wAccording to a company release, joint managing director of TNS Mode, Debi Basu, will move to the Asia-Pacific Regional Management Team with responsibilities for standardizing all operations in the Asia Pacific Region for TNS. NFO's current managing director, Jenny Abraham will take over as managing director of the merged outfit, TNS India.

The company has formed a nine-member board under the aegis of Board chairman Shiloo Chattopadhyay, including John Abraham, regional director-north Asia and Indian subcontinent; Jenny Abraham, MD; Debi Basu, Regional Director for Operation Standardization; Raghavan Srinivasan, deputy managing director; R Suresh, deputy managing director; Ganapathy (Ganesh) Subramanian, director, stakeholder management and automotive; Tilak Mukherjee, director, social and government and Edward Hoefling, group treasurer and tax director.

Says Abraham, "The combined expertise and capabilities of the two companies will help TNS bring to its clients in India the best of research technology, practices and knowledge. The combined business would give TNS India the requisite scale to invest substantially in leveraging technology for serving clients better, more efficient and accurate data capture and analysis and reduced lead times for research projects."

"The integration opens up enormous opportunities for the personnel of TNS India - both in India and abroad. More so, with the strong commitment of TNS to take India global. The importance of India for the Asia-Pacific region is crucial and has already been manifested by the appointment of two India Board members to the Asia-Pacific regional Management team," says Ms Abraham.

For the new company, Abraham has outlined ambitious growth plans for 2004, with a concentration on aggressively growing in specialist sectors like automotive, telecom, customer satisfaction and stakeholder management and social and development research.

TNS will set up verticals and have a dedicated resource pool for these divisions, and intensifying investment in the business solution areas where the combined entity already has a major stake. "We are bullish on Pharma research, Media research and Consumer Panels - plan an India foray in 2004-2005," says Abraham.

TNS has also invested significantly in an outsource centre in a software technology park in Hyderabad. There will be greater investments in this area in 2004 and 2005, the release says.