than 1,000 employees for its India operations and further 500 people could be added to its headcount through the year," a PTI article states.

Yahoo India seems destined to shoulder a great deal of responsibility.  Its hiring binge, even as major layoffs are rumored to be lined up elsewhere, is one sign.  The appearance of Glue Pages in India is another; it may represent Yahoo’s next approach to presenting search results.

We’ll see what happens, anyway.  Given the rate at which American employees are quitting, some sort of shift may take place whether Yahoo likes it or not.

He was referring to the buoyant market of travel portals in India. Many travel portals have been launched in recent past to great success. The report also mentions that major international travel portals, such as Travelocity and Kayak are ready to set shop in India.

Yahoo! India has made strategic investments in BharatMatrimony.com who is a preferred partner in the matrimonial segment. However, Yahoo! has stated that it is not looking for a similar strategic investment, though industry sources are predicting that it might be another strategic investment.

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To be fair, Yahoo’s claims pretty much mesh with our past coverage of this story; its official statement today, as reported by PC World, stated that “[t]he content on Yahoo! India’s language portal is provided by Webdunia under the express representation that Webdunia has all the necessary rights and authorization for all the content provided by them.”

“When this incident was reported,” the company continued, “the recipe content was immediately removed to avoid any unnecessary conflict.”

It did take the corporation quite a while to makes it apology, however, which frustrated the woman, named Suryagayathri, at the center of this controversy.  CyberMedia India Online talked to her yesterday, at which point she had not hear from either Yahoo or Webdunia.

As in the past, she doesn’t want much of anything to do with them.  “Giving credit to what I write is not the question,” Suryagayathri proclaimed.  “[I]n fact I don’t want my content to appear (with or without credit) in that portal where they don’t honor copyrights.”

To return to Yahoo’s official semi-apology, we can only hope that the company will be more careful about this sort of thing in the future.  “Yahoo respects the blogging community and the etiquette followed by bloggers,” the statement read.  “We regret any inconvenience caused by the inadvertent posting of the recipe without attribution.”

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According to Inji Pennu, the recipe belongs to a woman named Suryagayathri, and was used by Yahoo as part of a new portal’s beta version. “They have copied some . . . of her recipes word by word,” Pennu asserted. “The only thing is that they changed the picture.”

She went on to describe another incident in which Yahoo India lifted content from a small magazine, only to quietly take it down upon request.

Amit Agarwal looked into it, and was able to get the company to break its silence. “The Malayalam story was provided to us by Webdunia.com (the content provider) on the express representation that they are duly authorized by the author of the story to publish it,” responded an unnamed employee.

That’s understandable, although perhaps not comforting. But Agarwal points out something strange: “the slightly worrying part here is that they are asking users to follow-up with WebDunia to report copyright violations in future.”

This isn’t the first time Yahoo has faced allegations of “copying” someone, either. Late last year, there was a very messy affair in which Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny and Google’s Matt Cutts went back and forth over a related issue. This Yahoo India problem isn’t likely to grow nearly as large or ugly, but it is nonetheless causing some raised hackles.

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