AAPI: March 2023

DELHI, March 2023

Index of this Newsletter

INDIA

INDIA & THE WORLD

21.1. Indian degrees to be recognized in Australia; PM Anthony Albanese announces education qualification recognition mechanism
21.2. Australia-India Trade can be Scaled Up to $100 billion
22.1. ET, Tech,Unwrapped
22.2. India Thali to Get a Bigger Slice of Netflix Budget
23.1. India, US sign MoU on semiconductor supply chain, innovation partnership; to propel growth of IT, electronics sectors
23.2. Global cos eye India’s digital model
24. SAP to Double India Investment in 5yrs
25.1. World Bank to give $1b health infra loans
25.2. Want India’s Help to Build Consensus, Conclude Key Deals

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DELHI, MARCH 2023

NEWSLETTER, MARCH 2023

INDIA

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC.

1.1. Just doing IT is a way of life, As is starting up a new code of giving

ET, 22 Feb. 2023

Industrialist and philanthropist Shiv Nadar epitomises the country’s startup and innovation culture as the man who gave India its first microcomputer, around the same time as Apple, and co-founded HCLTech, now the country’s third-largest IT services company by revenue.

Industrialist and philanthropist Shiv Nadar epitomizes the country’s startup and innovation culture as the man who gave India its first microcomputer, around the same time as Apple, and co-founded HCLTech, now the country’s third-largest IT services company by revenue. Those accomplishments as well as his philanthropic programmes led the ET Awards jury to confer the Lifetime Achievement on Nadar. “I would like to thank The Economic Times and the jury for honoring me with the Lifetime Achievement Award in Corporate Excellence.

It has truly been a joy and privilege to build HCL and the various institutions of the Shiv Nadar Foundation over the last 47 years,” Nadar told ET. In what would seem like the career graph of a latter-day startup founder, Nadar switched three jobs within less than a decade before launching his own company in 1975.

Supported by an investment from the Uttar Pradesh government, in 1976, Nadar launched his second venture Hindustan Computers (HCL) synonymous with Made-in-India computers, before tapping the software services outsourcing opportunity in the late 1990s. One may argue that many other entrepreneurs have demonstrated the level of business acumen and innovation that he has, but few have paid it forward through the immense scale of philanthropic and educational initiatives launched by Nadar.

As per the Hurun India Philanthropy List for 2022, billionaire Nadar’s annual donations stood at 1,161 crore or roughly 3 crore per day. With a net worth of $28 billion, he was positioned at 46 in the Hurun global rich list and fourth among Indian peers. “European nations are quite advanced in this (philanthropy) and there are foundations running for around 100 years. We will be ahead as we have an opportunity to get the best global practices and to leapfrog,” Nadar had told ET in a 2015 interview.

Nadar was among the founding patrons of the Indian School of Business. In 1996, he set up the SSN College of Engineering in Chennai, which has offered scholarships worth $7 million benefiting over 5,000 students, with over 2,000 first-generation learners. As of March 2022, he has invested $1.1 billion through the Shiv Nadar Foundation, impacting over 36,000 students. In 2011, HCL Foundation was established as the social responsibility arm of HCLTech with a mission to alleviate poverty and achieve inclusive development across health, education, environment and disaster relief. The Shiv Nadar University he set up in 2011 is a multidisciplinary research-focused institution.

The foundation runs two residential schools in Uttar Pradesh with many of its students securing admissions to Ivy League colleges. Nadar stepped down as chairman of HCLTech in July 2020 and handed over the position to his daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra to focus on his philanthropic initiatives. He is chairman emeritus and strategic advisor to the board of HCLTech, which recently rebranded itself and moved up the global rankings. Having started his life in rural Tamil Nadu, the third richest software and services billionaire in the world always credited access to quality education and scholarships for his success and worked to expand access to these opportunities for others.

1.2. Supreme Court launches AI for live transcript of court hearings

ET, 22-Feb. 2023

In a first, the Supreme Court on Tuesday launched the use of Artificial Intelligence and technology powered by Natural Language Processing on a trial basis to provide live transcriptions of court hearings.

The deep inequality which fractured our society at the time of Independence persists even today, said CJI Chandrachud. In a first, the Supreme Court on Tuesday launched the use of Artificial Intelligence and technology powered by Natural Language Processing on a trial basis to provide live transcriptions of court hearings.

The service was launched in the courtroom of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, who is heading a Constitution bench hearing a bunch of pleas on Maharashtra political party Shiv Sena. A screen displaying the live transcription of court proceedings has been placed in the CJI’s courtroom facing lawyers.

The CJI said that SC was trying to explore the possibilities of live transcripts. “It is an experiment. Then we will have a permanent record of arguments,” he said, adding the facility will help not only judges and lawyers but also law colleges.

The service is being managed by TERES, a company which has been providing the facility to arbitration practitioners. As per the available information, SC will also make available on its website transcripts of oral arguments.

“Now, the only issue can be if two or more people talk over. But there are people overseeing it. They will hear and clear it up,” the CJI said. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who is representing the Uddhav Thackeray faction of Shiv Sena, termed the move “wonderful idea”. Justice PS Narasimha said this would mean that SC would be literally a “court of record”.

In her plea calling for livestreaming of significant cases, senior advocate Indira Jaising had earlier suggested audio transcripts of hearings for archival. Last month, a bench headed by the CJI had taken these suggestions on record.

2.1. Not emerging, India is the leading market

ET, 18 Feb. 2023

India’s population is expected to overtake China’s soon and by 2030 the country is projected to have the largest working-age population. If those people can find jobs, India will see a huge demographic dividend, creating “one of the greatest economic opportunities”, the PwC chief said.

India has the opportunity to become the focus of the world in the next decade with 1.7 billion people and a $10-trillion economy contributing 10% of the world’s GDP, Bob Moritz, global chairman of PwC, said on Friday.

“You should not be thinking about India as the emerging market, India is the leading market,” Moritz said at The Economic Times Global Business Summit, adding that India is already an economic powerhouse achieving one of the highest growth rates in the past few decades.

According to a recent PwC survey of 4,400 chief executive officers around the world, Indian CEOs saw positives in the economy while CEOs from the rest of the world were pessimistic about growth.

Moritz said India is expected to grow at the fastest levels this year. “And if it is able to sustain that, it actually does capture this next decade,” he said.

Despite signs of an economic slowdown, continuing high inflation, the ripple effects of the war in Ukraine and interest rates, the outlook for India has never been better, Moritz said.

“Speedy economic growth commensurate with millions of people entering the labour force and, as a result, enabling their own consumption at a higher level, thereby enabling economic growth… (and) continuing the cycle for economic development,” he said.

Moritz emphasised the need to “ensure that women are an important engine for that future growth”. Currently, only 20% of the women in this country are in the workforce. That number needs to increase significantly, he said.

The PwC chief said India has the potential to lead the world in the fight against climate change and in transition to low carbon emission. “The transition from a high carbon to a low carbon economy is going to include a rewiring of the global economy in new and different ways that we’ve never thought of. India is at the forefront of this transition,” he said.

The country can also play a leading role in global technology innovation, particularly in the social sector, backed by “its young digitally savvy population”, he said.

Moritz also highlighted the need to continue the country’s thrust on infrastructure development and ease of doing business to attract foreign and private investments.

“The recent capex push is driving a self-reliant India initiative and help achieve a number of sustainable goals,” Moritz said. “The only way this happens, though, is (through) greater focus on public private partnerships to get the needed capital.”

Hinting at the geopolitical tensions, particularly after the US recently shot down an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon, the PwC chief said that with so much happening, India now has a much bigger opportunity in terms of global supply chain diversification.

2.2. Essential drugs list to soon include commonly used hygiene product

ET, 22 Feb. 2023

The government has initiated the process to finalise a list of commonly used hygiene products like adult diapers, sanitary napkins, floor disinfectants, soaps which it plans to put under the National list of Essential medicines (NLEM).

The government had in 2019 decided to widen the basket of NLEM by including health and hygiene products. However, due to Covid-19 nothing could be finalised. The government has now asked a committee of experts to resume the meetings and shortlist these products so that they can be brought under NLEM.

Bringing them under NLEM would mean it would be available within the health system in adequate numbers and will be assured. The committee will also see if prices of these products need to be regulated.

The committee on National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) had earlier formed sub-committees to categorize medicines, medical devices, disposables, and health and hygiene products according to how essential they are for healthcare.

The sub committee will identify consumables, hygiene products and will send the list to another committee.

“Products like sanitary napkins, adult diapers have to be on the list. Experts will deliberate on various aspects of hygiene products that should be available within the healthcare system at all times. “We have to decide what kind of soap to be put under the hygiene category, whether it should be liquid, medicated. What type of gloves-simple, powdered, lubricated etc be included in the list, said a committee member, requesting anonymity.

Medicines and devices listed in NLEM must be sold at the price fixed by the NPPA, while those in the non-scheduled list are allowed a maximum annual price hike of 10%.

The government had in September last year included several anti-diabetes drugs and patented antivirals used in the treatment of tuberculosis, HIV and hepatitis C in the latest edition of the NLEM.

Popular anti-diabetes drug teneligliptin, insulin glargine injection, and common antibiotics like meropenem and cefuroxime have been included on the NLEM, 2022, bringing their prices down.

For the medicines included on the NLEM, manufacturers are required to sell their products at equal to or lower than the ceiling price. The calculation of the price is based on a simple averaging of the market prices of different brands of medicines having a market share of at least 1%.

3.1. Beyond politics: examining the ideological moorings of Gujarat and Kerala models of development

ET, 28 Feb. 2023

A thriving market economy is imperative for a social democratic government to generate growth and prosperity, but it should keep the market economy on a leash. That entails preventing it from turning into a ‘market society’ where employment is not stable, incomes are less than deserved levels, and communities are continuously marginalised and disrupted by market fluctuations.

Economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, in their 2014 book India’s Tryst with Destiny, have injected the term ‘Gujarat model’ as a metaphor for market-led development model, in contrast to the term ‘Kerala model’, popularised by Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, which had been used as a metaphor for state-led development.

Political moorings aside, it is in the fitness of things to examine the ideological foundations of the debate and what it entails. Narendra Modi and Pinarayi Vijayan’s reign and resurgence in Gujarat and Kerala, respectively, have put the spotlight back on this classic debate, and the patron saints for this debate are Friedrich August von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, the two Vienna-born influential thinkers of the century.

A prosperous market economy is imperative for a social democratic government to generate growth and prosperity. But the government should keep the market on a leash and prevent the ‘market economy’ from turning into a ‘market society’ that people might not approve of — a society where employment is not stable, incomes are less than deserved levels, and where communities are being continuously marginalised and disrupted by market fluctuations.

The market argument

Hayek proclaimed that “the market giveth, the market taketh away; blessed be the name of the market”. He was a moral philosopher and a political-economy activist who grasped most thoroughly and profoundly what the market system could do for human benefit. He sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy, and emphasised free markets to spur economic growth and efficient allocation of resources.

To him, the only rights the market economy recognises are property rights, and indeed, only those property rights which are valuable. Hayek was not a great fan of an overly democratic, egalitarian, and permissive society. To him, the democratic political sphere can be counterproductive to unfettered economic growth, as it entails confiscation and redistribution.

A prosperous market economy, according to Hayek, needs to run on the logic of cooperation and growth, and this in turn, can materialise only by way of protection by authority. In Hayek’s view, a market economy can lead to a highly skewed distribution of income and wealth, but to ask whether it is ‘fair’ or ‘just’ is to commit a fatal intellectual blunder.

‘Justice’, ‘fairness’, and ‘social justice’ of any form require that you receive what you deserve. A market economy gives not to those who deserve, but to those who happen to be in the right place at the right time. Who controls the resources that are valuable for future production is not a matter of fairness.

The other perspective

Karl Polanyi, a political economist of Hungarian-Jewish-Canadian descent, vehemently disagreed with Hayek, pronouncing that “the market is made for man, not man for the market”. In his book ‘The Great Transformation’, he declares that people have not just property rights, but other economic rights as well — rights that a pure-market economy will not respect.

Polanyi laments that the market turns everything into a commodity, but certain inputs, viz., land, labour, and finance are “fictitious commodities”, which cannot be governed by the logic of profit and loss. These factors need to be embedded in society and managed by the community, taking into account religious and moral dimensions.

With respect to land, people have the rights to a stable community whether or not the market logic thinks otherwise, and as regards labour, they have a right to a fair income commensurate with their skills and preparation irrespective of the logic of the world market. With regard to finance, people believe that as long as they do their job diligently, the flow of purchasing power through the economy should be such as to give them the wherewithal to buy, and their jobs and incomes are not at the mercy of someone’s return on investments, thousands of miles away. But the market economy would deliver the above essential inputs only if they passed the maximum-profitability test.

Articles 38 and 39 of the Constitution of India may be seen as the reflection on the broad currents of both the Hayekian as well as Polanyian rights. Specifically, Section (b) of Article 39 clearly states that “the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good” exudes the Hayekian belief that resources should gravitate to their most valuable and efficient uses.

In Section (c), however, the Constitution states “that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment” is a true reflection of the Polanyian rights. The Constitution does only provide the broad brushes, which states can adopt and does not purport to a specific plan of action for furthering economic and social development.

The directive principles of state policy, enumerated in part IV of the Constitution of India, lays down certain economic and social policies to be pursued by the states, making it the duty of the state to apply these principles in making laws to establish a just society along the lines of a welfare state. The Supreme Court tasked itself with the objective of infusing the spirit of social welfare and justice through a series of landmark cases, viz., Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India; Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India; Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation; Consumer Education and Research Centre v. Union of India; Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka etc.

The government has made phenomenal efforts to implement the directive principles in the form of the insertion of Article 21-A, the Prevention of Atrocities Act 1995, The Minimum Wages Act 1948, Consumer Protection Act 1986, and Equal Remuneration Act 1976, and launched many schemes like the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana in pursuit of the larger objective of a just and prosperous society.

However, there has critical hurdles to cross — caste-based discrimination, exploitation, and occupational immobility — to keep powerful vested interests at bay. The Land Acquisition (Amendment) Act of 1984 and the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill of 2000 have marginalised tribal and dalit communities, resulting in growing land alienation, migration, and displacement from land and forest.

The contrast

Hayek was right about the superior allocative efficiency of markets but his theory runs the risk of being carried to the extremes. According to the anti-state crusaders, the state often gets in the way of human self-organisation, but this hostility was driven more by ideology than by empirical observation.

As most economists will admit, there are many types of public goods that markets will simply never provide, and states have played stellar roles in helping and coordinating functions, which promoted economic growth. This has been seen in countries such as Japan and South Korea during their high-growth periods.

In a similar vein, Polanyian rights or autonomy are susceptible to extreme manifestations by both sides of the ideological spectrum. Individual autonomy, if pushed far too right, may create excessive inequality and financial instability, and if it veers far too left, it may evolve into identity politics where individual autonomy is absolutised in ways that will threaten social cohesion and justice. From a strictly political standpoint, individual autonomy will now come to mean autonomy not for the individual but for the group in which the individual is embedded.

Hayek or Polanyi, for successful development there is a need to promote markets, build railroads and canals, charter banks, teach children, teach engineers, impose tariffs on commodities, and nurture the creation of communities of engineering practice. The logic of politics which reeks of favours performed, wealth redistributed, influence exercised, and taxes collected is different from the logic of economic growth.

It doesn’t matter whether the patron saint is Hayek or Polanyi, what is paramount is whether economic growth is fast enough. Even if one may not receive the size of the pie they deserve, they are better off if they receive a bigger slice than what their predecessors got. The fiscal dividend that the government receives during times of economic boom should allow governments to protect and vindicate Polanyian rights as well.

A prosperous market economy is imperative for a social democratic government to generate growth and prosperity, but it should rein in the market and keep the ‘market economy’ from turning into a ‘market society’ that people might not approve of, a society where employment is not stable, incomes were less than deserved levels, and where communities are being continuously marginalised and disrupted by market fluctuations.

3.2. India ranks 4th among 51 countries in having quality entrepreneurship ecosystem: Report

IBEF, Feb. 17, 2023

In a new worldwide survey, India was placed fourth out of 51 countries for having a high-quality entrepreneurial ecosystem, showing the country's consistent improvement in the business environment over time.

After receiving a far lower score in 2021, when it was placed at 16th overall, India's standing in the National Entrepreneurship Context Index (NECI) report from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) represents a significant improvement.

India’s latest score of 6.1 reflects a steady increase in the country’s overall entrepreneurial environment over the years.

India's NECI score increased from 5.8 in 2019 to 6.0 in 2020, placing it sixth among GEM economies (ranked 4th).

The Entrepreneurship Framework Conditions, developed by GEM, are a set of 13 characteristics that describe the entrepreneurial context of a given economy (EFCs).

The scores of the framework conditions for each of the 51 participating economies form the basis of the NECI results.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

4.1. Wired for ease: Bombay High Court at Goa opens e-Seva Kendra for ease of e-filing

ET Gov. 24 Feb. 2023

The acting Chief Justice of the high court of Bombay, Justice Sanjay Vijaykumar Gangapurwala, and three Justices of the high court of Bombay at Goa inaugurated the kendra.

The kendra is equipped with a scanning machine and computer systems for lawyers to scan the required court documents in line with the goal to create a paperless system.

Taking a step towards a paperless court system, the high court of Bombay at Goa on Wednesday opened an e-Seva Kendra at the Goa State Legal Services Authority office, on the court premises in Porvorim. The kendra is meant to assist lawyers and litigants e-file their cases.

The acting Chief Justice of the high court of Bombay, Justice Sanjay Vijaykumar Gangapurwala, and three Justices of the high court of Bombay at Goa inaugurated the kendra. Justice Gangapurwala was joined by Justice Mahesh Sonak, the chairman of the authority; Justice BP Colabawalla; and Justice Bharat P. Deshpande.

The kendra is equipped with a scanning machine and computer systems for lawyers to scan the required court documents in line with the goal to create a paperless system.

“The process of e-filing has already begun and about 15 cases have been e-filed over the past two weeks,” an official said. “Judges have access to these cases through the e-filing system.”

The e-Seva Kendra has been set up in accordance with the guidelines of the Supreme Court e-Committee to take forward the concept of paperless court. The scanning facility is free under the SC’s project. “A technical person will help lawyers and litigants scan the documents. The kendra also has a legal assistant, an advocate from the Goa State Legal Services Authority and one paralegal volunteer,” the official said.

At the kendra, assistance and guidance will be provided to lawyers and litigants appearing in person in all the necessary processes, including e-filing, uploading files and obtaining registration numbers.

“Once this is done, the file goes to the Lordships in an e-format which they will access on their devices,” the official said.

The e-Seva Kendra has a kiosk at which litigants and lawyers can check orders and status of their cases. Another kiosk is already functional in the litigants’ waiting room on the first floor.

Justice Gangapurwala said the facility will be “of great assistance to everyone. It will facilitate each and every litigant and lawyers too”.

Justice Sonak said the kendra will be extremely helpful “because litigants will have the status of their cases and orders at their fingertips.”

Legal facilities can be availed of by citizens on the toll-free number 18002334060 and through the dedicated email ID legal-gsisa.goa@gov.in.

4.2. RIL Plans to Set up 10 GW Solar Project in Andhra Pradesh

ET, 4 Mar. 2023

Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani on Friday said his group will set up a 10-gigawatt renewable solar energy project in Andhra Pradesh.

Speaking at the inaugural session of the southern state’s two-day Global Investors Summit 2023 in Visakhapatnam, Ambani said Reliance will create 50,000 new job opportunities in the state and promote sale of products made in Andhra via its retail business.

He said RIL has invested more than ₹1.5 lakh crore on the KG D-6 gas field in the Krishna-Godavari basin off the Andhra Coast, developing and supporting gas pipelines. “Today, the gas produced by Reliance at the KG-D6 basin is fuelling India’s clean energy transition and will contribute to nearly 30% of India’s gas production,” Ambani said.

Reliance Retail has partnered with over 120,000 kirana merchants across 6,000 villages of Andhra Pradesh, equipping them with tools. Ambani said the group retail firm has created more than 20,000 direct jobs and a larger number of indirect jobs in the state. Reliance Retail will source significantly more agri and agro-based products and manufactured goods from the state, he said. “Apart from increasing the incomes of farmers, artisans and others, this will directly create over 50,000 livelihood opportunities,” Ambani added.

5.1. India added 1,300 tech start-ups and 23 unicorns in 2022

IBEF, Feb. 17, 2023

In 2022, about 1,300 start-ups with a technology focus were added, bringing the overall number of active tech start-ups to 25,000-27,000. In addition, India added around 23 unicorns in 2022, which was the second-highest number in the world.

After China and the United States, India continues to have the third-largest tech start-up ecosystem worldwide.

A total of US$ 73 billion in equity investments have been raised by tech start-ups in India, of which US$ 18.2 billion came in 2022.

According to a NASSCOM analysis, this was less than the US$ 24.1 billion raised in 2021 but more than the US$ 13.1 billion raised in the year prior to the 2019 pandemic.

The country also added the second-highest number of unicorns in the world, with over 23 added in the calendar year 2022. It has a total of 89 technology-focused unicorns. India has 174 potential unicorns and 60 were added to the list in 2022.

The influence of women in the startup ecosystem has increased. A woman is at least one of the founders or co-founders of 36% of unicorns and potential unicorns.

About 17% of all investment deals between 2019 and 2022 were raised by women-led start-ups, and about 18% of all start-ups in the ecosystem include at least one female founder or co-founder.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

5.2. Crisis Creates Opportunities; Bought into ITC During a Crisis

ET, 6 Mar. 2023

In an interview with Arijit Barman, Rajiv Jain, the founder of the Fort Lauderdale-based GQG Partners opened up on his thesis, crisis management strategy and more.

For a man who manages $88 billion in assets for over 800 entities, with a diversified portfolio that ranges from Petrobras to Exxon, Nvidia, Snowflake, Bharti, ITC and Lotte, old-school bets in dividend or cash-generating businesses have been an investing mantra for Rajiv Jain, chairman of GQG Partners. Last week’s $1.87 billion bet on Gautam Adani’s empire is arguably his most daring till date. In an interview with Arijit Barman, the founder of the Fort Lauderdale-based GQG Partners opened up on his thesis, crisis management strategy and more.

Edited excerpts:

Why did you buy the stakes from the Adani family trust and not from others?

That's frankly not our decision. That was their decision. So we didn't pick and choose. But from a structuring perspective, we thought it's better to sort of buy directly from the promoter family. In other words, a secondary offering rather than primary offering. And also as a whole for logistical reasons also, such as the timing etc., secondary is faster and more efficient.

There were murmurs that other institutional investors like LIC were ready to sell too…

Once you are shopping around, the deal is off, in my opinion, because the word will leak, right?

So speed matters in these things. And the way the stock was moving, we kind of knew that this won't last forever. The faster a stock declines, the sooner the decline would end. So you can't say we’re gonna look at it and let’s come back in six months while the deal’s off because the stock won’t be as attractively valued. So, that was the discussion point rather than try to go shopping for a block with somebody else. Frankly, we would’ve never done that because that would’ve made no sense.

Has there been a situation in the past where you’ve picked up shares from the open market, from the controlling shareholder of a company?

There have been cases where we have been aggressive in a decline. I remember the 2004 elections, there was a little bit of upset, and the whole market declined 25% plus. And I was actually at that point, ironically in Australia and I came out of a meeting in Perth and asked, hey, can I buy anything? I was told why something, you can buy anything.

So we bought hand over fist those few days. In 1996, I remember there was a crisis in ITC because of a tax situation. I bought into ITC and we ended up owning ITC for almost 20-plus years. So crisis usually creates opportunities. But to be clear, I've got some crises dead w12 wrong. For example, I was very nervous after the demonetisation and boy, was I wrong in terms of what happened after that.

But have you in the past bought from a controlling shareholder who is under significant regulatory and legal scrutiny?

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to know who's selling at that point, right? If you're buying in an open market, you just don't know who's selling. But for example, in 2019, we bought into Infosys when there was a whistleblower case if you remember. That is not that long ago. The stock had dropped drastically right then by around 30-45%. People forget.

In fact, we also bought Petrobras quite a bit aggressively in the last two years. You know there were a lot of issues (corruption cases, tax cases, political imprisonments, debt ballooning) and I think we are now the second-largest shareholder after the Brazilian government in Petrobras. So…we bought stuff in a crisis — this is not the first time.

Can you share with us some of the salient bullet points that you shared with your investors when it came to your investment rationale for the Adani Group?

We have a $5 billion investment in various utility-type businesses globally and those are unique animals because those are regular businesses, they tend to have a very long tail. And if they grow, they will have negative free cash flow because they get paid on their capex. So they have to keep investing. I think part of the issue here is that a lot of folks frankly, don’t fully understand how this game is played on the utility side. That’s the first part of it. The second is debt. Debt to Ebitda for most Adani Group companies on average is around three times. (Adani) Green is a little bit higher and some are a little bit lower. On average, the US utilities have a debt to Ebitda of around 6-6.5 times — that’s 2x. I'm talking about some of the best utilities. Because of the stability and the long tail, these utility businesses can afford to have high debt. If you are a cyclical business, you should not be levered. In fact, in a regulated business you are required to be levered.

There's nothing like a debt-free, regulated utility.

So I think that is an aspect which we feel comfortable with. In other words, if they slow down growth, the free cash flow will pile up. I don’t know whether it’ll be good for the business as much. So slow down a little bit, it is fine. From an Indian context, there’s so much need for infrastructure. You need somebody who can execute it. Who owned Mumbai International Airport before? Who owned the Mumbai power transmission and distribution company? Some other private sector companies owned it but they couldn’t run it. SoftBank Energy used to run renewable farms. They couldn’t run it either. And, by the way, when they sold — and we looked up the record—they didn’t need the money. Adani today is running them fine. People forget Adani did not get a functional port in Gujarat with connected railway lines. He built it in the middle of a patch of the Kutch desert.

So in India, if you take a 20, 25-year visible growth… it is a very powerful story. Question is, again, what are you paying for? But that's a different debate.

So this is a long-term bet on the India macro, India infrastructure story… And the debt according to you in the operating Adani companies is manageable, in fact, less compared to many global utility peers.

So I have to qualify everything because market, you don't want to make a forecast for five years. There’s a debt-refinancing issue in 18 and 24 months. So at that point, the markets should be reasonably open or they could issue debt from an operating company. So there are ways around it. In fact, we talked to a bunch of bankers, who have lent to them now, and they said, yeah, we would love to lend more. So we talked to their partners, and we talked to Total. We did a lot of due diligence terms with folks who have dealt with them before, some of the former partners, and employees to get a sense of the culture of the place. And, we felt very comfortable with how the group has done. But you don't live in a vacuum, so things always move around. So, while we take a five-year-plus review, you still have to look at what’s happening here and now.

Have any of your investors at GQG gotten back to you expressing concerns thus far?

Look, I mean, to be clear, people are concerned. I mean, if there was no controversy, we wouldn’t be discussing this. Controversy is part and parcel of investing. And they understand how we invest. So we have talked a lot to our investors. We continue to talk to them. But that’s normal. By the way, when I talk about controversial trades, cutting back on technology in the developed markets two years ago was a heck lot more controversial than this. Buying energy in the latter half of 2020 and 2021 was no less controversial. The ESG (environmental, social, governance) group was so strong ideologically, particularly the ESG index funds. But if I had to follow the index all my life, I’ll be bummed on the Street.

One of your largest shareholders Norges Bank exited Adani stocks over governance standards, exposure to coal, etc. How do they feel about you putting money in Adani?

We haven’t had any conversation with them directly, but I think everybody knows we invest in fossil (fuels). We own coal companies too, by the way. It’s public knowledge. Our job is to invest within the constraints given to us by our clients and then maximise the returns. At the end of the day, this business is about performance. Rest is talk and talk is cheap. True. It’s performance that matters.

But you don’t worry about money leaving your fund because, on Friday, GQG’s stock (listed in Australia) was down 3% after the Adani investment news came public.

Look, what do stocks do, they fluctuate.

If you look at our performance last year, if you ask me strategically, we are very well positioned today because of the ESG folks. They want to avoid oil and give us bargains at 20% dividend-yielding, free cash flow, fantastic companies. Hallelujah. We are happy to own those. We have seen fairly strong inflows last year and continuing this year. Stocks fluctuate, of course, it'll fluctuate. But again, you gotta take a long-term view and on a five-year basis, if we can deliver performance, everything is fine. If you don’t deliver this performance, nothing is fine.

Historically you have bought dividend-paying, steady cash flow-driven companies — ITC, HDFC, you like them, Bharti, Reliance Industries, etc. But Adani Group companies will guzzle cash and won’t spew capital. So, is this a different strategy?

I disagree with your characterization. If you look at some of the gas pipelines or crude oil pipelines we own in Europe or in Canada, they have very similar characteristics. They are guzzlers you would argue but they are not because they’re expanding for growth. What is the capex for an airport if not growth capex? These are not very capex-heavy businesses. But if you’re expanding into Navi Mumbai for a new airport, that’s a different thing because it will give you more passenger throughput. We have invested in plenty of technology companies where there was no dividend but there was pure growth. In fact, in Nvidia, we had a big position for years when they never paid dividends.

The way I like to describe ourselves is we are an equal-opportunity investor. We are happy to own the fastest-growing company like Snowflake at 50 times revenue. We are happy to own steel companies — and by the way, as you know, we do own a couple in India. We have owned some coal companies before. You got to look at everything with a different lens. But the common thread is, can we compound ours and our client’s capital on a double-digit basis? That’s your objective. We hope to deliver that. Sometimes you buy cheap, sometimes for dividends. Sometimes you buy growth and everything in between.

The prices of the Adani Group company stocks on average are down 60-70%. The anchor investors from the Adani Enterprises FPO and Indian mutual funds are staying away. Would you have been more comfortable if they were co-investors?

Not at all. When we started buying energy, there was a lot more pushback. It was early 2021, or late 2020, and we were selling technology. So sometimes you have good company, and sometimes you have no company. That’s perfectly fine. The moot point is what is the cash flow that they generate and how would the free cash flow develop over the next five years? Do you know how many people covered Berkshire Hathaway for the longest time? For close to 40 years, there was no sell-side coverage on Berkshire Hathaway. Most institutional investors didn’t own it. Isn’t that surprising? For the most renowned investor in the world, there was almost very little institutional ownership. And surprisingly, it actually kept growing in line with the book value that they delivered. Look, there are a hundred ways to heaven. You just have to find one.

Your money has gone to the SB Adani Trust as cash, but the Street would have preferred if it had gone directly into the companies to improve their debt-equity ratios. Did you explore any other structure so that the companies could have been the direct beneficiaries?

Actually, I disagree. I think the current problems are not at the company level. It’s the pledging that was a concern, right? And this actually reduces that risk. The companies have 20, 25-year visible growth but at the promoter level, there was maybe a little more tightness. I mean, Adani Ports, they don’t need cash at all.

Most of the credit-rating agencies talk of limited equity cushion in the group companies and that’s worrisome.

I’m not disagreeing with that. All I’m saying is that free cash flow will look meaningfully better if this load is on growth-oriented capex…because these businesses are not inherently very capital intensive, but are low on the maintenance capex.

Won’t your investment be going primarily toward paying the interest commitment of the promoters or to pare the ACC, and Ambuja debt rather than grow the companies?

What is the underlying growth rate of the business — with more capital and without more capital? Why is it that the Adani family owns 65-75% of these businesses and they built this empire? It’s because of their strong cash flow-generating capabilities. They are actually not issuing equity that much and have been rather stingy about it. We like that.

So this is not a guaranteed internal rate of return (IRR) kind of trade?

You name one. I don’t have any guaranteed IRR trade in my entire portfolio.

What’s the investment timeframe or horizon for you? How long will you wait for things to turn?

First of all, things are not really bad anywhere from a business perspective. There’s a balance sheet issue that we are discussing here. So, if the capex slows down, the picture will emerge better than what people think — that’s our bet. It could be wrong. In fact, I think a lot of the issues are kind of solved. So, we are taking a five-plus year view, and hopefully, we can own this for a long time. This is not a two-year trade at all.

But then again, they still have to execute all that. Nothing is guaranteed in life. So, I don't want to give you the perception that, oh, we are locked up. Who would've predicted that rates in the US will be where they are now versus zero for the last 15 years. But I would still say, this is a really 10-plus year trade because the headroom is dramatic. How many in the private sector are doing what these guys are doing?

What kind of return expectations do you have?

They’re all sort of in mid-teen kind of levels. And that’s where we feel the entry price mattered. And I think that’s very doable without having any sort of crazy debt loading but on the flip side, if you drastically reduce your debt, your growth will be slow too.

What do you like about Gautam Adani and his phenomenal rise in recent years–business chutzpah, vision, guts or political patronage? Did you know him, or his brother Vinod Adani from before?

No, I did not know them. I have never personally met Gautam Adani. I will answer the political question differently. For the longest time, India had a licence raj —that was to benefit a few. The markets were artificially restricted for others to come in. Let’s be clear, I think what you shouldn’t lose sight of is the fact that things were not handed on a platter. Ports were not handed on a platter. Solar farms were not handed on a platter. I’m not denying political connections—to be clear you can say that of a lot of large business houses here. I think it’s a matter of timeframe — in the 70, 80s, 90s — that you pick.

You pride yourself as a quality growth investor. Are you concerned about governance standards?

When we talk about quality, let me ask you this — can you replace Mumbai airport? No, can you replace the T&D (transmission and distribution) monopoly that they have in Mumbai? The reliability of that is 99.99% vs 99.98% for Florida Power Light, a stock we own in Florida. That’s damn good by Indian standards. If it was perfect, we wouldn’t be sitting here discussing this. That is what makes investing so much fun. And it doesn’t mean others can’t be because they may make money in different ways. So, I think I would broaden the discussion beyond Adani because if you look at the opposite side in India, do you really want to buy Hindustan Unilever at 55-60 times earnings?

The Adani Group has been targeted by the Hindenburg Research report — any association could arguably taint you as well.

Maybe I have a little thicker skin. Even the locals are surprised that we own more than 5% of Petrobras. When we bought Exxon we became the largest non-index owner of Exxon, and I was blown away. There are many trillion-dollar fund houses, so we are by comparison not a large player. But Adobe was 50 times forward earnings and people were jumping in excitement.

There’s always a lot of discussion about political affiliations. And I think the reality is a lot less extreme. I mean, these guys operate in a lot of states and in some there are different political dispensations. Look, I think I’ve heard that story on Reliance for about 25 years, about the political affiliation and so on and so forth. These come and go, but we can’t run the portfolio based on (what) the politics is.

The problem, the markets, at the end of the day, is about dollars and cents. Money talks — it’s hard to take a five, 10-year view.

- Agriculture, Fishing and Rural Development

6.1. Two lakh agriculture credit societies, fishery-dairy cooperatives to be set up

ET, 18 Feb. 2023

The ministry of cooperation has formulated a plan to establish viable PACS in each uncovered panchayat, viable dairy cooperatives in each uncovered panchayat/village and viable fishery cooperatives in each coastal panchayat/village as well as panchayat/ village having large water bodies, an official statement said.

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved setting up of 2 lakh new primary agriculture credit societies (PACS) and dairy-fishery cooperatives in uncovered villages and panchayats over the next five years to strengthen cooperative movement in the country. At present, there are around 63,000 functional PACS out of nearly 99,000 PACS across the country. There are still 1.6 lakh panchayats without PACS and nearly 2 lakh panchayats without any dairy cooperative society.

"Initially, 2 lakh PACS/dairy/fishery cooperatives would be established in the next five years. The action plan for implementation of the project shall be prepared by Nabard, National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and National Fishery Development Board (NFDB)," the statement said.

The Cabinet decision would help in providing farmer members with requisite forward and backward linkages to market their produce, enhance their income, and obtain credit facilities and other services at the village level itself. Our Bureau

6.2. Several steps have been taken to boost the Indian tea industry, address emerging challenges, and create a global brand

Press Information Bureau, Mar. 3, 2023

India has taken several steps to boost the output, create a niche brand for Indian tea, and ensure the welfare of the families associated with the tea industry.

With an output of around 1,350 million kilogrammes, India is the world's second-largest producer of black tea and is self-sufficient enough to fulfil its domestic needs as well as its export responsibilities. Around 18% of the world's total tea usage comes from India, which is also the biggest consumer of black tea. In addition to serving a sizable local consumer base, India is the fourth-largest exporter of tea to a variety of countries.

The Indian tea Industry is employing 1.16 million workers directly and an equal number of people are associated with it indirectly.

The growing sector, which accounts for nearly 52% of the total production, is small tea growers. Almost 2.30 lakh small tea growers are currently involved in the supply network. The government of India through the Tea Board has helped in the formation of 352 self-help groups (SHGs), 440 farmer producer organisations (FPO), and 17 farmer producer companies (FPCs). In addition to this, various seminars have been organised, mini tea factories have been set up, a scheme of “assistance of education stipend to the wards of Small Tea Growers” to improve their livelihood and education needs has been devised.

Indian Tea Exports has been fiercely contending on the world market and has succeeded in carving out a niche for itself. Despite numerous geopolitical, geoeconomic, and logistical difficulties, it is anticipated that Indian tea exports will surpass 95% of the US$ 883 million goals set during 2022–23. Additionally, recent exporters' feedback has helped to remove logistical obstacles like the lack of available containers.

Darjeeling tea is produced in the hilly area of the Darjeeling district spread over 87 tea gardens. The Tea Board has proposed additional changes to the "Tea Development and Promotion Scheme, 2021-26," which includes several elements for the overall advantage of the tea business. An online system under the ‘Service plus Portal’ has been put in place to ensure transparency in disbursement and beneficiary identification.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

7.1. Seaweed Gets Rolling

ET, 26 Feb. 2023

Using seaweed to make bioplastics and burgers, a few Indian companies are exploring the range of sustainable solutions the marine algae offer.

A round 2018, Neha Jain was working in the tech and advertising space in Mumbai, when she decided to embark on two different but parallel tracks — one personal and the other professional, but both revolving around sustainability. She wanted to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, especially in the supply chain. “When we talk of alternative, bio-based materials to plastic, these would still burden other natural resources like land or water. My idea was to find a material that does not do that,” says Jain. That was also the time she decided to experiment with a lifestyle that reduced her carbon footprint. “But within eight months, I had generated enough plastic to fill another house! I understood that this was not a problem a consumer alone could solve.” Both her quests finally found an unexpected solution: seaweed. This, she realised, was a natural resource that was fully biodegradable and would not require additional land, water or fertiliser to grow or scale up production. In 2020, Jain launched Zerocircle to make bioplastics from seaweed. After research and pilot scale-ups, the startup, backed by Sequoia’s Spark fellowship, Rainmatter Foundation and Marico Innovation Foundation, is set to manufacture sustainable coated paper and coatings in a few months. “We already have a few multinational and Indian clients on board, spanning food delivery, apparel and fast-moving consumer goods industries,” says Jain.

Seaweed, the hero in Jain’s startup, has been seeing a surge of interest in the US and Europe. However, the seaweed economy in India never really scaled up although it has been cultivated here for years. Zerocircle is one of the small but growing number of companies hoping to promote the use of seaweed in India and, through that, solve some of the bigger questions around sustainability.

THE INDIA STORY

Seaweed is a broad term for thousands of species of marine macroalgae as well as plants growing in oceans and other water bodies. Farmed seaweed is grown using ropes suspended in the ocean. Both cultivated and wild seaweed are harvested by hand, making it a labour-intensive process. Some species of seaweed are part of the cuisine in countries like Japan and South Korea — think sheets of nori, which are dried seaweed, used to wrap sushi rolls. Hydrocolloid extracts from seaweed like agar, alginate and carrageenan have wide commercial use. Thanks to their thickening and stabilising properties, they are used in a host of products, from toothpaste to jelly.

The recent interest in seaweed in the West lies in its potential to tackle climate change, from its ability to absorb large amounts of carbon to a source of nutritious food, the cultivation of which does not put more pressure on land or water. Just a week ago, for instance, ecommerce behemoth Amazon announced a $1.6 million grant for a Dutch effort to set up a commercial seaweed farm. In 2020, the global output of seaweed was an estimated 35 million tonnes and its value around $16.5 billion. With an output of around 34,000 tonnes, India commands only a sliver of this market. The government wants to ramp this up to an ambitious 1.1 million tonnes by 2025. It allocated `640 crore under the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY) in 2020 for this. However, at a seaweed expo in Ahmedabad in January, Jatindra Nath Swain, secretary in the department of fisheries, said that India has not made “much headway” towards meeting this, according to media reports. (Swain did not respond to a request for comment.)

Among the crop of companies pushing the envelope in the use of seaweed in India, the most ambitious is possibly Sea6 Energy. While it makes biostimulants to boost crop growth from seaweed extracts and is planning to enter the bioplastics space, the holy grail it has been working towards is biofuel from seaweed. On a Zoom call, cofounder and MD Shrikumar Suryanarayan, a former president of R&D at Biocon, says while seaweed might be a recent trend in the West, Sea6’s motivation to enter the space back in 2010 was to solve the daunting problem of India’s energy security using biotechnology. W h i l e t h e o t h e r cofounders, all IIT-Madras bio-technology graduates, zeroed in on seaweed as a source of biomass, they also “realised that the current method of cultivating it, which is highly manual, made the cost per kilo of biomass unaffordable as far as biofuel was concerned”. “It would need to be brought down by a factor of 10. Interestingly, the only cost in sea agriculture is labour productivity and if you can bring that down you can straightaway bring down costs,” says Suryanarayan. Sea6 Energy has since invented a “Sea Combine” to mechanise seaweed farming and enable large-scale cultivation. The cost of cultivating seaweed is not yet ideal for biofuel but Suryanarayan says the goal is close. “By 2025, we will be at a point where the economics of mechanised sea farming will be such that we can make biofuels viable. And before the end of the decade, we will have the first farms making biofuel in the sea,” he says.

Six years ago, Goa-based marine biologist Gabriella D’Cruz realised just how labour-intensive seaweed harvesting is when she interacted with a community of women who had been diving into the sea and collecting it for generations in southern Tamil Nadu. “The fact that many women are involved in seaweed harvesting makes it appear interesting. But they need a lot of interventions. They are the most important part of the value chain but are right at the end of it,” she says. To change this, D’Cruz set up The Good Ocean in 2021. It aims to promote the high-value use of seaweed and conserve local seaweed, of which India has over 800 species. The venture currently harvests wild local seaweed and works with chefs and restaurants to include it as a sustainably grown ingredient in different dishes, from burgers to chips and soups. “We are careful about where and how we harvest our seaweed, we pay our harvesters more and we map and keep track of the local biodiversity,” she says. With more consumers interested in sustainability and companies in meeting the environmental, social and governance metrics, the Oxford University graduate hopes the bootstrapped venture will break even in a year and-a-half.

While the government’s intentions to boost the seaweed economy are welcome, D’Cruz says the industry needs innovations to benefit all stakeholders. “Otherwise, the cultivators will become like the fishing community, which continues to struggle with poverty.” She says the country needs to move beyond focusing on just one or two species and just a couple of applications, to more high-value uses in food, beauty and nutraceuticals.

Those who have been in the seaweed industry for long, too, agree that more efforts are needed if India wants to capture more market share. “If you want to become a serious player, you cannot have piecemeal efforts. There should be more of a partnership between the government and the private sector,” says Abhiram Seth, who heads AquAgri, a pioneer in seaweed cultivation in India. AquAgri was set up by PepsiCo India in 2000 and sold to Seth, a former top PepsiCo executive, in 2008. Two years later, the company set up facilities to extract and process carrageenan and make biostimulants. Seth says business has been growing rapidly since fertilizer cooperative IFFCO took a 50% stake in the company in 2018. “But the purpose for which we launched seaweed cultivation — which is to create livelihood opportunities for local communities, including women — is not being fully served,” he says.

The number of people involved in seaweed cultivation with AquaAgri off the coast of Tamil Nadu has dipped from a peak of 1,000 to 250-300 due to lack of fresh planting material, he says. “We need fresh planting material and seed banks but there is no clarity from the government on how to go about it,” he says.

Much of the seaweed AquaAgri used to farm was the kappaphycus, a non-native species brought to India from Japan in 2000 by the scientists at the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSMCRI) in Bhavnagar, Gujarat.

“That was when commercial seaweed cultivation started in India. Though India was a new entrant in cultivation, it created its own space in the global seaweed industry by developing a new processing technology with which it could increase the value of the biomass,” says CRK Reddy, a former chief scientist at CSMCRI, who has been studying seaweed for three decades and is a consultant with Zero-circle. Several small- and medium-scale industries sprang up to extract and sell hydrocolloids, which dominate the seaweed economy in India, but is not a high-value industry. Reddy says India needs to ramp up seaweed cultivation, perhaps by corporates who could develop offshore seaweed farms and develop different seaweed-based products that could give a better return on investment and make large-scale farming more viable. Suryanarayan says the government’s current policies prioritize improving seaweed cultivation as a rural livelihood option. “This is based on what we already know about the uses of seaweed and while it will improve livelihoods, it will never reach the scale at which it can solve big problems such as the manufacture of biofuels or bioplastics.” Reddy says India should look at Australia for inspiration. Five years ago, the Australian seaweed industry was where India was but, today, he says, the former is looking at it as a $100 million industry: “What changed was the discovery that by blending a small amount of a type of seaweed with cattle feed, methane emissions (a contributor to global warming) could be cut by around 90%. This is attracting global companies to invest there.” If India improves the kind of seeds it uses, cultivates varieties that will give an assured quality of biomass and if industry expands processing technologies, the country, he says, could generate a more inclusive economy from seaweed.

7.2. Mr. Bhupender Yadav says more than 9,000 Jan Aushadhi Kendras have been opened across the country to make health facilities accessible to all

Press Information Bureau, Mar. 9, 2023

Union Minister for Labour and Employment and Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, Mr. Bhupender Yadav, while addressing the ‘Jan Aushadhi Diwas 2023’ program being organized in Dwarka, Delhi, remarked under the leadership of Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi, more than 9,000 Jan Aushadhi Kendras have been opened across the country by the central government to make health facilities accessible to all people.

The public is relieved from the burden of expensive medications, according to the minister, because medications are offered at these centres at low rates. He added that the government also ensures that sanitary pads are available at these Jan Aushadhi Kendras at affordable prices, bearing in mind the convenience of women.

Mr. Bhupender Yadav further highlighted that the government is working on a target of increasing the number of Jan Aushadhi Kendras to 10,000 in the country by the end of the year.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

8.1. IG International secures rights to Desy apple

Asia Fruit, 8 march, 2023, John Hey

Leading Indian fresh produce company signs agreement with Italian breeder CIV to plant new apple variety

IG International has clinched the rights to grow Desy – a new apple variety bred by Italian nursery consortium Consorzio Italiano Vivaisti (CIV) – in India.

IG International’s Tarun Arora and CIV’s Pier Filippo Tagliani signed the licensing agreement at Fruit Logistica, with the pair underlining the bright prospects for the variety in India.

Desy is a full colour red apple that’s ”crunchy, juicy and super sweet”, according to CIV. The variety is also characterised by its ‘grower friendly’ qualities, with trees that are easy to manage, excellent yield and high disease tolerance, the breeder added.

“Desy has a striking appearance with 90 per cent red colour and a yellow background,” explained Tagliani. “It has an attractive regular shape, and the flesh is very sweet; the Brix level is 16 degrees at harvest, going up to 18 degrees after storage. The flesh is firm, juicy and crunchy, and it has excellent shelf life.”

One of the key benefits of the variety from a growing perspective is its disease tolerance, with high resistance to apple scab and low susceptibility to powdery mildew, Tagliani added.

Arora told Fruitnet that IG is planting around 10 ha of Desy in India as a trial, with plans to expand plantings to around 200ha in the coming years

“We are testing it and we have full confidence in the variety. I am pretty sure we’ll get complete results in a year or two. By 2026/27, once we’ve tested it ourselves, CIV will look at growing it with other farmers.”

Desy is the first international apple variety IG has introduced to India for local production, and Arora said the company had “complete confidence” in its attributes for both Indian consumers and growers.

“One of the great things about Desy is the full colour – it’s highly marketable with the beautiful wrap around red colour,” he said.

“It’s also one of the finest varieties in terms of disease resistance. And from what we’ve seen in the trials in Bolzano and southern Italy, it performs consistently across growing regions. It’s a one-pick apple, so this also reduces the cost for us to go ahead and harvest.

“Another thing we’ve seen with this apple is that despite the high Brix, it has great storage qualities. It’s able to last even if you do not put it into controlled atmosphere storage – it still offers 12-month consistent marketability.”

In addition to Italy and India, Desy is also being planted under license in Poland and Turkey.

8.2. US$ 523.8 million worth of onions exported from April to December 2022

Press Information Bureau, Feb. 27, 2023

From April to December 2022, India exported onions worth US$ 523.8 million. In November 2022, India reported onion exports worth US$ 45.9 million, an increase of 71.39% compared to the previous year.

The export of onions is not limited or forbidden by the government. Presently, onions are exported under a "Free" trade policy. Only the export of onion seed is "Restricted," and even that is permitted with DGFT authorization. The DGFT vide Notification No. 50, onions (of all varieties) that are cut, sliced, or broken into powder form, as well as Bangalore Rose onions and Krishnapuram onions that are not cut, sliced, or broken into powder form, were changed from being "prohibited" to "free" on December 28, 2020.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

9.1. AI powered Robots and monitoring systems to save lives on India’s beaches

ET Gov. 13 Mar. 2023

An AI-powered robot and a monitoring system are patrolling Goa’s popular beaches and assisting lifeguards in saving lives of the tourists.

The Government of Goa took the decision to deploy the AI-powered systems following an increase in beach-related incidents due to rising domestic and foreign tourists on the coastline.

There is a long line of Hollywood movies featuring cyborgs and robots that are programmed to wage war, destroy and kill. But on Indian beaches, we could soon encounter robots powered with advanced AI that are programmed to save lives. Goa has become the first state in India to augment the life-saving capabilities of its fabulous beaches with an AI powered self-driving robot and a monitoring system.

Goa's self-driving robot and the monitoring system have a personality, in the sense that they have names -- the former is called Aurus and the latter Triton.

The Government of Goa took decision to deploy the AI-powered systems following an increase in beach-related incidents due to rising domestic and foreign tourists on the coastline. A recent study shows that there are about 200 swimming related fatalities in Goa every year. Most of the fatalities are reported on the popular beaches like Baga, Calangute, Arambol, Sinquerim and Morjim.

The state-appointed lifeguard organization, Drishti Marine, is behind the induction of the AI systems.

Aurus, the AI-powered self-driving robot, assists lifesavers on Goa’s extensive coastline by patrolling the non-swimming zones and warning the tourists during the high tide. The primary task performed by the Triton monitoring system is to use AI to monitor the non-swimming zones and alert the tourists of the danger while also informing the nearest lifeguard about the presence of tourists in a dangerous zone.

Currently, Aurus is deployed at Miramar beach in North Goa, while Triton is deployed at Baina, Velaso, Benaulim, Galgibag in South Goa and Morjim in North Goa. By the end of this year, the Government of Goa plans to deploy 100 Triton and 10 Aurus units on the state’s beaches, according to official sources.

This is not the first time that robots are being deployed on India’s beaches to save lives. In 2022, a robotic Lifebuoy was deployed in Visakhapatnam’s beaches to safeguard the life of swimmers. According to G. Hari Venkata Kumari, Mayor, Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation, the robotic Lifebuoy is capable of traveling six meters in a second and it can go up to 600 meters in water. It is capable of saving three lives at a time.

The use of robots for cleaning the beaches is fairly common in many parts of the world, but the use of AI-powered systems to save lives is a new innovation.

9.2. Centre may soon okay ₹3 tn for Bharatmala 2.0

MINT, 24 Feb 2023, Subhash Narayan

Under the Bharatmala project, the government plans to build 83,677km of national highways

The Union road ministry has already prepared the note, and approval is expected next month

The Union road ministry is set to move a cabinet note for the second phase of India’s ambitious Bharatamala project to build over 5,000 km of expressways and highways at the cost of almost ₹3 trillion, two people aware of the development said.

The Union road ministry has already prepared the note, and approval is expected next month, the people cited above said. Approval for Phase-2 has been advanced to allow for its completion alongside that of Phase-1, which got delayed by five years due to covid-19 disruptions and land acquisition delays.

Though 5,000 km of roads are expected under the new phase, more projects could come into its fold. An earlier plan had envisaged six expressways and 17 access-controlled corridors of length of over 8,100 km as part of Bharatmala Pariyojana Phase II at a total capital cost of over ₹3.66 trillion.

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) proposes to issue tenders for the construction of some sections of the roads under Phase-2 as early as the first half of FY24 so that a big chunk of these expressways and highways become operational in line with remaining projects under Phase-1 that is now scheduled to be completed by 2027, said the persons quoted above.

A query sent to the roads ministry remained unanswered till press time.

Bharatmala Phase-2 aims to provide better connectivity to various infrastructure projects, including multi-modal logistics parks (MMLPs) and under-construction expressways to enable seamless movement across major economic centres. The new phase would also take up the construction of highways that decongest existing roads, ring roads around major industrial centres and bypasses.

The prime component of this ambitious project would be the construction of six key expressways totalling 2,560 km

The prime component of this ambitious project would be the construction of six key expressways totalling 2,560 km. This will include 120 km long Kharagpur-Kolkata expressway that would also provide connectivity with an eastern dedicated freight corridor, 220 km Pune-Ahmednagar- Aurangabad expressway, 310 km Chennai-Tiruchirappalli expressway, 515 km Indore-Mumbai expressway that would also connect with under-construction Mumbai-Delhi expressway, 650 km Varanasi-Ranchi-Kolkata expressway and 745 km long Pune-Bengaluru expressway that would provide the longest expressway link via Delhi-Mumbai corridor.

“The preparation of detailed project reports (DPRs) for various projects under Bharatmala Phase-2 has been accelerated so that the award and construction of projects could be completed without delay. DPRs for several of the projects have already been done by NHAI while a few others would be available over next few weeks," one of the two people cited above said.

Bharatmala aims to link several of the existing road infrastructure while providing better connectivity to various industrial corridors. Though the first phase of the project was conceived in 2015, land acquisition delays and late clearances, along with covid-19 disruptions, have pushed the projects back to 2027, escalating costs. With early clearance for phase-2, the learnings from the previous round is expected be used to maximize road works.

10.1. From individuals to industries: Can green credit programme demonstrate how sustainability pays?

ET, 24 Feb. 2023

Aside from the discussions around how good the Union Budget was for people, a policy announcement around green credits was welcomed by environment experts. How beneficial could a green credit programme be and will it be effective? More importantly, with money in the equation more directly, can it help India achieve her net zero goal?

The Green Credit Programme (GCP) announced in the Union Budget by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman is a move to quantify environmental actions and then monetise them in the form of green credits, something like carbon credits, which can be traded online.

It would entail the formation of a technology-driven domestic voluntary market platform in sectors ranging from farmer-producer organisations, sustainable agriculture enterprises, individual entities, and industries to municipalities or states.

India has set steep targets to arrest climate change by aiming to go net zero by 2070. To execute this, a large amount of climate finance is necessary that is difficult to come by going forward, if we go by the current pattern of climate finance flow from developed countries to developing countries. Policies such as the green credit programme will help India in raising awareness and intent about climate change in the country.

The GCP has been conceptualised to encourage sustainable lifestyles by driving change in consumer mindset and incentivising them for environment-friendly measures. This will also help ease of doing business for corporates as they can purchase green credits to meet their mandatory forestry, water and air pollution reduction targets.

Let’s look at some examples of how GCP will help stakeholders:

Individual: If an individual installs a solar water heater/solar system on the rooftop for which GST was paid during purchase then at the end of the financial year the individual can claim an income tax credit for their environmentally friendly deed.

Industry body: If the industry body decides to recycle/utilise waste generated in its industrial unit and looks to achieve zero waste to landfill, then it can help the industry body get incentives like cheaper power or tax rebates.

Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs): If an FPO decides to switch to growing water-resilient crops like millets then the amount of water saved per hectare of the crop compared to traditional paddy plantation can bring them some monetary incentives.

Forward developments

Scheduled to be notified under the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC), the nodal ministry to implement the scheme, is likely to roll out the green credit framework by mid-year and has already held a series of stakeholders’ meetings with industry bodies, educational institutions like IITs, sector experts, civil society groups, the World Bank and the UNDP.

Six sectors have been identified for the initial phase of GCP that will be brought on board for designing and piloting of green credit framework. These include forestry, water, sustainable agriculture, waste management, air pollution reduction and mangrove conservation and restoration.

“A phased and iterative approach for implementation of GCP is planned. The ministry is in process of developing thresholds and benchmarks for each of the green credit activities and processes for generating and issuance of green credits will be developed based on exhaustive deliberations. It’s like creating a platform where you incentivise the supplier and buyer of green credits,” Leena Nanda, MoEFCC secretary, tells ET Prime.

Suppliers of green credits can include private industries and companies from different sectors, such as forestry, agriculture, mining, energy, oil and gas companies, pulp and paper, heavy engineering, and textiles among others.

According to the ministry, the GCP is unique as nowhere in the world, a comprehensive environment credit mechanism is run by the government.

“There are few water credit systems like in the US but they are at a smaller scale. The GCP is very robust with several sectors in its fold and a market platform that is pushed by the government. There are plans to add more activities in the GCP in the future based on learnings from the initial phase,” said a senior ministry official.

In 2020, the ministry’s Forest Advisory Committee recommended a green credit scheme for the forest to be traded as a commodity and that the industry can buy it to meet its mandatory afforestation targets in lieu of forest being cut for the project.

It was planned that individuals, village bodies and social organisations can be roped in for this.

But things didn’t move forward.

Roadmap for GCP

There will be three elements to it — supply creation, demand generation and trading platform. A platform will be created for registering the activities qualifying for green credits.

To ensure transparency, the entire platform will be technology driven where each activity must be geo-tagged and validated through satellite kind of imagery.

"Municipal corporations and states will get targets to improve their air quality or do waste management related activities and failing which they would have to either pay fine or buy green credits related to the sector."

— Manish Dabkara, president, Carbon Market Association of India

“There is a demand side and a supply side, and we have come forward to put this structure together through GCP. Once we have green credit activities, there will be an online transparent model for trading it and for the demand side connecting the corporates. They have a corporate environment responsibility sense and then there are sovereign green bonds, and ESG (environment, social and governance) responsibilities. The idea is you incentivise the buyer, you incentivise the supplier,” says Nandan, adding a dedicated team under an additional secretary-level officer looking after the implementation.

The governance setup of GCP will comprise an inter-ministerial governing board and GCP administrator.

Dehradun-based Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE), an autonomous council under the environment ministry, as GCP administrator, will be responsible for the approval/development of methodologies, standards, processes for registering green credit generating projects in various sectors, issuance of digital green credits, based on the due process, transparently conducting the transfer of credits, and ensuring that these are properly recorded in the registry.

The ministry has held several deliberations and is in process of validating the platform. The entire exercise has been aligned with the Modi government’s Mission LiFE (Lifestyle for the Environment).

Launched in October 2022, Mission LiFE is envisioned as an India-led global mass movement that will nudge individual and collective action to protect and preserve the environment. It lists 75 individual pro-environment lifestyle activities that can bring a change.

Manish Dabkara, president, Carbon Market Association of India (CMAI), who has attended a series of such deliberations, says the energy-saving certificates and renewable energy certificates could also come under the ambit of green credit.

Dabkara says, “Municipal corporations and states will get targets to improve their air quality or do waste management related activities and failing which they would have to either pay fine or buy green credits related to the sector. There are benchmarks being made like if a municipal corporation generates X percentage per capita of waste and Y amount is processed, what kind of credits will be available.”

Municipal corporations in metros like Delhi and Mumbai offer property tax rebates of up to 15% for housing societies that undertake waste segregation, recycling and reuse of dry waste, composting, sewage treatment, and rainwater harvesting.

Indore Municipal Corporation, which has topped cleanliness surveys for the past six years, is the first local body to announce the public issue of green bonds worth INR244 crore from February 10-February 14. The proceeds will be used for installing a 60MW solar PV power plant in Madhya Pradesh.

Dabkara, chairman and MD, EKI Energy Services Ltd, further says that it is also a step towards ease of doing business for when a project comes up in forest land, the project proponent must do compensatory afforestation on double the land and it is a difficult target for compliance.

“Even if you set up an industrial unit, the law says that 30%-40% must be green cover. Now, when the land is not enough for the company to even carry out expansion work then keeping 30%-40% of land for green cover is also in a way a waste of industrial land. To make that attractive, these companies can purchase forest credits from individuals, farmers, or entities,” he adds.

Learning from existing systems

Air pollution is a big issue across major Indian cities and air pollution reduction credits can play a major role in making the cities competitive to take measures to reduce air pollution. The US has an emission trading market system for harmful air pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.

A first-of-its-kind emission trading scheme (ETS) for particulate matter pollution was launched in Gujarat’s Surat in 2019. Initial reports say that it helped in reducing particulate matter in the industrial city. In a cap-and-trade scheme, the industries enrolled in the ETS trade among themselves for buying and selling credits for meeting their targets.

However, the lack of a market system has limited its benefits and expansion.

“Each company is given a target (for reduction of particulate matter) and they can trade between themselves based on the requirement to meet their targets. So, this is only between the two companies and no other market force then comes in. What will happen is that it will not give me real value for the credit because the transaction is happening only between two companies that are well-known to each other, and which are in the same sector. So, this is the limitation of this pilot project,” says a senior officer of Government of Gujarat.

Advocating for a market-driven credit scheme, the official further said that it can help in deciding the real value of the market.

Green credit was under discussion in the environment ministry for some years and a draft was prepared when Prakash Javadekar was heading the ministry, but it could not take off. The push now came from the Prime Minister’s office after the launch of Mission LiFE.

Ashish Chaturvedi, head - energy, environment and resilience, UNDP India, says, “What it means is that pro-planet actions should not be reduced to using the metric of greenhouse gases alone. There is a significant emphasis on carbon credits, and quite rightly so. But such focus should not disincentivise other environmental actions that don’t lead to emission reduction alone but are equally important for conservation and the local environment. These actions can be measured and incentivised. For instance, how many litres of water are saved from a shift to more efficient water fixtures in your house? So, I think it broadens the conversation.”

According to Chaturvedi, the fact that green credit made it to the budget speech shows its significance and initially, it will be the learning phase as a pilot and then it will be scaled up.

“The scheme can be used creatively as there are lots of ideas and we will continue to work with the Government of India and hopefully implement some green credit-based pilots soon,” he adds.

All eyes are now on the contours of the scheme when it finally rolls out in the coming months and what kind of incentives are offered to generate interest among the masses to move towards pro-planet actions and initiatives.

10.2. Vaazhndhu Kaattuvom Project: Over 3.10 lakh women in rural Tamil Nadu empowered through entrepreneurial skilling

ET Gov. 9 Mar. 2023

Since its inception in 2017, VKP has been dedicated to creating self-reliant and self-sufficient communities through enterprise promotion and its work has touched the lives of more than three lakh women so far across 3,994 villages in 31 districts in Tamil Nadu.

On the occasion of International Women's Day (March 8), the Vaazhndhu Kaattuvom Project (VKP) celebrates the achievements of its mission to empower women and transform lives in rural Tamil Nadu. Since its inception in 2017, VKP has been dedicated to creating self-reliant and self-sufficient communities through enterprise promotion and its work has touched the lives of more than 3 lakh women so far across 3994 villages in 31 districts in Tamil Nadu.

Speaking about the journey of VKP and the impact it has had on the lives of women in rural Tamil Nadu, S. Divyadharshini, IAS, CEO of VKP said, "Our support needed to be continual, personal, holistic and start from the grassroots. We understood from the very beginning that a single approach would not work for lakhs of women whose aspirations were different and our strategies would have to be as diversified as the women and their aspirations themselves, with multiple touchpoints."

VKP's project aims to develop and drive progress through enterprise promotion, creating access to finance and providing skill training for job opportunities. The projects focus is on creating enabling environments for promoting and strengthening individual and collective enterprises in both farm and non-farm sectors. VKP has focused on supporting women, youth, self-help group (SHG) members/ households, tribal communities, the differently-abled and aspiring entrepreneurs to become self-reliant business people and a skilled workforce who grow exponentially.

The projects support is diversified to solve the unique problems that each woman faces. This includes promoting the formation of rural enterprises of all kinds, creating easy access to finance for business plans and facilitating training and skilling to become self-employable. The Collective Enterprises include enterprise groups (10-30 members), producer groups (30-150 producers) and producer collectives (300-3,000 producers). VKP's Matching Grant Program (MGP) addresses the issues of the demand-supply gap in lending to rural enterprises. The grant covers up to 30 percent of the project costs to enhance the sustainability of enterprises. VKP has helped 1,317 individual and collective enterprises so far to get access to start-up grants via the matching grant program from formal financial institutions.

The community farm schools (CFS) train farmers in agriculture, community skill schools (CSS) provide vocational training in scalable local professions such as pottery, handcrafting, tailoring, etc. VKP has helped train 1,64,128 beneficiaries through CFSs and 33,861 beneficiaries through CSSs programmes.

The Women Livelihood Support Centre (WLSC) is a single point business service provider which provides access to a range business development support services to rural enterprises and entrepreneurs. There are 42 Women Livelihood Service Centers established across project districts. Through WLSC, technical support is provided through right experts and it acts as a one-stop center providing right guidance for enterprise creation and its promotion. The project also delivers last-mile support through carefully trained Enterprise Community Professionals (ECPs) who work at the grass-root levels of the campaign to personally touch the lives of these new entrepreneurs.

Divyadharshini said, "We endow women with professional training, certifications and mentoring that makes them employable (self or otherwise) and create further job markets. Our project is designed to work at the grass-root levels to personally touch women's lives. It has been an incredible journey so far and we are so proud of the impact that the Vaazhndhu Kaattuvom Project has had on the lives of women in rural Tamil Nadu. But we know that there is still so much work to be done. We are so grateful for the support of our stakeholders including the World Bank, other resource institutions like KVKs, RSETI and public/ private sector banks, our many other collaborators and supporters. Together, we are making a real difference in the lives of women and their families in rural Tamil Nadu."

As the Vaazhndhu Kaattuvom Project enters its sixth year of operation, its leaders remain committed to their mission of empowering women and marginalized communities through economic transformation. With a focus on holistic and diversified support, they are creating lasting change in the region, one woman at a time.

- Industry and Manufacture

11.1. Vedanta-Foxconn Selects Dholera SIR for First Semiconductor Facility in India

ET, 21 Feb. 2023

A joint venture of Indian conglomerate Vedanta and electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn has finalised the Dholera Special Investment Region near Ahmedabad city of Gujarat for setting up their semiconductor and display manufacturing facility, a senior state government official said on Monday. In the biggest ever corporate investment in the history of independent India, a joint venture of Vedanta and Foxconn in September last year signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Gujarat government to invest Rs 1,54,000 crore to set up the plant in the state. This will be the first manufacturing facility for semiconductors in India.

At that time, the joint venture company had not disclosed the exact location of the facility.

"After a detailed site analysis in consultation with Gujarat government authorities, the joint venture entity of Vedanta and Foxconn has selected Dholera SIR for setting up their semiconductor and display manufacturing facility. The project is in the advanced stage of evaluation by the government of India," the official said.

The MoU was signed in September last year in Gandhinagar in the presence of Minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw.

Both the companies would invest Rs 1,54,000 crore to set up the facility in Gujarat, which would create one lakh job opportunities, Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel had said on the occasion. Patel had also said his government will provide cooperation to set up the facility and to make it a success.

Notably, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing a poll rally in Bhavnagar in November ahead of the Assembly polls, had given clear indication that the mega semiconductor plant will come up at Dholera SIR, nearly 100 km from Ahmedabad.

This project is likely to get huge subsidies and incentives, like zero stamp duty on land purchase and subsidised water and electricity, under the 'Gujarat Semiconductor Policy 2022-27' announced by the state government in July last year.

Gujarat became the first state in the country to have such a dedicated policy for the semiconductor and display fabrication sector, a government official earlier said.

Under this policy, eligible projects will be given 75 per cent subsidy on the purchase of the first 200 acres of land for setting up manufacturing units. The eligible projects will be provided good quality water at the rate of Rs 12 per cubic metre for the first five years.

To encourage investors under the policy, the state government has also announced to reimburse 100 per cent of stamp duty which investors would pay for the first time for taking land on lease, sale or on land transfer.

11.2. Indian Railways Production Units on the fast track to achieving record production in 2022-23

Press Information Bureau, Feb. 17, 2023

Indian Railways Production Units – Chittaranjan Locomotive Works (CLW) at Chittaranjan, Banaras Locomotive Works (BLW) at Varanasi, Patiala Locomotive Works (PLW) at Patiala, have manufactured 785 electric locomotives in 2022-23 till 31st January.

Indian Railways Coach production units have ramped up LHB coach production by manufacturing 4,175 LHB coaches in 2022–2023, till 31st January, to ensure convenient and faster mobility.

Actual Production of LHB Coaches in 2022-23 (till January 2023)

Rail Coach Factory (RCF): 1221

Integral Coach Factory (ICF): 1891

Modern Coach Factory (MCF): 1063

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

12.1. We will be less China-centric in supply chains; India a key alternative: Eric Rondolat, CEO, Signify

ET, 6 Mar. 2023

As the humble light bulb becomes digitally connected, it will transform into a source for data, helping the world save big in energy costs, says Rondolat. In an interview covering a host of issues, he discusses the future of lighting, the company’s India strategy, the PLI scheme, and more.

In about a decade or more, the world will shift to 100% connected lights, up from less than 5% at present, says Eric Rondolat, chief executive officer and chair of the board of management at USD8.16 billion Signify, the world’s largest lighting maker. Founded as Philips, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the company has been in the lighting industry since 1891, and around 93 years in India. In 2016, the lighting business was spun off from Philips, and in 2018, it changed name to Signify, though retaining the Philips brand for many of its products.

Light will be a source of data, be it in airplanes, homes, offices, or streets. But before such a transformation can happen, the world has to shift to LEDs — for which only around 50% of the potential has been covered — or leapfrog to the more expensive connected lights.

In an exclusive interview with ET Prime, Rondolat, who has worked extensively in various positions across China, Australia, Argentina, France, and Singapore, discusses supply-chain disruptions caused by the pandemic, the future of lighting, the company’s India strategy, the PLI scheme, and more. Edited excerpts:

Incandescent bulbs were common for a long time, before CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) and LEDs (light-emitting diode) disrupted the segment. What’s after LEDs?

The product has effectively evolved over the years. The 100 watt incandescent is a 6 watt LED. The energy consumption dramatically reduces. That’s the big transition in the past 10 years. Now, we are bringing to the market a new technology that goes from 6 watts to 3 watts and gives the same output as 100 watts. And you don’t need to keep lights on all the time — with connected lights, you can save an additional 50%. And it goes to 1.5!

Lighting is the only industry in the world that has gone from consuming 100 watts to reducing it by a factor of close to 100. This is a huge transformation — from conventional to LEDs to connected lighting.

That’s sensor-based smart lighting…

From 6 watt to 3 watt, we are using low-power LEDs — a big shift. It costs a bit more, but lasts much longer — around 50,000 hours. With increase in the price of energy, the return on investment of such a lamp is more than ever. Probably 50% to 60% of the socket-based lighting today is LED. Between 80% to 90% of what we sell is LED. Rest is conventional. Connected lighting is less than 5% overall.

What difference will connected lighting make?

With connected lights, we can have lighting only if there is movement. Otherwise, they can be dimmed. That’s additional energy saving.

These lights [Interact brand for enterprises; Philips Smart Wi-Fi with WiZ, and Philips Hue for consumers] can be connected to networks, controlled remotely, and can provide information on their performance.

Interact enables data to be collected via sensors embedded in luminaires. Its application program interface (API) enables the integration of connected lighting with other management systems and offers data-enabled services.

Philips Smart Wi-Fi with WiZ for homes offers smart lighting with products [bulbs, tube lights, desk lamps, LED strips, etc.] that run on Wi-Fi and work straight out of the box.

Last year, we also introduced SpaceSense, a motion-detection technology for the WiZ lighting system that doesn’t require any sensor to be installed. It uses Wi-Fi signals that are already present in the room to detect motion – without the need of dedicated sensors and batteries. Wi-Fi signals are slightly disturbed when people move around in a room, like a ripple in a swimming pool. By measuring the small deviations in signal strength caused by those disturbances, the WiZ lights can determine if there is an object moving in the room, and automatically switch off or on.

"Lighting gives you much more than just light — it gives you data. There's so much information we can carry through the lighting infrastructure that I believe in 10 to 15 years 100% of the lights in use will be connected."

— Eric Rondolat, chief executive officer and chair of the board of management, Signify

Li-Fi [wireless communication tech which uses light to transmit data] was supposed to replace Wi-Fi? That didn’t really happen.

In our office, we use Li-Fi. It’s 2x to 5x faster than Wi-Fi. A lot of schools, mostly in Europe, have decided not to have Wi-Fi anymore. They use Li-Fi.

Our Li-Fi [called Trulifi] is available in India. It provides high-speed broadband data connection through light waves. Li-Fi connects to the IT infrastructure and turns wired Internet into wireless, using light waves. It offers speeds of 220mbps, enough to download a gigabyte in 40 seconds or work with multiple online tools without any hiccups. But speeds depend on the backhaul offered by the Internet service provider.

Li-Fi can’t penetrate walls and during the daytime when there’s sunlight its efficiency decreases. What are its applications?

The fact that it doesn’t go through the walls is seen by our customers as an advantage and not a drawback, because it gives safety and security. If you’re not on the premises, you cannot catch the signal. It uses the non-visible light spectrum, so if the light is on, the signal is on.

Apart from schools, another application is airplanes. In-flight Wi-Fi does not offer a great experience. Li-Fi is better. The big advantage of Li-Fi in airplanes is you can save 1.5 tonnes of cabling (which is at present used to connect entertainment systems to each seat) as you get all information via light. Some planes are being equipped to use Li-Fi, with data coming from light and you can connect your phone, tablet, or whatever, to the Internet.

How much are you investing in India? What are your priorities?

We’ve been here for 93 years. Over the years, we have developed a lot of activities in India, not only marketing and commercial, but R&D also. We have R&D centres in Noida, Bengaluru, and Pune, where we develop not only for India, but also for the world. For instance, India is our global hub for solar-lighting products, developing and manufacturing solar products for the world.

Has the PLI [production-linked incentive] scheme given a boost to manufacturing in India?

We are one of the beneficiaries under the lighting programme of PLI…. [But] we don’t manufacture specifically because of PLI. We have 48 local contract manufacturers. They make what we design. That probably brings additional employment for about 10,000 people here.

"If there are incentives, we may take advantage of those, but our decisions are not based on incentives. They're strategically based. India is in the top five of our markets. It's a very strategic market for us."

— Eric Rondolat, chief executive officer and chair of the board of management, Signify

What else can be done to ease manufacturing in India?

Incentives are great. But for us, every investment that we do has to be sustainable. When there is such an incentive, I believe it is good, because it will bring more manufacturing locally. We hope it will also bring quality, because for us, incentives should go in two different directions — one is investment to develop an activity; another to make sure that whatever is going to be produced will be at the right level of quality. If there are incentives, we may take advantage of those, but our decisions are not based on incentives. They’re strategically based.

India is among the top five of our markets, a strategic one. Our brand is strong, and we are also developing a second brand in India, called EcoLink, which was launched in 2019, and is into fans and lighting.

Signify has had supply-chain issues in China during the pandemic. Will this change your global sourcing strategy?

We may be less China centric than we were previously in the global supply chain, and we see India as an interesting alternative. That’s because of the size of the market, and the capability of the people to create not only for India, but also for the world.

So, are you moving manufacturing out of China to India?

At this point in time, when we incrementally increase, we will probably put more in India.

Signify’s 2022 sales grew 1.2% over 2021 at USD8.16 billion and Ebita margin declined from 11.6% to 10.1% in 2022. Signify missed the Street’s estimates.

The world has been very complicated in the past three years. With the Covid-19 crisis, big disruptions in the supply chain, and a war. The Russia-Ukraine war has translated into a high price of energy and a contraction of the market due to inflation, which have reduced the capacity of people to buy.

But with high energy prices, the world should have used more LEDs…

The transition has increased. Especially on the professional side of the business. Many of our customers — whether in warehouses, manufacturing plants, or in offices —want to benefit from a reduction in energy costs. You get savings between 50% and 70%. In the consumer market, it’s different. Inflation has limited the buying power of the consumer. So, we’ve seen the consumer market going down, especially in 2022. It’s exactly the reverse for the professional market.

In India, you have a factory in Vadodara. One factory and 48 contract manufacturers. Will you be setting up more factories?

We have one manufacturing facility, which is the cornerstone of our local-for-local strategy, and we also export from here. We make LED and conventional lighting products in that facility. It is the world’s largest manufacturing unit for GLS lamps [conventional] and is also India’s largest set-up for fluorescent lamps [tube lights]. We will scale up capacity in this facility.

Connected lighting accounts for less than 5% of the total lighting globally. What roadmap do you see for connected lighting?

For Signify it’s close to 25%. Overall, the penetration is less than 5%.

We think that this is the next transition in the lighting industry — from conventional to LED to connected, and to data enabled services — because the more we connect, the more data we get. We have connected on the planet 114 million light points by the end of 2022 [at the end of 2021, the figure was 96 million]. Those light points are making a big sensory network, because everywhere you have light, you have power. Now you have power and data.

You can connect sensors and get a lot of information about what is happening – temperature, humidity, sound, presence — so much that can be carried through the lighting infrastructure. The 114 million connected points will help us gather data and deliver data-enabled services, which is going to be the next transition.

This can help people do things like preventive maintenance, get information on presence, and send it to an HVAC (heating ventilating air conditioning) system. So, lighting gives you much more than just light — it gives you data on temperature, whether people are there, etc. There’s so much information we can carry through the lighting infrastructure that I believe in 10 to 15 years, 100% of the lights in use will be connected.

12.2. Who can forget the iconic Ambassador?

ET, Prime, 18 Feb. 2023, Shobha Mathur

A European car (in all aspects) that ruled Indian roads for about half a century. You may be wondering why I’m calling the Amby, made by Hindustan Motors (HM), European. Well, HM bought the rights to manufacture the car in India, and its tooling, from UK’s Morris Oxford in 1956. Even after its discontinuation in mid-2014, and sale of its rights to French carmaker Peugeot, there is a buzz that it will make a comeback in a new avatar in 2024. This would probably be Peugeot’s fifth attempt to be successful in India.

This brings us to the question: Why do European automakers fail to crack the Indian market?

The list of an unimpressive show by European carmakers in India is long. The Renault Nissan alliance, the Peugeot Citroen combine, and the Skoda Volkswagen partnership. They look dwarf in front of Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai Motor India, Kia, or homegrown Mahindra & Mahindra and Tata Motors.

Renault has plunged to the eighth slot in the passenger vehicle pecking order. Skoda Auto India is next. Volkswagen India is lumbering around at the eleventh rank. Citroen comes near the bottom with sales of just 6,719 units in a market pegged at about 32,17,775 units in FY23 till January.

Skoda and Renault, despite their almost two decades of presence in India, have managed a couple of remotely successful models. Take for instance the Skoda Octavia. It’s a good car leading the premium sedan segment (length 4500-4700mm), where competition is negligible.

Under its 2.0 transformation strategy, Skoda launched the Kushaq SUV in June 2021. But the model is currently selling 2,000-3,000 units monthly compared with 11,000-15,000 units of the Hyundai Creta. The combined sales of the Volkswagen Taigun and T-Roc were lower than the Kushaq’s in January.

The Renault Triber, Kiger SUVs that were supposed to turn the fortunes of Renault in India starting mid-2019 are also seeing their combined monthly sales vacillating between 2,500-6,000 units.

The problem statement

One can blame European carmakers' fundamental approach to the Indian market for their lacklustre show here. The cars are attractively designed and well-engineered. But the cost of ownership is high, while vehicle reliability is low. “Word of mouth does all the damage to the brand, and rightly so,” says Avik Chattopadhyay, co-founder, Expereal India, a branding and marketing consultancy.

If an automaker doesn’t build a strong after-sales ecosystem right from the start, it will fail. According to Chattopadhyay, all the European brands focus on sales and durability (model lasts longer but with regular breakdowns) and this makes their offering irrelevant to the Indian customer.

Asian carmakers stand out for their economy and premium-economy models that are more aligned with the Indian customer’s requirements.

“The product portfolio of European car manufacturers requires major changes and modifications which is costly and time-consuming. Also, Asian companies tend to post their decision makers in the Indian market, whereas in case of European companies they are posted in their global offices,” says Arun Malhotra, an automobile industry veteran.

In the luxury car segment, the story is quite different. Here, the big three – Mercedes-Benz India, BMW India, and Audi India – are all European players.

Experts say Europe is considered synonymous with global luxury products/brands and this has a positive rub on the customer’s mind. Also, the Indian customer vying for luxury brands is more global in his/her aspirations and tastes.

Staying put

European brands are still at it despite the sluggish growth in India.

This could be because they are a part of a larger group, where the overall numbers justify continued presence in India in the hope of clocking healthy sales volumes in the future. A presence in India could be advantageous if they have strong export commitments, as the country offers low-cost and high-value manufacturing compared to most parts of the world.

“The European badges could be playing a wait-and-watch game in terms of electrification, where they have products relevant to the Indian marketplace, in sync with what they offer in China,” Chattopadhyay elaborates.

Mitul Shah, head-research, at Reliance Securities, believes that over the years, except for Japanese and Korean carmakers, most foreign automakers didn’t achieve success primarily due to the lack of relevant products for the Indian market.

India for a long was dominated by small cars, but most foreign players launched premium cars. However, the trend is now fast shifting towards high-end SUVs.

Since India is one of the fastest-growing passenger-vehicle markets, most European manufacturers would prefer to stay on despite all the odds.

Consulting Editor - Auto

13.1. ONDC will help small retail survive onslaught of large tech-based e-com firms: Piyush Goyal

ET Gov. 9 Mar. 2023

ONDC is an initiative of the ministry to help small retailers expand their business and reduce the dominance of e-commerce giants.

The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a unified payments interface-type protocol, will help small retailers survive the onslaught of large tech-based e-commerce companies, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday. ONDC is an initiative of the ministry to help small retailers expand their business and reduce the dominance of e-commerce giants. It aims to build an open, interoperable network on which buyers and sellers can transact without needing to be present on the same platform.

It offers small retailers an opportunity to provide their services, and goods to buyers across the country through an e-commerce system, where buyers will be able to purchase the products, which are sold on any platform.

“ONDC will help our small retail survive the onslaught of large tech-based e-commerce companies,” Goyal said here at an event on the retail sector.

He said that the effort is to encourage small companies, and startups to integrate into the e-commerce ecosystem.

“Like UPI democratised payment systems, ONDC will democratise benefits of e-commerce,” he added. He also said that the consumer industry in India, and FMCGs have been victims of indiscriminate low-quality imports because of which people have suffered.

Without naming China, he said India's imports from one geography led to a significant increase in trade deficit between 2004-14 and broke the back of Indian manufacturing.

“When we are doing our free trade negotiations, the focus is on opportunities that India offers,” Goyal said adding the government has focused over the last few years to bring back manufacturing into India again.

He added that the government have been able to stem the fall of manufacturing, and now "we have to work to take it to greater heights".

Consumers will be equally responsible for making this happen, he said.

On promoting the manufacturing of high-quality goods, he said the government is working to introduce quality standards in a big way to to domestic manufacturing stand against the irrational competition, increase scale of production and become more competitive.

“Each consumer must commit to good quality, sustainable, indigenous products. Must promote message of respect for Indian products and opportunities that consumers offer,” he said.

Goyal said that the government, over the next two or three years, hoped to significantly ramp up focus on quality by bringing in reasonably strict and compulsory but practical quality standards on many more products so that Indian manufacturing is able to withstand irrational competition, increase the scale of production and become more competitive.

The minister said that as long as "we do not recognise" the importance of quality in our country, "we will not" be able to stop this influx of low quality products.

“Towards that end, we in the government are working to introduce quality standards in a much bigger way. We have now almost four times the number of quality control orders implemented in the last few years than what we had 10 years ago,” he said.

Goyal also called for the creation and strengthening of a virtuous circle with massive amounts of investment and focus both on the public sector and the private sector to create the necessary building blocks or infrastructure to help the Indian economy grow rapidly.

“I think we lost out by allowing a lot of indiscriminate, low quality, low cost goods coming into the country,” he added.

13.2. Rel Retail Aims to become World’s Biggest Garment Seller in 2 Years

ET, 28 Feb. 2023

Reliance Retail expects to become the world's biggest garment seller by volume in the next two years, driven by growing demand in the most populous market that is not showing any signs of a slowdown, a top executive said.

Customer spending is purely based on sentiment and India's growth story is intact because of a feel-good factor in the market, Reliance's fashion and lifestyle chief executive Akhilesh Prasad told ET. "India will be the fastest growing economy and there is no problem. So, we are managing customer sentiment which ensures the market grows."

With more than 4,000 fashion and apparel stores, including brands such as Trends, Centro, Azorte and Fashion Factory, Reliance is by far the market leader in the segment. The retailer sold 430 million pieces of garment in 2022, enough to clothe the entire population of the US and Canada.

Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani believes that the one who doesn’t grow actually shrinks, Prasad said. "And that's the brief from our leadership,” he said. “We sell the largest number of garments in the country and in a year or two, we should be the highest in the world. We have 1.4 billion people (in India), so the market is already here."

Reliance Retail has grown at 17% on a compounded annual rate over the last decade with consumer electronics expanding the fastest. However, in the past five years, growth has been majorly driven by fashion and lifestyle which expanded 43%, followed by grocery that grew 41%. Fashion contributes the highest to overall profitability with the widest margins at 24%.

The company said as income grows in India, the likelihood of growth in the premium segment is likely to be slightly faster now. Last week, the company opened the first standalone store of American brand Gap in India and said it would drive the partnership with India-centric merchandise as well as innovating technology like grab and go concepts.

"Gap has understood the India market better after that first stint. We have also sat intensely with them and explained how Indians have different usage of colour and a lot of seasonality," Prasad told ET during the Gap launch.

Fashion is the fastest-growing category in India’s tier-2 and tier-3 cities, with over 93% growth in fiscal 2022. In fact, online shopping novices typically start with purchases from the fashion segment.

Experts said India's consumption structure has been skewed in the past over a narrow base of richer consumers accounting for a large chunk of the overall market. However, as the economy is broadening across many more cities and the impact is reaching further down the income ladder, the opportunity for value-formats and value-brands is expanding, an area where Reliance is entering with a youth-centric brand.

14.1. Indian cars are more reliable than those sold in the US, says survey. But the good news ends here

ET, 22 Feb. 2023

An initial quality study by J.D. Power shows Indian cars on an average have 122 problems per 100 vehicles versus 180 problems for American cars. But don’t come to any conclusion just yet, as new vehicle owners in India face a higher number of design-related problems.

This one will certainly challenge a common perception most lay Indian car buyers have. That foreign-made cars are of superior quality compared to the ones manufactured locally. But an initial quality study (IQS) by J.D. Power, which is known for its benchmarking automotive industry reports, busts that myth.

The study shows that Indian cars on an average have 122 problems per 100 vehicles (2022 data). In the US, that number is 180 for 100 cars. In the US, the study measured the problems from a sample set of 84,165 car owners in the first 90 days of their ownership. In India, the survey was conducted on 7,397 new owners who had purchased vehicles up to six months before the survey date.

But this is where the good news ends.

For, new vehicle owners in India face a higher number of design-related problems, as per the J.D. Power study. The India survey for 2022 reveals that owners, who usually have more than two passengers and multiple cars, report markedly high problems. The US 2022 survey doesn’t cover this information.

Cars should ideally have very few problems in the first two years and automakers have a direct stake in it, as they mostly offer a two-year warranty. That is why a survey of how cars perform in their third year becomes important. A survey on this is done by J.D. Power in the USA which is called Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS). But the same isn’t done in India.

Also, one should note that the report in India on initial customer problems is done on a smaller sample size and it is less comprehensive.

Avik Chattopadhyay, founder, Expereal, a brand consultancy firm, believes J.D. Power will undertake the research (VDS) if enough automakers subscribe to it. But on the contrary, many automakers are opting out of IQS itself in India.

For Indians, a car is an important purchase given the high cost of ownership relative to his income. Indians have traditionally paid a high premium for vehicles that offer low maintenance cost and high resale value. Failure on this count had proven costly for many carmakers over the years. The Japanese have made their mark globally due to high quality and low cost of ownership. Ditto is the story for the Koreans. Both have set the bar for all others to follow in India.

Durability tests are ensured by all auto manufacturers. However, in India, as customers move out of the carmakers’ network after free services, it becomes difficult to track the durability issues unless reported. Although car manufacturers test the vehicle for functional and safety aspects, a customer may be interested in specific problems that he may be facing during the life cycle of the vehicle – for example issues can be as small as noise during driving etc., says Puneet Gupta, director, S&P Global Mobility.

The India survey ranks the top three models in each segment. Here is a list in the SUV and MPV segment.

The US survey also charts the top three models per segment. It additionally had brand ranking which was absent in the India report. We found the US survey quite interesting, and hope some of them can be incorporated in the Indian one.

Newly launched vehicles have more problems: Newly launched models reported 25 more problems compared to the continuing ones.

That is a cautionary note for Indians who have increasingly been drawn, as well as pushed by manufacturers, to buy the latest model launches. We found the quality gap between new and existing models sorely missing in the Indian report.

Premium vehicles have more problems: Premium brand buyers typically go for more technology in their vehicles, and this adds to the complexity and increases the likelihood of problems. Mass-market brands on an average have 175 problems, compared to 196 problems in premium brands. In the Indian context, premium means luxury brands. The J.D. Power report also highlights how Lexus and Genesis luxury brands from Toyota and Hyundai, respectively, buck the trend. This raises an interesting question about how these two brands can fare in India.

Infotainment systems have the most problems: In the US, infotainment systems represent 45 problems per 100 vehicles, or around 25% of the problems. In India, more than one-third (35%) of the problems cited are in the categories of audio/communication/entertainment/ navigation and features/controls/displays. Given Indians are heavy users of infotainment, the reliability of this can be an important purchase consideration.

Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) have more problems: ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles have 175 problems per 100 vehicles, compared with 240 for battery-powered vehicles excluding Tesla, which is the market leader and performs better at 226 problems than BEVs from other companies.

Ideally, in the long run BEVs, due to fewer moving parts, should have fewer problems and lower maintenance costs. However, given the technology is so new and the learning curve for automakers is probably translating into more problems. It is also possible that owners may face more time to understand how these vehicles work and this may lead to more people reporting problems. In the India report, BEVs were not mentioned, probably as its too small a segment at present.

So, how do product managers benchmark their vehicles for quality?

The quality benchmark

An industry insider says a carmaker chooses one or two vehicles in the relevant segment and does quality benchmarking. They strip the vehicles down to the components and the part quality and cost is cross referenced to its own design. It may also collect customer feedback generally as well as specifically, say, for problems faced in the infotainment system. By offering an improvement in design or feature or quality, the company hopes to build a selling point for its future vehicles.

In other words, product managers go far deeper than the consumer surveys done by J.D. Power. Like the Global NCAP (New Car Assessment Programme) ratings, surveys such as the one done by J.D. Power are used for external communications. In the US, if an agency/magazine is considered serious because of its credible track record and practices, or/and if it is widely publicised, automakers take them seriously.

Consumer Reports (CR), an American non-profit consumer organisation created way back in 1936 that is both famous and popular for its editorial independence, follows a different business model. CR claims to have no agenda other than the interests of consumers and sometimes has taken extraordinary steps – for example, once it declined to renew a car dealership's bulk subscription because of "the appearance of an impropriety". The organisation with 629 employees claims to have 7 million subscribers who pay for its physical/and digital content.

In India, we have a gap. Customers have to hope that the past record of a car is an indicator of its future performance. And that is one of the reasons why customers stay with a so-called reliable brand. They rely on online customer reviews and word of mouth.

The bottom line

Customers today are more willing to accept voice-recognition software errors, Android/Apple connectivity issues, or touchscreen and navigation problems. There will soon be a time when these won’t bother them. But this will impact resale values of cars.

The higher technology content, the speed to bring new cars to the market, and supply-chain disruptions all mean that more problems are on the way for the consumer. Just last week, Tesla stock dropped 5% after the US safety regulator discovered that its vehicles with “full self-driving beta” can incorrectly respond in intersections, ignore or read wrong traffic rules and traffic signs. On the other end of the spectrum, as most cars don’t have comprehensive over-the-air updates, safety problems can be identified and rectified late.

India may need stricter regulations and customers who are willing to pay for quality and independent insights into the products they buy.

14.2. Amazon’s aim to rule air cargo just got wings in India. Why this is only the start of a long haul

ET, 26 Feb. 2023

After building massive air-cargo operations across the US and Europe, Amazon Air has made a modest start in India. This will give Amazon India the operational flexibility it needs to handle the huge volume spikes, especially during festivals or sales seasons. This will also entice Prime users more, as express deliveries are an important part of the membership value proposition.

As Amazon Air started India operations in January this year, its maiden Asian venture and its first outside the US and Europe, Sarah Rhoads, vice-president, Amazon Global Air, said in an interview to an Amazon storyteller, “Our general approach at Amazon Air, which has proven successful throughout the past five years, is to crawl, then walk, then run.”

With its two leased cargo aircraft from Benglauru-based Quikjet, Amazon Air has indeed started crawling in India. And going by its global trajectory in air cargo, Amazon Air may soon start walking and running in India if all goes well.

The Seattle-based company launched its air-cargo service in 2016, amid an industry buzz that it intends to create an overnight-delivery network to match the logistics giants FedEx Corp and United Parcel Service — the two most active cargo flight operators globally with more than 473 and 289 aircraft, respectively. In the last few years, encouraged by the growth in online commerce, Amazon has aggressively grown its air fleet across key markets in the US and Europe to 110 aircraft in 70 on-airport locations. As per an analysis by the Chaddick Institute of Metropolitan Development at DePaul University in Chicago, about 73% of the US population now falls within 100 miles of an Amazon Air airport.

Globally, Amazon has made aggressive investments in logistics and fulfilment infrastructure to reinforce its position as a leader in delivery speed and customer experience. This has led to its logistics spends skyrocketing over the last decade. As per a report by Statista, Amazon’s shipping and fulfillment costs, which include costs incurred on sortation and delivery centres, transportation, and operating and staffing fulfilment centres, grew almost 40-fold between 2009 and 2021. Its revenue has grown 20-fold since 2009. For 2021, Amazon’s revenue stood at USD497 billion against logistics spends of over USD150 billion.

In India, the company continues to make regular fund infusions in its Amazon Transportation Services (ATS). In January this year, it invested INR400 crore in ATS after an INR375 crore investment in June last year. The idea is to own its logistics end-to-end and cut dependence on third-party logistics providers. The company has gradually scaled up its logistics capabilities to handle more than 85% of the deliveries on its own.

The how and why of Amazon Air’s India push

The lease agreement with Quikjet will help Amazon supplement its huge trucking network in India and have a strong grip over air shipments across its busiest lanes — Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. As per Amazon, it will start with two dedicated cargo aircraft, Boeing 737-800 freighters, branded as Prime Air, which can carry up to 23.9-tonne cargo or about 20,000 packages per flight. Amazon may be planning to have six such aircraft by the end of this year, as per reports.

The partnership with Quickjet is still in its early days and is settling down with ground-handling arrangements at airports and parking slots. Both Quikjet and Amazon may share the cost of operations which are very high in India.

The usual model for Amazon in other markets has been to operate out of regional airports close to its warehouses. This helps quickly move inventory to accommodate one- and two-day delivery schedules.

The two dedicated air freighters leased from Quikjet will give Amazon India the operational flexibility that it needs to handle huge volume spikes, especially during festivals or sales seasons. “...we sometimes require dedicated aircraft so we can tailor our flight schedules to accommodate our fulfillment centre timings and needs versus relying on another transportation provider’s schedule. This allows us end-to-end visibility of our customers' packages, and we can test the impact on the customer experience,” Rhoads said on the partnership with Quikjet.

Amazon's fast expanding base of Prime customers in India and other markets also makes it imperative to control air shipments. The number of Amazon Prime members around the world tops 200 million. Of this, around 5 million are in India. Express deliveries are an important part of the value proposition for Prime users besides its streaming service, free Kindle books, and access to exclusive deals. Amazon India, which recently talked about onboarding at least a ‘couple of million more’ sellers and increasing the user base to around 500 million in India, is definitely expecting a larger base of Prime users in the country.

In India, Amazon has built more than 60 fulfilment centres and more than 25 specialised sites dedicated to Amazon Fresh, a section for daily essentials and grocery, across multiple states. Until 2021, Amazon India’s fulfilment network in India, spread across a floor area of more than 10 million square feet, was estimated to be more than the size of 125 football fields.

Now, how Amazon will leverage these for air operations remains to be seen. “Besides airport-to-airport connectivity, Amazon will need time to build its pick-up and delivery capabilities and first- and last-mile capabilities to match the likes of Blue Dart,” says Vikash Khatri, co-founder of Aviral Consulting.

The air-cargo opportunity in India

Globally, the rise of e-commerce sales post-pandemic and the need for faster deliveries, besides congestion at seaports, are among the factors boosting the demand for air cargo. Last October, Craig Smyth, CEO of Paris-based Worldwide Flight Services, one of the world’s largest air cargo-handling services providers, said that e-commerce cargo accounts for a fifth of the cargo that the company is moving in several regions of the world and there are structural changes underway.

India’s air-cargo market may be facing similar dynamics if Amazon’s seriousness about the India market is an indication. After scheduled commercial flight operations took a hit in India during the pandemic, air freight turned a saviour for airlines which carry belly cargo for additional revenue. In India, the total air-cargo volume in fiscal 2022 was 3.14 million tonne compared with 2.5 million tonne in 2021, over 25% year-on-year growth. Of the 3.14 million tonne, 1.18 million tonne was domestic cargo.

E-commerce shipments that merit air movements may be only 5%-7%. So, e-commerce companies need to rationalise road-versus-air movements, because pure-line haul costs via air are at least 5X higher. Nevertheless, the growing base of direct-to-consumer (D2C) customers and categories such as high-street fashion, high-end watches and other luxury items are driving the push. “Many D2C brands do not have a network of warehouses across the country to enable regional shipping. Their customers want 48 to 72 hours delivery and you can do that only if you can connect your shipment via air,” says Dipanjan Banerjee, chief Business officer at Ecom Express.

"Being a retail provider of cargo space in a dedicated aircraft is a challenge because air cargo in India is still a very shallow market compared with the US and Europe. However, if you have one customer (the likes of Amazon) having huge volumes of captive cargo all over India, moving in different directions all through the year, you are very much like a huge express company such as DHL."

— Cyrus Guzder, chairman and managing director, AFL

However, there are risks in the Indian air-cargo market in terms of running dedicated freighters. For, cargo in India is seasonal or unidirectional. Also, air cargo is by and large volumetric. For example, ready-made garments’ cargo is light but bulky. So, you can fill the plane to its optimum capacity but in terms of weight, it will be underutilised, leading to the operation becoming unprofitable.

“Being a retail provider of cargo space in a dedicated aircraft is a challenge because air cargo in India is still a very shallow market compared with the US and Europe,” says Cyrus Guzder, chairman and managing director of logistics company AFL Pvt.Ltd. Quikjet is a joint venture between AFL and Ireland-based ASL Aviation Group.

“However, if you have one customer (the likes of Amazon) having huge volumes of captive cargo all over India, moving in different directions all through the year, you are very much like a huge express company such as DHL,” says Guzder. Operating freighters entails very high fixed costs, the biggest among them being fuel and parking.

Quickjet was started around 2007 by IL&FS, Tata Capital and IDFC. But it had to ground operations in 2013 amid high oil prices and other factors. Last year, Guzder, the former promoter of AFL, got into a partnership with Ireland-based ASL Aviation Group to revive Quickjet’s cargo business.

Though airlines are investing in capacity and expecting an uptick in demand, India still has a limited number of freighters. Blue Dart, which was the only dedicated cargo carrier in FY22, currently has eight aircraft in operation. The year 2022 saw the entry of Indigo with one cargo aircraft, SpiceXpress with four and Pradhan Air Express with one. Amazon Prime Air is now the fifth air-cargo player with two aircraft. Given the vast number of passenger services, there is a lot of belly-space capacity, which accounts for more than 80% of India’s air-cargo traffic. E-commerce companies have a fair share in the same. Amazon too, besides its partnership with Quickjet, will continue to use belly space of passenger airlines.

Industry insiders say once Amazon moves its loads to Quikjet’s freighters, it will free up significant belly capacity of many commercial planes it works with.

Amazon Air’s crawl-walk-run model

To begin with, Amazon Air started building out its network globally by leasing aircraft from operators. It largely depends on contractors to operate the flights. The contractors provide flight crews and maintenance as well as loading/unloading of planes. Amazon’s global pool of operators include Air Transport Services Group (ATSG), Atlas Air, Sun Country Airlines, Cargojet Airways, Silver Airways, and ASL Airlines. Amazon has also bought a minority equity stake in ATSG and Atlas Air to deepen its roots in air cargo. The company continues to invest towards strengthening relationships with partner airlines.

Later, Amazon Air’s business model shifted to acquiring good-quality used jets and converted passenger planes for its operations. For the first time, in 2021, it purchased 11 used Boeing 767-300 jets from US’s Delta Air Lines and Canadian air carrier WestJet, amid falling aeroplane prices because of the pandemic. The aircraft were expected to join Amazon’s Air cargo network in 2021 and 2022. “Having a mix of both leased and owned aircraft in our growing fleet allows us to better manage our operations, which in turn helps us to keep pace in meeting our customer promises,” said Rhoads said in a press release.

Amazon had been in the market for large freighters like the Airbus A330-300 for more than a year to potentially control intercontinental shipments from China, currently handled by third-party ocean and air-cargo carriers. This was to step up from its usual mix of mid-sized Boeing 767 aircraft that Amazon had been using in the initial years of operations. In October last year, it announced plans to add 10 Airbus A330-300 freighters to its fleet through a partnership with Hawaiian Airlines which will be deployed for flight operations this year.

Amazon has also been deepening its relationships with partner airlines and simultaneously expanding its air hubs and ground infrastructure in the US and Europe. For instance, in 2021 Amazon Air began operations at the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport site, a ‘superhub’ spanning 600 acres and designed to operate dozens of flights per day. The superhub is equipped with robotics technologies to sort and transport millions of packages. As per an analysis by Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at Depaul University, with the addition of half a dozen airports to its system, Amazon could potentially build a system providing second-day delivery to the entire US mainland from the Cincinnati area.

Amazon has synchronised flight schedules at its major hubs like Cincinnati and Wilmington to move packages between planes without long delays, so as to meet next-day or same-day delivery schedules.

The way ahead

How Amazon will scale up in India beyond two aircraft remains to be seen, but is most likely going to be a gradual but steady approach.

Last year, amidst flattening online sales, Amazon grew its air-cargo operations from 187 flights per day in March 2022 to 194 flights in September. However, in 2023, it may soften its flight-expansion plans due to reduced economic growth and cooling e-commerce demand. Amazon may also consider selling excess space on its cargo planes. The International Air Transport Association has indicated that global demand for air cargo, which had spiked during the pandemic, cooled down in 2022 to go back to near pre-pandemic levels.

ATSG, which operates a significant portion of Amazon’s air freight network, recently indicated that it may operate flights at reduced schedules and Amazon may not extend its leases on five Boeing 767-200 freighters, which are due to expire between May and September this year.

However, Amazon Air’s long-term growth outlook seems to be steady. “Although our prediction roughly 20 months ago that Amazon Air would have 200 planes by 2028 was speculative, it remains in our view reasonable. In fact, it may be conservative….” said Chaddick Institute, in a report.

Have a safe flight, Amazon Air.

15.1. Pvt Sector can Strengthen India’s Digital Ecosystem

ET, 13 Mar. 2023

The Indian government and the regulators have played a significant role in the development of the digital ecosystem, but there is a recognition that the private sector is crucial to ensure a strong structure for the platforms that have been created, said MasterCard chief executive officer Michael Miebach. In an interview with ET’s Saloni Shukla and MC Govardhana Rangan, Miebach said commercial sustainability is vital even for the government-backed projects and India has the opportunity to provide direction to the rest of the world with its upcoming data protection law that could marry the domestic needs with the global reality. Edited excerpts:

For several years, payments industry was a duopoly. What do mushrooming fintechs mean to the industry?

Payments have never been more competitive than it is today. It’s also more relevant... The world has become more digital than ever before. Post Covid, there has been massive digitisation acceleration, hence a lot more solutions are needed. Consumers want choice, governments want options. A lot of people come into the industry. That is fundamentally a good thing, because it’s the tide that raises every boat. Fintechs are our partners and some of our common fundamental building blocks of the payment ecosystem like cybersecurity solutions. It’s a global phenomenon and plays out in different ways in different markets.

India has written its own chapter of that by building out the tech stack with UPI (Unified Payments Interface, a real-time payment system), with Aadhaar. In an incredibly short period of time, it has driven tremendous change and tremendous scale.

Yes, UPI has been a great success. What is that we got right and got wrong in this digital payments evolution?

We are amazed looking at India on a whole range of things. One that first comes to mind is making it simple and scalable. Scaling it in the billions is done here better than anywhere else. We are working on micro and small businesses solutions; we’re working on solutions for subsistence farmers here. Those are all aspects that we believe are important for long-term market building as you keep pulling people into a digital economy. A digital economy has to work for everybody and India wrote the playbook on how to do that.

That’s the first leg. What more needs to be done as we progress?

In terms of what’s more work to do, nobody will ever say that there is enough done on cyber risk. So, that’s an area for us. And we see that as an opportunity to make the digital economy significantly scaled and even safer. We also think UPI is a tremendous growth story, but also the existing credit card use cases that are there will continue to grow. And we love to compete on that and partner with local banks on that.

You spoke about the simple and scalable models that have been built in India. Why a MasterCard, or a Visa, could not do what NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India that developed UPI) was able to do?

It’s important to take a step back and understand the various roles in play. So, if you are a government, what roles can you do? If you are a bank, what role do you have? And what’s the network doing? What's the technology company doing? We're mainly growing to scale through others. That is the business model through banks to fintechs or merchants; that is how we reached scale. The government, on the other hand, can say I want to do it, and I will do it, and then put the respective regulatory framework in mind. In India’s case, which is unique compared to many other countries, it also built technology at the same time. So, the path to scale is not a question. And we partner wherever we can along that journey. A digital economy that does include everybody is a much bigger playground for everybody and much better competition. And the innovation that India will see out of this digital economy is going to be unparalleled.

Global payments companies in the past have raised questions about regulation. Has that changed?

I see a deep belief in the role of the private sector. I also see the deep belief of the government that solving unsolved questions is the role of the government. And both together doesn’t give me a reason for worry. I think this is coming together nicely in India. It’s going to be good to invite private sector companies to innovate on applications and services that run on top of the India tech stack. And that is exactly the journey we’ve been over for the last 10 years in terms of our diversification. So, we will always play in payments. Wherever we can, we will try to have all solutions. But then, really the growth vectors are a lot in the adjacent services.

What are these adjacent services? How different is your business going to be several years down the line?

It’s instructive to look at the last 10 years. We’ve seen more changes in the payment ecosystem than we’ve seen in the last 60 years. And it’s going to be the same thing again. We are going to see more changes because the underlying fundamental technologies keep pushing this ecosystem forward. We have continued to diversify. Ten years ago, we were largely about consumer credit. Then we diversified to be more balanced into consumer credit and commercial payments solutions. Today, one third of our business is related to payment-related services. You look at some of the horizontal needs — cybersecurity is the first that comes to mind in a large digital world. Our stated strategy is, we will provide every relevant payment solution, safest payment solution, and the smartest payment solution. So, those are vectors of growth for us, we will continue to do more of this until it becomes mainstream.

You have a huge set-up in India. What has that done for your global business and how much it innovated for your local operations?

India has driven this terrific digital growth story. So, for us, being here and being part of that has been hugely helpful because you kind of see it happening in real time. A third of our employee base is based here. These are largely engineers doing artificial intelligence and machine learning. They are building products and solutions not only for India, but also for the region. We did not come to India for wage arbitrage. We came here for talent. We also liked the fact that for a truly global company like us, it works very well. We have a few other tech hubs like this, but nothing of the magnitude that we have here.

Even in the payments business, India took a different approach. There’s a feeling that there’s no level-playing field on both sides — be it private companies or NPCI. Is it so?

For the long-term sustainability of any solution, there’s got to be some sort of commercial sustainability. That’s the nature of the private sector. A world where UPI is a reality and is reaching every citizen on top of that, if you invite the private sector to innovate to solve a problem there will be some interest revenue involved. Is that going to happen? I don’t have any doubt.

I do think India is open for business and competition... We have shareholders, so we will look at commercial sustainability. But we will do this in a way that is not always about the next quarter. Financial inclusion, as India is pushing it, and rightly so, has been something that we've been doing for the last 12 years. And we’ve been doing it with a commercial sense of mind. It’s not a philanthropic activity, but it’s not the next quarter. This may pay back in 10 years…it’s long-term market building.

Many countries are eager to take the UPI model to their countries. How would that affect your business?

When I look at the global market and dialogues between countries to establish connections that haven't been there before, I think it’s fundamentally a good thing. Such bilateral activity is important. But I think there is a limit over time to bilateral connections because…it’s just gonna look like a spaghetti plate. So, at some point in time, I think it’d be important once you prove the point that it actually does work, to take a step back and say, how is this done most effectively for everybody to keep growing and make it a useful thing for everybody.

Data protection is an issue. Do global corporations have an issue with the way India is looking at data protection?

The data localisation regulation in India is not totally unique. It’s really about keeping your citizens’ data safe. And if you deal with countries where the standards are not the same, then that’s obviously a concern for any government. So, I think it’s very important that across the countries, there are common standards of data usage and data regulation, and trusted data exchanges. There are conversations going on today between the Europeans and the US, and it is part of the dialogue here with the United States and India as well. The starting point is that you want to keep your citizens’ data safe. We are fully compliant with these regulations. We’ve invested in India to keep the data on soil and doesn’t keep us from competing effectively here.

India is debating a data protection law. As a company which does business in more than 200 countries, what would you want to see in it?

Data protection has got to be simple, but it has to be principle oriented because every country will have its own individual considerations. What should be the guiding principles on any data privacy bill? I think the four principles are: the data is your data; you own it; you should control it: and it’s our job to keep it safe. It’s as simple as that. I think that the Data Protection Bill is going to do all of that. There are many countries today that don’t have data privacy law. India with the tech stack Aadhaar as the base and UPI on top of that, I think the data privacy bill will help hugely to put a wrapper around it and make it future proof. It’s a step forward for India versus other countries.

15.2. The power of youth-based innovation: Nurturing India's future entrepreneurs

ET Gov. 13 Mar. 2023

At the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi noted, “Growth of technology and innovation in the country will be driven by the innovative youth and increasing tech access in the nation.” Along those lines, youth-based innovation has had a significant impact on India’s economic, social, and cultural economy.

In 2020, NASSCOM reported that more than 40 percent of its documented sample of entrepreneurs were aged between 25-44 years. In 2022, NASSCOM further reported that 18 percent of all start-ups, and 20 percent of all unicorns, have at least one female founder. The report further noted that over 360 open innovation programmes were set up by academic institutions alone. Notably, almost 80 percent of India’s top 50 technology academic institutions have an incubator programme.

February saw the inaugural (Sherpa) meeting of the Urban20 (U20) engagement group, a city diplomacy initiative within the G20 ecosystem to raise critical issues of G20 cities during the G20 negotiations. Making a case for the role of youth in innovation, Chintan Vaishnav, Mission Director of Atal Innovation Mission, presented an example of an innovation hub consisting primarily of educational institutions in Ahmedabad.

The hub boasts of the LM College of Pharmacy which innovates in the field of pharmaceuticals and healthcare; VentureStudio at Ahmedabad University, which is a startup incubation center for diverse technological domains; SRISTI at Gujarat University, focused on reinforcing educational and institutional grassroots innovations; i-Hub, the Gujarat Student Startup and Innovation Hub, a multi-sectoral, multilayer startup assistance center; and the Indian Institute of Management, which houses the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, one of India’s oldest incubation centers. The entire setup is contained within a 6.8-kilometer radius and presents an excellent example of ‘innovation clusters’, geographic concentrations of organizations and institutions that are focused on innovation. Such clusters allow the exchange of knowledge and ideas in close proximity and provide an excellent opportunity to young adults to explore avenues of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Providing the youth with positive feedback and recognition for their early successes as well as opportunities to experience successful innovation, can help them develop their skills for innovation. This can increase their confidence in their ability to identify problems and find solutions, which are important life skills that are highly valued by employers. Although youth innovation is commonly associated with older teenagers and young adults, research has shown that teaching design, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills to younger children can also help develop their capacity for innovation.

At the U20 Sherpa Meeting, Ghulam Hassan Mir, who holds the position of Joint Commissioner, Planning in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, proposed an intriguing idea to induce changes in the behavior of school students, “Once you involve children from the very beginning, there is no need to make a major shift in behavioral change.” Small things taught to every age group can have a compounding result upon the culmination of their schooling.

The incorporation of a risk-taking appetite from a fairly young age has also been suggested by Inbal Arieli in her book titled ‘Chutzpah: Why Israel is a Hub of Innovation and Entrepreneurship’. She introduces the concept of ‘playing with junk’, or unstructured play, where children are encouraged to play sans rules – climb chairs, handle heavy wooden objects, and play with rustling pots and pans. In a scenario where children are at an increased risk of hurt, Arieli makes a case for the introduction of ambiguity in the life of children, eventually resulting in adults who are equipped with better problem-solving skills, self-confidence, and the ability to persist in the face of adversity than their Caucasian counterparts. The National Education Policy, approved by the Union Cabinet in 2020, also emphasizes the need for entrepreneurship education, which aims to provide students with the skills and knowledge needed to start and run their own businesses.

Collaboration between industry and academia at the higher education level is a critical aspect of promoting innovation and preparing Indian youth for an entrepreneurial future. This collaboration plays a pivotal role in bridging the skill gap by providing students with industry-specific knowledge and skills, thereby reducing the time and resources that organizations spend on training new professionals.

Furthermore, industry-academia collaboration promotes entrepreneurship by granting students access to industry mentors and networks, equipping them with the necessary skills to establish new businesses and create employment opportunities that can drive India's entrepreneurial growth. It is crucial to note that industry-academia collaboration is vital in fostering innovation and must be pursued collaboratively and cooperatively between the two entities.

Along these lines, the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) hosts multiple fellowship and internship programmes aimed at preparing the youth to be responsive to work environments, comprehend ethical practices related to professional development, and gain hands-on training and mentoring in urban development practice. During India’s G20 presidency, NIUA as the technical secretariat of U20, in collaboration with the Youth20 engagement group, is hosting the National Youth Conclave, India’s biggest youth summit that will bring together young minds and city champions to deliberate on pertinent themes of the U20 and Y20 priority areas, and foster bright leaders of tomorrow.

The Indian youth is not without role models in its ‘Entrepreneurs Under 30’ journey. Paytm's founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma began his entrepreneurial journey at just 19 years old with his first company, XS Corps. At 29, he started One97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm, which is now India's leading digital payments platform. Deepinder Goyal, the founder of Zomato, a popular food delivery and restaurant discovery platform, started his journey at the age of 20 with his first company, Foodiebay. At 28, he founded Zomato, which has since become a household name. Shashank ND, the founder of Practo, an online healthcare platform, started his journey at 24 with his first company, Enziq Solutions, an online marketing firm. At 28, he went on to found Practo, which has revolutionized the healthcare industry in India. Aditi Gupta is another young female entrepreneur who has made significant contributions to the field of women's health. At 23, she founded Menstrupedia, an online platform that educates girls and women about menstruation, breaking the taboo surrounding the topic in India. These individuals serve as inspiration for young Indians who aspire to become entrepreneurs, showing that age is not a barrier to success in the business world.

The youth require ample room to engage in creative exploration and develop a knack for innovation, both in virtual and tangible settings. Apart from physical spaces, they also need emotional assistance, opportunities to exchange thoughts with peers, adequate time to innovate, and guidance from adults. The presence of mentors and inspirational figures is crucial, as is access to information and technology. Most importantly, it is necessary to provide youngsters with the freedom to innovate without overly restrictive measures.

(Views are personal.)

- Services (Education, Healthcare, IT, R&D, Tourism, etc.)

16.1. Highly skilled manpower produced from CSIR-IICT a boon for pharma-biotech industry: MoS Jitendra Singh

ET Gov. 10 Mar. 2023

As Hyderabad is known to be a destination of health and wealth as well as the pharma capital of the region, the specialized and skilled manpower developed by the IICT should find a naturally integral place in the pharma and biotech industry of Hyderabad in particular and India in general.

Union Minister of State (I/C) Science & Technology Jitendra Singh addresses an exclusive session of industrialists, start-ups and innovators at IICT Hyderabad on Thursday.

The Union Minister of State (I/C) Science & Technology Jitendra Singh has said the industry should be ready to take up the responsibility of being equal stakeholder in start-ups, right from the moment the project is conceived. This, he said, is essential not only for sustaining the start-ups in the long run by linking them with livelihood, but also for bringing about value addition to the Indian industry as per the contemporary global benchmarks.

Addressing an exclusive session of industrialists, start-ups and innovators at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) in Hyderabad on Thursday Jitendra Singh said, "Hyderabad is known to be a destination of health and wealth as well as the pharma capital of the region. Therefore, the specialized and skilled manpower developed by the IICT should find a naturally integral place in the pharma and biotech industry of Hyderabad in particular and India in general."

The minister exhorted the industry leaders to set up an institutionalized mechanism and come forth with precise and concrete proposals for doing away with unwarranted regulations and options to avoid procedural delays.

Hyderabad Pharma City (HPC) under making is the world’s largest integrated cluster in Hyderabad for pharmaceutical industries with thrust on R&D and manufacturing, Singh observed and said, the cluster has been recognized as National Investment and Manufacturing Zone (NIMZ) by the Government of India, given its national and international importance. Developed at international standards, Hyderabad Pharma City will harness the true value of symbiotic co-existence across pharmaceutical value chain, the minister added.

Each of the 37 CSIR (Council of Scientific & Industrial Research) labs spread across the country is dedicated to a different exclusive area of work and the ongoing "One Week, One Lab" campaign is offering an opportunity to each one of them to showcase the work being done by it so that others can avail of it and stakeholders learn about it. Keeping in tune with the transformations, the new tagline for CSIR is - “CSIR-The Innovation Engine of India”. With a pool of over 4,500 scientists, CSIR can reorient and revitalize to emerge as global centers of innovations in the Amrit Kaal, the minister said.

"Out of 130 countries, we were at number 81 in the Global Innovation Index till 2015, but we have jumped to 40th position in 2022. Today India is among the top three countries in the world in terms of PhDs and we are among the top three countries in the world in terms of start-up ecosystem,” the minister noted.

Addressing the heads of academic and research institutes, leaders from various industries (pharma, biotech, agro, power), scientists, staff, students and general public, Jitendra Singh said CSIR-IICT in almost 80 years of its existence, vigorously pursued basic as well as translational research, and is working towards sustainable development goals. He added that CSIR-IICT excelled in both basic and applied research areas of chemistry and chemical technologies. He also informed that the institute houses state-of-art pilot plant facilities to undertake industrial projects in a “concept to commercialization” mode.

16.2. Aurobindo Unit Receives USFDA Nod for Drug to Treat Multiple Myeloma

ET, 9 Mar. 2023

Hyderabad-headquartered Aurobindo Pharma manufactures a wide range of generic pharmaceuticals, branded speciality pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients globally in over 150 countries.

Aurobindo Pharma on Wednesday said its wholly-owned subsidiary firm Eugia Pharma Specialities has received final approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) to manufacture and market Lenalidomide Capsules used to treat multiple myeloma. Lenalidomide Capsules -- 2.5 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg, 15 mg, 20 mg, and 25 mg -- are bioequivalent and therapeutically equivalent to the Reference Listed Drug (RLD), Revlimid Capsules -- 2.5 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg, 15 mg, 20 mg, and 25 mg -- of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, the firm said in a statement.

The product is expected to be launched in October 2023.

"This is the 155th ANDA (including 9 tentative approvals received) out of Eugia Pharma Speciality Group (EPSG) facilities, manufacturing both oral and sterile speciality products," it said.

"The approved product is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with Multiple myeloma, in combination with Dexamethasone."

Hyderabad-headquartered Aurobindo Pharma manufactures a wide range of generic pharmaceuticals, branded speciality pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients globally in over 150 countries.

17.1. AI powered Bhashini to break the internet’s language barrier, foster digital inclusion and digital empowerment

ET Gov. 9 Mar. 2023

The AI powered Bhashini project will completely transform the way people in India access the Internet. Instead of accessing internet content in English, they will do so in their own language.

More than half of India’s population is unable to access internet content in English–they will be the major beneficiaries of the Bhashini project.

The Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution lists 22 languages, which have been referred to as scheduled language. But the country is home to 122 major languages and 1,599 dialects and mother tongues. Despite the rich linguistic diversity, much of the internet content in the country is available only in English. The Central Government plans to break the language barrier of the internet through an AI powered translation system called Bhashini.

Part of the National Language Translation Mission, Bhashini is a translation system that will connect Indians, who use local languages, with the internet. The non-English speaking masses in the country will be able to access global content and upload their own content in their own language. Bhashini is also expected to encourage the participation of startups and individual innovators by giving them easy access to AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources.

RS Sharma, who has headed the National Health Authority, TRAI and UIDAI in the past, sees Bhashini as a landmark project that will lead to digital inclusion and digital empowerment. He says, “the AI powered Bhashini project will transform the way people in India access the internet. Instead of accessing internet content in English, they will do so in their own language. There will be an increase in content in Indian languages.”

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will soon place the Bhashini project before the Union Cabinet. The idea of an AI powered national language translation system is one of the key missions identified by the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC).

Along with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, and the Department of Science and Technology are the lead agencies for this project. The technologies that the project will use include: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Understand (NLU), Machine Learning (ML), and Text to Speech (TTS).

Sharma says, “With the proliferation of smartphones throughout the country, and 5G technology being round the corner, the scope of the Bhashini project is staggering. The project has the potential to catalyse a new kind of internet–one that is in local languages."

More than half of India’s population is unable to access internet content in English–they will be the major beneficiaries of the Bhashini project. The vision statement of the Bhashini project declares: “Harness natural language technologies to enable a diverse ecosystem of contributors, partnering entities and citizens for the purpose of transcending language barriers, thereby ensuring digital inclusion and digital empowerment in an Atma Nirbhar Bharat.”

17.2. Workers equipped with advanced digital skills contribute Rs 10.9 lakh cr to India's GDP, reveals AWS-sponsored study

ET Gov. 24 Feb. 2023

91 percent of workers who use advanced digital skills express higher job satisfaction compared to 74 percent of workers with basic digital skills.

Workers in India equipped with advanced digital skills, including cloud architecture or software development, contributed an estimated Rs 10.9 lakh crore (USD 507.9 billion) to India's annual gross domestic product, an AWS-commissioned study said on Wednesday. According to the study conducted by Gallup on behalf of AWS, workers with advanced digital skills earn 92 per cent higher salaries in India compared to those with a similar education who do not use digital skills at work.

"Digital skills yield big economic benefits. We have seen dividends for the GDP for India's GDP to the tune of about USD 508 billion. People who have advanced digital skills, command higher salaries," Gallup, Managing Consultant, Rohit Kar said while sharing findings of the report.

The study was conducted in two phases covering 2,005 working adults and 769 employers in India across a variety of public and private sector organizations and industries.

The study classifies basic digital skills as the ability to use email, word processors, other office productivity software, and social media. Intermediate digital skills include drag-and-drop website design, troubleshooting applications, and data analysis. Advanced digital skills include cloud architecture or maintenance, software or application development, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning.

According to the study, 91 percent of workers who use advanced digital skills express higher job satisfaction compared to 74 percent of workers with basic digital skills.

The study found that 80 percent organizations in India that employ workers with advanced digital skills report higher annual revenue growth, but 88 per cent of organizations are facing hiring issues.

AWS India Private Limited, Head of Training and Certification, Amit Mehta said that there is stickiness for these job roles in the industry for careers in cloud, AI, ML, Big Data Analysis because in times of economic distress or slowdown, people need to deploy more of the application on cloud.

The study found that 21 percent of Indian organizations that run most of their business on the cloud report a doubling of annual revenue or more, compared to 9 percent of those that use the cloud for some or none of their business. Cloud-based organizations are also 15 percentage points more likely to have introduced a new or improved product within the last two years.

In response to a question regarding lay-off and opportunity available in market for them, Mehta said that there's a great opportunity for them upskill themselves.

The study report said that with the digital transformation of businesses and government agencies accelerating around the world, demand for advanced digital workers will remain strong in the coming years.

"93 per cent of Indian employers surveyed reported they were seeking to fill openings that require digital skills, but 88 per cent said it is challenging to find the talent they need. A possible barrier is that 60 per cent of Indian organizations prefer a bachelor's degree, even for entry-level IT staff," the report said.

According to the study, many Indian firms have started to recognize that accepting industry certifications can ease their hiring challenges.

18.1. India visit helped Co deepen tie-ups, seek support in new areas: Foxconn Chairman

ET, 5 Mar. 2023

His visit underlines Foxconn’s heightened interest in India, which is positioning itself as an alternative manufacturing hub for electronics for global companies working to diversify their supply chain away from China. Liu had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday.

Foxconn chairman Young Liu on Saturday said his trip to India supported the Taiwanese contract manufacturer’s efforts to deepen existing tie-ups and “seek cooperation in new areas such as semiconductor development and electric vehicles”.

Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn) said negotiations with various state governments and internal reviews to invest in the country are going on although the world’s largest contract manufacturer did not sign any definitive pacts during Liu’s six-day trip to the country that ended on Saturday.

“On the basis to share, collaborate and thrive together, Foxconn will continue to communicate with local governments to seek the most beneficial development opportunities for the company and all stakeholders,” Liu said in a statement.

Karnataka government had on Friday said Foxconn plans to set up an electronics manufacturing and assembly unit on the outskirts of Bengaluru on a 300-acre plot of land. People aware of the negotiations said Foxconn is expected to invest somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion in phases during 2023 to 2027 in the new Karnataka plant to make iPhones and other electronic products.

The Karnataka announcement came a day after the Telangana government said Foxconn plans to set up a manufacturing facility in the state. Both state governments said that Foxconn plants will potentially employ over 100,000 people each over 10 years.

“Foxconn hopes its investments will lead to direct and indirect jobs growth for local communities,” the company said in its statement. “Employment figures currently being discussed in media do not equate to direct jobs by Foxconn,” it added.

Foxconn has also not released any investment figures. “As a publicly listed company, Foxconn will disclose investment plans at the appropriate time as required by Taiwan securities regulators,” the company said.

Plans for the two new plants in addition to increasing capacity at its existing facilities underline Foxconn’s rapid expansion in India, with production of millions of new iPhones at the heart of its strategy.

Foxconn currently has two facilities in the country — one at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu under Hon Hai where it makes iPhones, and the other operated by Bharat FIH (previously Rising Star) in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, which acts as a contract manufacturer for brands such as Xiaomi.

The company’s increased India push is driven by strong domestic demand for iPhones as well as a surge in exports, led by the diversification of global supply chains away from China.

Besides contract manufacturing of smartphones, Foxconn has formed a joint venture with the Vedanta Group to set up a manufacturing facility for semiconductors. In the biggest corporate investment in the history of independent India, the JV had in September last year signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Gujarat government to invest ₹154,000 crore to set up the plant in the state.

The plant to be set up in Dholera Special Investment Region near Ahmedabad will manufacture semiconductors and displays. The venture has sought support of $5.6 billion from the Indian government under the ₹76,000-crore Semicon India programme. During his previous meeting with Modi in June last year, Liu had expressed interest in the manufacturing of electric vehicles in India.

18.2. Why New Delhi needs to mount an India-driven global health-diplomacy push, and what it needs to do

ET, 23 Feb. 2023

The pandemic has catapulted India to the high table of global health diplomacy. Using its position as the world’s leading supplier of vaccines and medicines, it has wielded its soft power to great effect, grabbing significant political clout internationally. In this backdrop, what are the salient aspects that India needs to consider to consolidate its position further?

The coronavirus pandemic, described by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a “health emergency”, upended public-health projections and exposed the fragility of healthcare ecosystems, particularly in the global south. On the one hand, India used soft power and global pharmaceutical dominance, backed by effective state policy, to deal with the situation. On the other, China’s vaccine certification and supply since 2015 under the WHO banner came under scrutiny.

As of February 7, data from 223 countries showed 672 million cases globally, with India accounting for 44.69 million cases.

Even as the coronavirus wreaked havoc across nations, the calamity sparked a debate on the need to replace WHO with a more effective institution, and how India can play a lead role in addressing the emerging needs of the global south. For this, the existing power structures will have to go through tectonic shifts in the public perception of developing and underdeveloped countries as the world moves towards multi-polarity.

As the dust settles, India finds itself catapulted to the high table of global health diplomacy. Using its position as the world’s leading supplier of vaccines and medicines, it has wielded its soft power to great effect, grabbing political clout in the international arena and effectively countering the influence of China. In this backdrop, what are the salient aspects that India needs to consider to build on its gains and consolidate its position further?

Africa’s fragile healthcare ecosystems

In 1945, with the founding of the United Nations, WHO was established as a global organisation to address health challenges (on April 7, 1948). WHO has remained insulated and siloed while enjoying a broad consensus of credibility, despite the polarised nature of public debate. The eradication of smallpox, after the former Soviet Union proposed mass immunisation and vaccination in 1958, was one of its most notable successes. A concerted global effort enabled it to be eradicated in 1980, becoming one of the cornerstones of international coordinated effort.

However, cracks have emerged in this venerable institution. There have been widespread allegations of mismanagement of the 2008 H1N1 influenza and the 2014 Ebola outbreaks. The allegations pointed to undue influence by client countries, who were unwilling to label these outbreaks as international because it would have affected their economic interests.

A lack of stewardship by WHO was also evident, as was underinvestment in healthcare, particularly on the African continent, with poor health statistics —an average of 3.10 intensive care beds and 0.97 ventilators per 100,000 people and 2.42 doctors per 100,000 people trained in intensive care. This varied by geographical location and income group among countries. However, the lack of verifiable data prevented an accurate assessment. Covid-19 also required an elaborate ‘detect, assess, and treat’ approach, imposing a heavy burden on the infrastructure.

India’s pharma muscle

India had 5% of the world market in 1969 and has grown to become the third largest producer in the world, while it ranks 14th in terms of value as a pharmaceutical hub. The country has an estimated 20% share in global supply by volume, valued at USD 50 billion, and an expected growth rate of 11%-12%, with a market size expected to reach USD 65 billion by 2024 and USD130 billion by 2030. Pharmaceuticals accounted for USD24.6 billion in exports in FY22. It manufactures 60% of world’s vaccines and 20% of generic medicines.

During the pandemic, India supplied hydroxychloroquine and paracetamol to over 87 countries, including the United States, and spent about USD16 million on drugs and test kits for export to about 90 countries. In addition, it has rapidly developed and provided mechanisms for fast-track approval of two Covid-19 vaccines, Covaxin and Covishield, developed by Bharat Biotech and the Serum Institute of India, respectively. These vaccines have been exported to more than 74 countries, including those in Latin America and Africa.

Despite the success of the pharmaceutical industry, India continues to be dependent on China for more than 70% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients. The Indian government, under the Make in India programme, has announced a systematic reduction in dependence for these critical components by proposing an incentive package of INR21,940 crore under production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes in Pharma Vision 2020.

In what is perhaps the first study to be published in an open access journal, Ayurveda has shown its mettle. The conceptual framework of the epidemic has been described in the Charaka Samhita’s Vimana Sthana, a description of the impact of air, water, and environment on human health. The study prescribed a diet and regimen of medicines that would lead to complete recovery by the seventh day.

The WHO has recognised the importance and impact of traditional medicine, with 80% of the world’s population and 170 of the 194 member states using it. WHO describes traditional medicine as “the sum of knowledge and indigenous practices for maintaining health and preventing disease”. The Government of India and WHO have collaborated on traditional medicine to establish a global centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, as a hub to build evidence-based policy that will move healthcare towards wellness in a sustainable manner.

The influence of soft power

Nation states use soft power to influence behaviour towards certain outcomes, a concept described by American political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. India’s version of soft power is derived from its dharmic values of civilisation and its policy of inclusiveness. A long history of engagement with multilateral organisations also provides it with additional levers to influence other countries to agree with its stated objectives.

Indianised global health diplomacy

Kickbusch et al. define global health diplomacy as “multilevel, multi-actor negotiations that shape the global health policy environment”. It uses health principles in negotiations to achieve political or economic goals. Health diplomacy enhances international reputation by demonstrating a consistent commitment to ethical issues. It is aimed at strengthening health services to reduce poverty and improve health equity.

China’s emergence as an Asian rival vying for geopolitical influence in Asia, and particularly Africa, was set against the landscape of the SARS CoV-2 virus in China. The unfortunate clash in Galwan, Ladakh, compounded this. Before the pandemic, the African continent was overly dependent on other countries, especially for the most basic necessities. India had leveraged its soft power as an effective diplomatic tool by offering humanitarian aid to several African countries, thereby strengthening its relations with them and countering the rise of Chinese influence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the concept of vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world is one family) to pitch for common development goals and a rule-based global order for international peace.

Before the pandemic, health diplomacy was a mere pixel in the pig picture. India had provided lines of credit (LOCs) worth USD18 million to Zambia for the completion of 650 primary health clinics in 2015; USD71.4 million to Côte d'Ivoire in 2017 for capacity expansion of hospitals; and USD8 million LOC to Seychelles for implementation of an integrated health information system. The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme, implemented under the Ministry of External Affairs, also provided specialised training in health infrastructure and administration, and medical informatics.

At the height of the pandemic, India used a combination of soft power and global pharmaceutical dominance, exemplified by effective state policy. It stepped up efforts under 'Mission Sagar' by sending 1,000 tonnes of rice and 100,000 tablets of hydroxychloroquine to Madagascar, and transported 270 tonnes of food aid to Sudan, Djibouti, and Eritrea.

“Vaccine maitri” or “vaccine friendship” was another example of soft-power diplomacy, under which Covid-19 vaccines were distributed to African countries: Morocco (700,000); Mauritius (200,000); Seychelles (50,000); Egypt (50,000); Algeria (50,000); South Africa (1 million); Ghana (600,000); Congo (1.71 million); Angola (624,000); Kenya (1.02 million); Lesotho (36,000); Rwanda (200,000); and Senegal (324,000).

India supplied vaccine doses to over 75 countries in addition to handling domestic demands. It has also provided technical assistance in the form of Arogya Setu, E-Gram Swaraj, and the CoWin platform to facilitate the implementation of vaccination plans.

Future of global health diplomacy

Intense geopolitical rivalry hampered the early pandemic response between nation states. Historically, the global south has faced health inequalities that also exacerbated vaccine-distribution gaps in the absence of transparency and common data pools. WHO stood by as Western countries indulged in futile vaccine nationalism, throttling supply chains in the name of recouping research and development costs.

While the emergence of Chinese vaccine certification and supply from 2015 under the WHO banner began to be questioned globally, the conduct of the US as a responsible world power was found inappropriate. Rather, the US administration’s restriction on raw-material supplies to Indian manufacturers was selfish and politically motivated. This behaviour by the US came at a time when India was trying to produce excess capacity and supply vaccines on a war footing to more than a hundred nations.

On the other hand, global health can be an effective way for India to expand its sphere of influence. It is uniquely positioned to do this, given its historical stewardship and the combination of public and private enterprise.

Geopolitics is a field dotted with innovation and corporate roles, involving a range of factors such as data ownership, science, and technology. The pandemic has forced a reassessment of how global politics will shape international finance and healthcare, and the restoration of values and institutional hierarchies. This has strengthened calls to decolonise healthcare, and to abandon Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), on which questions has been raised.

Global cooperation in public health and the co-option of economic policies are essential for collective health security. The vacuum created by the muted role of the World Health Organization (WHO) has strengthened India’s case for a new institution-led policy framework, especially for the global south, despite the local challenges in healthcare.

19.1. Medanta Sees New Hospitals & Services, Complex Specialities Boosting Margins

ET, 18 Feb. 2023

Global Health, which operates the hospital chain Medanta, expects complex specialities, new services, new hospitals, cost optimisation and higher tariffs to boost its operating profit margins in the coming quarters as non-Covid hospital admissions return to normal.

Medanta chairman Naresh Trehan said there is a shift in trend from Covid-19 years, as there is less contribution from internal medicine and an increase in cases from complex specialities.

“We are seeing more and more complicated cases, which is driving growth… Also, the new facilities like Lucknow and Patna are all ramping up well,” he said.

Lucknow facility will become Medanta’s second-biggest hospital with 900 beds after its Gurgram flagship with 1,391 operational beds. Patna Medanta is proposed to have a capacity of 650 beds.

The hospital chain is also considering tariff increases in the coming days, along with undertaking cost optimisation initiatives on the manpower and material side, officials said. “Over the course of the last couple of years, the company hasn’t taken any tariff increase…(hence) some amount of tariff increase is expected,” Pankaj Sahni, group CEO and director of Medanta, told ET.

“We always maintained that performance, which is in the range of 22-25% Ebitda margins, is a really very good performance. We don’t see any reason why Medanta would not be able to deliver that kind of performance,” Sahni said.

Trehan said medical tourism is set to pick up and it hasn’t yet reached the pre-pandemic levels.

“We are getting much more traction now from our agencies around the world,” he said. “So, I'm sure this will actually culminate in a much, much better inflow of patients as we move forward.”.

According to Trehan, medical tourism currently contributes 6-7% of Medanta’s revenue against 10-12% before the pandemic.

The chain had in November last year raised about ₹2,205 crore in its initial public offering (IPO), including ₹500 crore in a fresh issue.

Besides Lucknow and Patna, Medanta is also setting up a 550-bed greenfield multi-speciality quaternary care hospital in Noida and has signed an operation and management (O&M) agreement to establish a 300-bed hospital in Indore. These two facilities would take 2-3 years to become operational, officials said. The company is adding 700 beds across its existing hospitals.

Sahni said Medanta added 170 new beds across its network in nine months ended December. As on December 31, it had 2,571 beds in its network. The company has also added over 130 specialist doctors, including Dr Randeep Guleria, former director of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi to head its internal, respiratory and sleep medicine department.

It also launched a mother and child speciality in its Gurugram and Lucknow hospitals and started home care services, diagnostic division and primary clinics.

Its matured hospitals including Gurugram, Ranchi and Indore contribute over two-thirds of Medanta’s revenue.

19.2. Quantum computing, data analytics, AI to transform Indian Railways: Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

ET Gov. 10 Mr. 2023

Quantum computing, data analytics, and Artificial Intelligence are being deployed by the Indian Railways to improve the management of railway assets, enhance the efficiency of train schedules, and reduce operational costs.

The Union Minister for Railways, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw wants to transform the Indian Railways by using new and emerging technologies. Speaking at a technical seminar organized by the Centre of Railways Information System (CRIS), he suggested that Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing, and data analytics should be deployed to bring efficiency to the operations of the Indian Railways.

He talked about the transformative role that the use of Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing, and data analytics could play in the Indian Railways. He said that a sudden change in our way of working and the technologies that we use is needed for enabling India to catch up with the rest of the world. He exhorted the Indian Railways to lead the transformation in India by adopting latest technologies.

The minister said that the Modi government was determined to do everything that was in the interest of the country and of the railways.

“India cherishes innovation; we believe in adopting new technologies to make better things for people. Quantum computing technology is one of the steps in this direction. This technology brings us close to data safety. By using technologies like quantum technology, we can make efficient use of railway assets and run trains more efficiently,” the minister said.

He said that he believed that by using data analytics, the Indian Railways can garner valuable insights for optimizing its assets and operations. “Data analytics can be used to improve the management of railway assets, enhance the efficiency of train schedules, and reduce operational costs. By analyzing data, the Indian Railways can predict the demand for trains and plan to provide adequate resources. This will reduce congestion and minimize delays,” he said.

DK Singh, Managing Director, Centre of Railways Information System (CRIS), said during the seminar that CRIS was collaborating with ISRO to develop a system for live tracking of trains. The system is called Real Time Train Information System (RTIS). “RTIS will help the Indian Railways in running its trains safely and efficiently,” he said. He also informed that Satcom and Satnav-based IoT devices were being deployed on the trains.

Deployment of emerging technologies have been going on in the Indian Railways for several years. The AI powered SMART coaches have already been deployed on several routes. These SMART coaches feature a single-window platform for monitoring the train’s health– from coach diagnosis to security and surveillance system. To the passengers, the SMART coaches provide world-class facilities with the help of an intelligent sensor-based system.

The Indian Railways is using AI for monitoring the condition of rail tracks. The repair and replace calendar developed by AI technology improves the punctuality of trains. AI is also being used to monitor and improve the railway signaling system. With the help of AI, the system will be able to predict the failure of the signaling system and transfer data through wireless medium using 3G, 4G, 5G and other telecom networks.

20.1. To strengthen safety oversight capabilities, DGCA to hire 400 tech staff, increase offices to 19: DG Arun Kumar, Government News

ET Gov. 28 Feb. 2023

Currently, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has around 1,300 employees, including about 700 technical staff.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) plans to ramp up its technical staff to 1,100 by hiring another 400 people in the next one to two years as well as increase the number of offices to 19 as the watchdog strengthens the safety oversight capabilities, according to its chief Arun Kumar.

Kumar, who will be superannuating on February 28 after being at the helm for nearly four years, described his tenure as a "roller coaster ride" during which various steps were taken to improve aviation safety and the regulator also dealt with multiple headwinds, including engine issues and safety concerns over SpiceJet.

India's aviation safety oversight ranking jumping to the 55th position from 112th place earlier under the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) coordinated validation mission, rollout of eGCA for processes at the regulator, introduction of regulations for transgenders who want to be pilots as well as compulsory breath analyser tests for air traffic controllers are among the key developments during the tenure.

"The country's aviation safety oversight capability has improved substantially and DGCA in its annual surveillance programme conducts more than 4,000 spot checks/audits/night surveillance," Kumar told PTI in an interview.

Currently, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has around 1,300 employees, including about 700 technical staff.

"The number of technical staff is expected to increase by 400 in the next one to two years... also, the number of offices of the DGCA in different parts of the country will increase to 19 from the current 14 in the near term," he said.

When asked about his tenure, Kumar, an IAS officer of the 1989 Haryana cadre, said it has been a "roller coaster ride".

"It was fulfilling as we took various steps to improve aviation safety. eGCA was a game changer and made life easier for all stakeholders," he asserted.

"Among the biggest achievements are India's position going up in the ICAO safety rankings and the full rollout of the eGCA. With the high ICAO ranking, the world knows that India is a better country when it comes to aviation safety," Kumar said.

During the pandemic, the DGCA chief said that India did what other countries were doing and flight services were suspended for a considerable time.

"What is significant is that our resumption was glitch free while others (countries) had air crash and accidents. DGCA is an expert agency and we have always taken pride in our professionalism. Aviation safety is a serious business and DGCA inspectors have always risen to the occasion," Kumar said.

India is the world's third largest as well as the fastest growing civil aviation market in the world.

"On an average, there are 4.5 lakh domestic air passengers and 1 lakh international air passengers in the country," Kumar said.

In recent times, the regulator has also taken strict action in relation of unruly passenger behaviour onboard flights.

Last month, in a span of less than a week, the DGCA had penalised Tata Group-owned Air India twice related to incidents of unruly passenger behaviour.

On January 24, the regulator imposed a fine of Rs 10 lakh on the airline for not reporting two incidents of unruly passenger behaviour onboard a Paris-New Delhi flight on December 6, 2022.

On January 20, the watchdog slapped a penalty of Rs 30 lakh on Air India as well as suspended the licence of the pilot-in-command of the New York-Delhi flight in which a person allegedly urinated on a female co-passenger on November 26, 2022. In connection with the incident, a fine of Rs 3 lakh was also imposed on Air India's Director of in-flight services for failing to discharge her duties.

20.2. Air India’s 470-jet deal is the largest commercial aviation history

IBEF, Feb. 15, 2023

The Tata Group will purchase 470 aircraft from Airbus and Boeing in an effort to upgrade the Air India fleet and revive the struggling airline. With the Boeing order valued at over US$ 34 billion and the Airbus transaction at about US$ 35 billion, this agreement is the largest in the history of commercial aviation. The deal signed with Boeing includes options to spend an additional US$ 12 billion on 50 737 Max aircraft and 20 787 aircraft.

The Air India hangars will soon have 250 Airbus aircraft, including 210 narrow-body A320 aircraft and 40 wide-body A350 planes. It will also house 220 Boeing jets comprising 190 737 Max aircraft, 20 787s and 10 777Xs.

The 25 Boeing B737-800s and 6 Airbus A350-900s will arrive in the second half of 2023, according to Air India. To speed up its fleet and network expansion, Air India has begun taking possession of 25 leased A320 and 11 leased B777 aircraft.

In a sense, Air India is a national endeavour, not "yet another," according to Mr. N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Group. For our part, Chandrasekaran stated, "We are undergoing a significant transformation as we are dedicated to creating a world-class airline known for safety, on-time performance, the best of Indian hospitality, and a contemporary fleet."

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

India and the World

21.1. Indian degrees to be recognized in Australia; PM Anthony Albanese announces education qualification recognition mechanism

ET, 9 Mar. 2023

"This new mechanism means that if you are an Indian student who is studying or have studied in Australia, your hard-earned degree will be recognised when you return home. Or if you are a member of Australia's very large Indian diaspora -- 500,000 and growing -- you will feel more confident that your Indian qualification will be recognised in Australia," he said.

It is the most comprehensive and ambitious arrangement agreed to by India with any country, Albanese said.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday announced that his country and the Indian government have finalized the 'Australia-India Education Qualification Recognition Mechanism.' Albanese, on a visit to India, was speaking at a programme here to officially announce that Australia's Deakin University would be setting up an international branch campus at GIFT City in Gujarat's Gandhinagar. "There is a significant development in our bilateral education relations. I am pleased to tell you that we have finalised Australia-India Education Qualification Recognition Mechanism," he said.

It is the most comprehensive and ambitious arrangement agreed to by India with any country, Albanese said.

"It paved the way for commercial opportunities for Australian education providers to offer innovative and more accessible education to Indian students. And it provides a solid basis for education institutions to consider new ways to partner with each other," he said.

"It is a fantastic piece of work that will have really tangible benefits," the visiting prime minister added.

He also announced a new scholarship for Indian students who want to study in Australia.

"I am pleased to announce a new scholarship offering -- the Maitri scholarships. This is for Indian students to study in Australia for up to four years. The scholarships are part of the wider Maitri programme that seeks to boost cultural, educational and community ties between Australia and India," Albanese said.

Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel and Governor Acharya Devvrat were also present on the occasion.

21.2. Australia-India Trade can be Scaled Up to $100 billion

ET, 13 Mar. 2023

India and Australia can scale up bilateral trade to $100 billion, Australia’s trade and tourism minister Don Farrell said in an interview with ET’s Deepshikha Sikarwar.

India and Australia can scale up bilateral trade to $100 billion, Australia’s trade and tourism minister Don Farrell said in an interview with ET’s Deepshikha Sikarwar. Farrell said the trade deal with India is the start of a new relationship between the two countries in the backdrop of the pandemic-induced changes in geo-political and economic structures. Edited excerpts:

There seems to be a shift in Australia’s view of India. Is this shift more strategic than economic?

The Ukraine-Russia war has shown just how dangerous the world has become, particularly for small countries like Australia. And in a defence sense, we need friends. We have so many things in common with India – our history with the Commonwealth, our support for democracy, and a free and open society. We naturally gravitate towards like-minded countries. Where did the new (Australian) prime minister go on his first day on the job? He flew to Tokyo to meet with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi. So, he obviously views it very significantly. They've met a number of times, and of course, the prime minister has come here for an extended stay. He missed parliament in order to come here and demonstrate his support.

On the other side of the coin, economically, we have had a range of difficulties with some of our trading partners that are sort of well publicised. We've decided to go down the track of trade diversification. So that means negotiating new free-trade agreements.

We negotiated a free-trade agreement last year. Critics of that agreement said we couldn't get it through the Australian parliamentary process. In fact, we did, and we got it through in record time, and it came into force on December 29 last year. It is the start of a new relationship with India. And I think now's the time to get in on the ground. Post-Covid, the world has changed; the geopolitical situation has changed. The economic situation has changed.

Where do you see the relationship heading in the next five years?

At the moment, two-way trade between Australia and India is about $46 billion compared with China’s $300 billion. We think we can do a lot more in an economic sense. We want to get that figure up to $100 billion, and I think that's achievable over the next five years. It’s just going to take some effort. But what happened this week? Well, 27 of the largest companies in Australia took three or four days out to travel with the prime minister to India. That, I think, is a really positive sign. It was banks, it was mining companies, it was universities, it was a range of other businesses.

How do you see India in terms of, say, sourcing products, as Australia still sources a lot from China?

In the past, we've put all our eggs in one basket. We've learned the hard way that that's not the most sensible economic policy. India is about to become the most populous country. By 2030, half the population will be deemed to be in the middle class. So, there's a great opportunity there. You've got to look for friends in a more unstable world. Americans certainly view Indians as friends. We've got the Indo-Pacific economic framework being negotiated. In fact, there were some discussions here in India on that recently. That also presents an opportunity for building that relationship.

India is not part of the trade pillar under IPEF. What kind of comfort can it be offered to get it on board?

It is largely in the hands of the Americans. I know Mr Goyal met with the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, this week, and I mentioned that would have been high on the list of topics for discussion. I mean, India has to make up its mind about which of the pillars it wants to come in on. They haven't ruled out yet coming in on the trade pillar. They've just said at the moment they're not comfortable joining. We would certainly encourage India to be part of all four pillars.

How are the negotiations progressing on the other three pillars?

They're all going forward. What date will they be finished? I couldn't tell you that. But we've had negotiations in Australia. We've had some negotiations in India. In May, I think there's going to be a ministers’ meeting in Detroit. So, things are going in the right direction. The Americans understand the importance of re-engaging economically in the region. You never get exactly what you want in a free-trade agreement. I think if the Indians become satisfied with the trade pillar, that there is enough there, then I think they'll give some consideration to signing up.

Australia and India are now talking about starting comprehensive economic cooperation agreement (CECA) negotiations. For India, services is a key area of interest. What can Australia offer?

Access to Australian business and government operations. The big thing that Australia has to offer in these negotiations is in the renewable energy space. The US has just implemented the Inflation Reduction Act. Companies or countries which have a free-trade agreement with the US get preferred treatment in terms of supplying to the US with all of the ingredients for batteries, electric batteries. On the one hand, people say, our critical minerals will end up going to the US. We say, that's not right. We've got good friends in the region, particularly India, and we want to make sure that we share our good fortune. Australia happens to have the largest or the second largest reserves of all the critical minerals that go into these batteries. We want to make sure that we share these with our friends in the region. And that means India. So, I actually think we bring quite a bit to the table.

In terms of Mode 4 and people-to-people movement, what could Australia offer?

Obviously, this has been one of the more difficult issues to deal with. But Australia at the moment, has massive labour shortage. And you've got all these young people with digital skills. Australia is reviewing its approach to immigration. You'll find a more relaxed approach by Australia, which will result in a far greater number of Indian students and workers coming to Australia.

What would be Australia's expectations from India, particularly in areas Australia has aggressive interests, say, dairy and agriculture?

Those were things that weren't dealt with in the first agreement. If they were easy to deal with, then they would have already been dealt with. So, they're the harder topics for India. I appreciate that they are hard to resolve. We do want to see access for our agricultural products. We're a great trading nation. We're a great supplier of good food and wine. Some progress has been made in the first agreement; we think we can go further. We don't want to flood the Indian market with our goods, but we would like greater access. And I think it's a win-win situation. Indian consumers get advantage of wonderful food and wine that we've created in Australia.

What are the other interests Australia would like to be part of the outcome under CECA?

I've mentioned renewable space. Australia historically has been a fossil fuel superpower. We want to be a renewable superpower. So that means critical minerals. That means rare earths. That means hydrogen and green hydrogen. So, we want to be in a position to supply India with those sorts of products. In the digital space, by 2030, India will have 900 million people on the internet. You're young people, very focused on the digital space. We need those sorts of skills. So we want to talk about that. Banking platforms – they're not easily transferable at the moment. We think there are some opportunities there. Space – that's the new frontier. And of course, defence. We're in the process of significantly expanding our defence capabilities. We think India has got a role to play in that.

India recently had an agreement with Singapore in the digital payments sector. Is that something that Australia would be willing to pursue?

Yes. In fact, we spoke about it not just at the ministerial joint meeting, but also at the meeting with the finance minister last night. We think there are some terrific opportunities there. We're structured slightly differently. In Australia, each of the banks has its own operations. So we've got to get a uniform system ourselves. We just need to sit down and work out exactly how we can implement that. I think discussions are well advanced in order to achieve that.

Both countries have implemented an economic cooperation and trade agreement (ECTA). How is it working on the ground? Would Australia want to renegotiate some chapters in ECTA under CECA?

Without any reason to renegotiate things that are already settled, we do want to expand our horizons in this new agreement. We do want greater access to Indian markets. In the first month of coming into operation of the new agreement, $2.5 billion worth of Australian products got into India at a lower tariff rate. Now, if that's any indication of how this agreement is going to go, it's a very positive start. It's not a case of sort of looking back and renegotiating. It's a case of looking forward and saying, we know this system is working well. How can we build on that to get a better relationship?

22.1. ET, Tech,Unwrapped

ET, 18 Feb. 2023

From Google and Microsoft to Cognizant and Adobe, a growing number of technology-focused firms are today led by Indian-origin chief executives. Neal Mohan, who was named the next CEO of streaming service YouTube, is the newest name added to the growing list of Indian-origin CEOs of global corporations.

Mohan succeeds Susan Wojcicki, one of the early employees of Google. The search giant in its early days functioned out of Wojcicki’s garage. An Indian-American executive and a close aide of Wojcicki for 15 years, Mohan has been the chief product officer at YouTube since 2015. He had earlier had a stint with Google which he joined in 2008.

A Stanford graduate, Mohan has also worked with Microsoft as a manager in corporate strategy. He had previously worked at DoubleClick, an online advertising company that was acquired by Google in 2007.

Mohan is recognized for his expertise in digital advertising and has also been credited with playing a key role in the development of several of Google's advertising products, including AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick. Wojcicki in her letter to employees announcing her exit said Neal has set up a top-notch product and UX team and played pivotal roles in the launch of YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium and Shorts.

Today, there are many Indian-origin CEOs at the helm of global tech companies. Search giant Google’s parent Alphabet is led by Madurai-born Sundar Pichai. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he was appointed Google CEO in August 2015. Pichai was only the third chief executive of the company after former CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Larry Page. Four years later, in December 2019, he became the CEO of Alphabet.

Another Indian-American business executive Satya Nadella occupies the corner office at Microsoft. He succeeded Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft in 2014 and has since been at the centre of the turnaround at the company.

Thomas Kurian of Google Cloud, Ravi Kumar S of Cognizant, Arvind Krishna of IBM, Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks and Shantanu Narayen of Adobe are some of the other prominent Indian-origin CEOs of global tech companies.

Neal Mohan succeeds Wojcicki as YouTube CEO: YouTube chief executive officer Susan Wojcicki will be stepping down from her role after serving at the helm of Alphabet’s video streaming platform for the last nine years. Wojcicki will be replaced by Indian American Neal Mohan.

Who is Neal Mohan, the new Indian American CEO of YouTube? Neal Mohan has been serving as the chief product officer for YouTube since 2015. Mohan had also worked with Google, which he joined in 2008.

Mohan assumes charge at a critical time: Mohan’s elevation comes at a critical juncture in the video-streaming platform’s history as it faces stiff competition from ByteDance-owned TikTok and Facebook-owned Instagram in the short-duration video segment.

22.2. India Thali to Get a Bigger Slice of Netflix Budget

ET, 18 Feb. 2023

India will get a bigger slice of Netflix’s $17 billion content budget given the growing engagement with its offerings and rising revenue from viewers in the country, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said at the Economic Times Global Business Summit on Friday.

“In India, we’ve had the best year of our existence,” he said. “Our content watching grew by 30% last year in India and our revenue grew by 25%.”

Engagement is the key measure of success, Sarandos said, and growth indicators have to start with this.

“Do people care enough to spend their viewing time with you? Are they spending their screen time with Netflix? That's why that engagement metric is so important,” he said during the session, Cracking The Content Code. “It wouldn't have happened if it wasn't tied to that engagement lift. Subscriber numbers make nice headlines, but they're not a real business metric. What is behind that subscriber number? Is there engagement? Is there revenue? Is there profit with Netflix? Yes, there is,” Sarandos said.

The company plans to plough more resources into India.

“You are basically trying to constantly get just ahead of or just behind the growth in the market and figure out what's working and keep investing,” he said. “So I would say that we are going to be investing more and more in India as we continue to grow engagement and revenue.”

Netflix has a strong slate of content coming up for India, he said.

“This idea of really getting into the grid, into the rhythm and the groove of local tastes and local desire…I think we're better at that than we ever were. The reason that we got there is that our team that runs India, runs it from India,” Sarandos said.

The key to success in the country was having teams on the ground with a feel for what people want, he said.

“A lot of companies that try to run India out of California get frustrated early on because they just don't learn anything. Here, our team really does understand the local culture and the local storytellers. And they themselves are part of the local audience — that gives us a large advantage. That's why we've invested so heavily on not just production in India, but we have 250 people in an office in Mumbai. We have an office in Delhi. These are people who really care about making great content in India.”

Netflix has produced 100 original projects in India so far with 28 of them last year. Sarandos said the India team is getting better every day.

“What I figured out early on when we started launching in various countries is that you didn't learn much in one country that was helpful in the next country,” he said.

“You have to be there, you have to be on the ground, and you have to understand consumer tastes and you have to understand the culture. You have to understand the history of the industry.”

He cited new Netflix release, The Romantics, about the legacy of Yash Chopra, as an example.

“You have to understand creators in that country,” he said. “What are the challenges to getting movies made and series made? And in the case of India, I think India has got this beautiful, rich cinema culture and it was not that much around television at that time when we first got here. So, Sacred Games was our kind of early attempt to say, well, what if you took the principles of cinema and infused them into television and the Indian audiences loved that.”

His top priority is reigniting growth at the company, Sarandos said.

23.1. India, US sign MoU on semiconductor supply chain, innovation partnership; to propel growth of IT, electronics sectors

ET Gov. 11 Mar. 2023

"India has a growing innovation ecosystem as shown by programmes like IDEX, our progress on 5G or our Covid related innovations. Both countries will benefit from this MoU.” Dr Ajay Kumar

Following the Commercial Dialogue, held in New Delhi on March 10, India and the USA have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on establishing semiconductor supply chain and innovation partnership.

The US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo is on a visit to New Delhi on an invitation from Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry. During her visit, the India-US Commercial Dialogue was re-launched on Friday with the objective of discussing cooperation for unlocking new trade and investment opportunities between the two countries.

The MoU signed between the two countries seeks to establish a collaborative mechanism between the two governments on semiconductor supply chain resiliency and diversification in view of US’s CHIPS and Science Act and India’s Semiconductor Mission.

Dr Ajay Kumar, Former Defense Secretary, Government of India, observes that the signing of the MoU between India and the USA is an important development. He says, “It shows how technology is driving the bilateral relationship between the two major nations. As far as the India–US technology relationship is concerned, it is clear that it is no more a one-way affair. India has a growing innovation ecosystem as shown by programmes like IDEX, our progress on 5G or our Covid related innovations. Both countries will benefit from this MoU.”

Stating that India has developed significant capabilities in chip design, Ajay Kumar said, “There is not a chip that does not pass through Indian hands. Most global chip manufacturers have their development centers in India. Some Indian players have also got into chip design and manufacturing. The Indian government is determined to have FAB manufacturing in India.”

“This MoU is a step in the right direction. It will help in the growth of IT and electronics industry in India,” says Ajay Kumar. “India can be the leader in new chips developed for developing countries, and this strategic MoU can pave way for major transformations in e-governance and online services apart from meeting strategic needs of the world in the changed geopolitical scenario.”

According to a statement released by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, the USA is India’s largest trading partner and largest export destination, while India is America’s ninth largest trading partner.

The Ministry of Commerce & Industry said the MoU seeks to establish a collaborative mechanism between the two governments on semiconductor supply chain resiliency and diversification in view of US’s CHIPS and Science Act and India’s Semiconductor Mission.

"It aims to leverage complementary strengths of both countries and facilitate commercial opportunities and development of semiconductor innovation ecosystems through discussions on various aspects of semiconductor value chain. The MoU envisages mutually beneficial R&D, talent and skill development," it added.

23.2. Global cos eye India’s digital model

ET, 9 Mer. 2023

India is becoming a digital hub for several global consumer and retail companies including Levi Strauss, Decathlon, Procter & Gamble, Mondelez, and Unilever, which are increasingly taking technological capabilities and learnings from the country to other markets.

“We have India for India, and India for the world. In tech and digital, India is amazing. So, we are discussing how India can contribute to the world as well,” said Barbara Martin Coppola, chief executive officer of Decathlon.

The French sporting goods retailer’s entire leadership, along with its chief digital officer, visited the country recently to have discussions on “how India can contribute for the future including technology”, he said.

For denim maker Levi’s, apart from being one of the sourcing hubs, India also has a global capability centre in Bengaluru, an engineering hub to accelerate omni-channel capabilities globally. “We are building an engineering base as we grow both technology, our digital operations, artificial intelligence, and India is making a big difference,” Harmit Singh, global chief financial and growth officer at Levi Strauss & Co, told ET.

Last year, Unilever had said India will be a beacon of digital innovation for the packaged consumer products firm globally.

While India has been a sourcing and talent hub for many companies, the country’s adoption for ecommerce and innovation in manufacturing accelerated significantly during the pandemic. And global markets can replicate the process, especially as omnichannels gain importance to sell their products, executives said.

“The digital infrastructure we have been able to create in India is quite impressive and that’s contributing to our ability to drive disproportionate growth, both from a sales capability standpoint and from a media capability standpoint,” Andre Schulten, chief financial officer of Procter & Gamble Co, told investors recently.

According to a Deloitte-Ficci report, technology-led transformation of retail accelerated over the past two years as the consumer and retail industries went phygital to survive the offline retail lockdowns in the new normal. “As we enter the endemic stage of Covid-19 and with the economy gradually recovering, more retailers are expected to fast-track the adoption of digitally enabled omnichannel strategy to operate proficiently and mitigate the supply chain disruptions and increasing competition,” the report said.

Last month, Alexis Perakis-Valat, president, consumer product division, at L'Oréal, told analysts that the French personal care company is bullish on India due to its technological advancement across operations. “I have seen changes in the last two years like never before — in terms of sophistication of the market (and) in terms of change of the distribution — thanks to ecommerce. And all that powered by a super digital ecosystem,” he had said.

Over the past two years, companies innovated across value chains to enable greater agility, flexibility and efficiency.

For instance, Hindustan Unilever set up nano factories that allow them to produce in batches of kilograms rather than tonnes and help them with faster product rollouts. Parent Unilever is rolling it out in other markets to bring innovation lead times and cost down.

“An untold story is the amount of digital innovation that’s happening in India…how we run our supply chain, route-to-market innovation, digital innovation, some of the marketing programmes that we are doing there…” Alan Jope, chief executive officer of Unilever, had said last year. “I hope India will be…a beacon of digital innovation as well as a powerhouse commercially.”

24. SAP to Double India Investment in 5yrs

ET, 1 Mar. 2023

India is “a winner” and “a bright spot” in a world that’s in turmoil, says Christian Klein, chief executive at SAP SE. The German software giant aims to double its investments in India over the next five years. It is also helping large global corporations move parts of their business here, in keeping with a growing trend to de-risk.

Klein, member of the SAP executive board, sees “a very good chance” of former Deloitte CEO Punit Renjen succeeding SAP chairman Hasso Plattner. In an exclusive interview with Romita Majumdar & Surabhi Agarwal, the 42-year-old, who is among the youngest to helm a global tech corporation, said he expects India to become an innovation hub for SAP. Edited excerpts.

Amid inflation and geopolitical tensions, how do you assess global technology spending?

I see Asia differently. India, to me, is one of the winners of this situation as the economy and talent base are strong. A lot of companies are looking to India when it comes to reducing dependence on countries that are at risk of geopolitical tensions. So, India will be a winner.

Indian Market Makes Sense Because of Biz Case, Talent/

Southeast Asia, we see decent growth. On the technology side, there are discussions on decarbonisation of supply chains, reshuffling supply and new business models. So, we are actually seeing strong business for our solutions. I am confident the North American economy will see decent growth because despite high inflation, they are not dealing with the same kind of energy challenges like us in Europe. In Europe (as in) Germany, the challenge is different because we have very high energy prices after everything that has happened in Russia. That is not good for the economy, especially when (one is) a very manufacturing-heavy industry (that) relies on cheap energy.

How are technology companies like yours readjusting the business model to cope with such change?

Companies want to safeguard their supply chains and logistics from disruption if it is concentrated in any one region. We are helping large multinationals and local businesses rethink whether they can move parts of their business to places like India, which is a safer bet, with a stable environment for many years to come. We believe India is one of the countries that will benefit from this shift as there is access to a market and customers who are willing to innovate and invest in technology like generative AI (artificial intelligence) and blockchain, among others. It’s clear where we need to put our money.We ourselves are looking to invest here (in India) because of the business case and talent. We (SAP) are out of Russia. We had a small lab in Ukraine, which has completely shut down now. China is reopening but let’s see how the disruptions work out. So, Germany and Europe (in general) have a lack of talent. North America has talent, but it is largely concentrated in Silicon Valley and the pool is not as big as in India. So overall, the Indian market makes sense.

Is SAP also looking at the India market as a de-risking option to offset the slowdown from other global markets?

In India, we already have the largest R&D centre, but we will double down because the economy is strong. Now, we have 15,000 people; it is realistic to say then that in five years, we can double the size. The ease of doing business is getting better. That was also a big point during the meeting between Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi and our Chancellor (Olaf) Scholz — that ease of doing business needs to be further simplified but we are in decent shape, in addition to the strong talent base. The last year changed more in India's direction. I would say three or four years ago, China was still a huge market. But the perception and political environment have changed now.

To what extent do you foresee phenomena like ChatGPT and the Metaverse disrupting today’s technology industry?

ChatGPT, AI and Metaverse will be disruptive in certain parts of the business. I don't believe that everything will be disrupted by ChatGPT, but there will be strong use cases and one or the other function in an enterprise or an industry. We, as a technology company, must start embedding this solution in our technology. It will, of course, mature further. But over the next two or three years, it will be ready for primetime. Then, our customers need it to stay ahead of the competition.We do our own AI development and we are also partnering with companies like OpenAI. The software world is big and no Microsoft, Google or even SAP can capture everything. We must invest where we are strong. You need to use partners like OpenAI to embed that technology in ours. They will win, we will win, and the customer will still see tremendous more value.

How far are India operations contributing to SAP’s global revenue?

Our flagship is our ERP solution and a lot of the code and IP is developed here in India. That comprises a huge revenue share for SAP. Supply chain sustainability, our platform, which is the foundation for all our products, is also developed in India. So, the majority of the revenue that SAP is driving has its source code in India. It is very important that we not only shifted work to India, but shifted complete responsibility for products (too), so employees don’t feel they are complementing work done in the US and Germany but have end-to-end responsibility and ownership of solutions.

SAP has announced some layoffs globally. Did the company overestimate talent requirements?

Last year, the tech sector had a challenging year indeed. After Covid, a lot of tech companies saw a real boom since everyone needed to work remotely. There has been a little bit of a calm-down in the industry (now). At SAP, we are reducing some parts of our portfolio that are not core to SAP or our customers. We are reducing capacity. But we are investing in other places where customers need us — in utilities, the public sector and retail. We are growing (in) triple digits here; there is no doubt that our capacity in the country will grow by a lot in the upcoming years.

25.1. World Bank to give $1b health infra loans

ET, 4 Mar. 2023

The World Bank will extend two complementary loans of $500 million each to India to bolster public healthcare infrastructure in the country.

In a statement, the multilateral body said its combined financing of $1 billion will support India's flagship Pradhan Mantri-Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM), launched in October 2021.

It said one of the loans will prioritise health service delivery in seven states—Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh—in addition to the national-level interventions. One of the loans will support efforts to prepare India’s surveillance system to better detect and report epidemics of potential international concern and ensure rapid response, among others. The other loan will support government efforts to bolster service delivery through a redesigned primary healthcare model.

World Bank India country director Auguste Tano Kouamé and additional secretary with the Department of Economic Affairs Rajat Kumar Mishra signed an agreement for the two loans on Friday.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought to the fore the urgent need for pandemic preparedness and health system strengthening around the world, said Kouamé.

The two projects are supporting India's decision to raise the resilience and preparedness of the country's health systems against future pandemics, according to the World Bank statement.

India's performance on the health front has improved over time, according to the World Bank estimates. Life expectancy in India—at 69.8 in 2020, up from 58 in 1990—is higher than the average for the country's income level. The under-five mortality rate (36 per 1,000 live births), infant mortality rate (30 per 1,000 live births), and maternal mortality ratio (103 per 100,000 live births) are all close to the average for India's income level, reflecting significant achievements in access to skilled birth attendance, immunizations, and other priority services, according to the statement.

25.2. Want India’s Help to Build Consensus, Conclude Key Deals

ET, 6 Mar. 2023

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), said multilateralism is under threat and she expects India to help build consensus to conclude agreements and ensure results.

World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala attends a news conference following a meeting at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin, Germany November 29, 2022. REUTERS/Michele Tantussi.

The WTO is revising its trade forecast based on improved global economic prospects cited by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), she said in an interview with ET. The WTO DG was in Delhi for last week’s G20 foreign ministers’ meeting.

“Multilateralism is definitely under attack — people seem to be losing faith in multilateralism,” she said, seeking India’s help in strengthening multilateral organisations. “That’s what leadership is about. Everybody will lose if you weaken the WTO, World Bank, and the IMF.”

She attributed the multiple crises that have hit the world to this pushback against multilateralism. People are shaken and losing faith in the system and they’re trying to now think only of their domestic policies and themselves, she said, citing the example of the Covid-19 pandemic, when some countries kept vaccines for themselves.

She said while multilateral arrangements have problems, protectionism is not the way to go. “I’m the first to admit that this multilateral trading system is not perfect, it needs reform and WTO needs reform. The way to deal with it is not to go unilateral or go to protectionist policies,” she said.

This was actually the time to push ahead and not retreat.

“I don’t think the recession will be intensified… if that’s the case, and the recession is not going to be as bad, then we need to look at more cooperation, not more retreat, not protectionism but a more outward-looking stance,” the WTO DG said.

The IMF has forecast 2.9% global growth for 2023, up from the 2.7% it expected in October.

She admitted there is a need to reimagine globalisation.

“We need to correct the things that went wrong with globalisation, with a new type of globalisation and reimagined globalisation, which we at the WTO are calling re-globalisation,” said Okonjo-Iweala.

This can be achieved by using the vulnerability of supply chains and making manufacturing less concentrated by moving it to those places that were left out — poor regions within rich countries or poorer countries, provided they have the right business environment.

Fragmenting into two global trading systems will cost the world a 5% loss in global GDP in the long term, and it’ll cost developing countries double-digit losses, she said, citing studies.

“We cannot afford to decouple, deglobalise or defragment. We have to change the nature of globalisation so that developing countries benefit,” the WTO chief said.

On India’s G20 presidency, Okonjo-Iweala said she expects the country’s leadership to lead to results.

“What I expect from India is strong leadership to make sure that we actually get results,” she said. “My expectation is that India will use the G20 presidency to ensure we get good results at the WTO.”

Blocking deals is not a result.

“Developing countries need to grow. They need to develop and the only way they can do it is to conclude agreements. So India needs to help us reach agreements, not block them,” she said.

She also said that India needs to ratify the fisheries subsidies agreement before the WTO’s 13th Ministerial Cconference (MC13), scheduled for February 2024.

“Two countries have already ratified — Singapore and Switzerland — and more are on the way. Even the EU and the US said they are working on it. So, it will be important for India not to be seen to be left behind,” she said. India also needs to “make sure that we conclude the second phase of the fisheries subsidies agreement where important issues are being debated.”

A breakthrough in agriculture and food security is crucial for all developing countries along with WTO reform and changes in the dispute settlement system. “I hope that India can also help us work with the US and others so we can deliver a reform by February 2024,” she said.

With the discussions on a global intellectual property rights waiver for Covid-19 diagnostics and therapeutics being pushed to this year despite an MC12 (12th Ministerial Conference) outcome on a decision by December 2022, no country has disengaged and “the good news is that discussions are still ongoing,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

“The Americans have said that they’ve sent it to their ITC (International Trade Commission) to study, which will not be ready till October. That means that at least one major country cannot say anything until October. That’s part of the reason,” she said, adding that she expects a solution and an outcome before the ministerial meeting in February next year.

As per the DG, the WTO must be seen to be delivering for people and that should be the focus of MC13, which is to be held in the UAE.

According to her, the second fisheries agreement, an agreement on agriculture and food security, and an agreement on therapeutics or diagnostics on TRIPS will all help ordinary people.

“If we get to reform the dispute settlement system, it means that every member has the full power. If I can get three out of those, that will be very good,” she said.

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AAPI

Pages

Saturday 18 March 2023

Newsletter, 20-III-2023

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC.

– AGRICULTURE, FISHING & RURAL DEVELOPMENT

– INDUSTRY, MANUFACTURE

– SERVICES (IT, R&D, Tourism, Healthcare, etc.)

NEWSLETTER, MARCH 2023

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC.

- Agriculture, Fishing and Rural Development

- Industry and Manufacture

- Services (Education, Healthcare, IT, R&D, Tourism, etc.)

India and the World