AAPI: June 2017

LISBON, 20th June 2017

Index of this Newsletter

INDIA

INDIA & THE WORLD

21.1. A Goa state of mind in Lisbon
21.2. Chasing dolphins in Goa—with kindness
22.1. After Myanmar success, storage major SLCM eyes other S-E Asian markets
22.2. With $6 b, Reliance & BP recommit to KG Basin
23.1. Africa takes tips from India to cut food import bill
23.2. Africa key for India, trade has doubled in 5 years: Narendra Modi
24.1. GMR Infra arm wins bid to develop airport in Greece
24.2. Breaking barriers with ‘Baahubali’
25.1. CPPIB scales up India investments, pumps in Rs 9,120 crore in fiscal 2017
25.2. India is the biggest growth driver for Essilor, says CEO Hubert Sagnieres

* * *

LISBON, 20th June 2017

NEWSLETTER, 20-VI-2017

INDIA

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC.

1.1. Centre has cleared record Rs 67,523 crore ($10.49 bn) for urban infra in Maharashtra: Venkaiah Naidu

Livemint, Jun. 07, 2017

Mumbai: The Narendra Modi government at the Centre has approved a total investment of Rs67,523 crore to improve urban infrastructure in Maharashtra in three years, Union minister for urban development, housing, and urban poverty alleviation Venkaiah Naidu said on Tuesday.

Naidu said this was the highest investment in urban infrastructure approved for any Indian state in three years of the Modi government. The investment approved for Maharashtra accounted for more than 15% of the total investment of Rs4.35 trillion in the country in three years, he said.

Naidu was addressing a press conference after a two-day review of urban infrastructure, affordable housing, and sanitation projects being implemented in the state with central assistance. Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis was also present.

In these project approvals worth Rs67,523 crore, central assistance of Rs8,712 crore had been sanctioned to Maharashtra, he added.

The approved investments include Rs19,100 crore for seven smart cities in Maharashtra, the highest in any Indian state. “Around 218 projects are under implementation and tendering in Pune, Solapur, Kalyan-Dombivli, Nagpur, Nashik, Thane and Aurangabad which are among the 60 smart cities selected. All these seven cities are setting up integrated command and control centres to improve service delivery and Pune and Nagpur would become the first cities in the country on 25th of this month to actually operationalize such centres to mark the second anniversary of the ‘Smart City’ project,” Naidu said.

An investment of Rs20,100 crore has been approved for Nagpur and Pune metros which is 42% of the total investment of Rs48,000 crore approved for metro projects in the country in three years.

“In the next five to six years, Maharashtra would have operational metro projects with a total length of 360km spread over nine metro corridors. A total investment of Rs1.4 trillion would flow into these metro projects and increase the number of daily metro users to about 10 million per day,” Naidu said.

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

1.2. New textile policy may be finalised in next three months

PTI, Jun. 13, 2017

Mumbai: The much-awaited new textile policy is likely to be finalised in the next three months, a senior official said today.

"After consultation is done with stakeholders we have finalised the draft. We are now trying to incorporate international response and output from foreign players at the forthcoming Textiles India-2017 conference, which will serve as input to our textile policy," Textiles Secretary Anant Kumar Singh told reporters at an CII event here.

"There is no harm in having wider consultation. After having inputs, we will process and finalise the policy in next three months period", the officer added.

The policy aims to achieve USD300 billion (over Rs 20 lakh crore) worth of textile exports by 2024-25 and create an additional 35 million jobs.

According to Singh, the Centre is organising Textile India Conclave and Exhibition in Gujarat from June 30 to July 2, for the Indian textile and handicraft sector which will showcase the entire range of textile products from 'fibre to fashion'.

It will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, added Singh.

The event will have over 1,000 stalls and will witness the presence of over 2,500 discerning international buyers, agents, designers, retail chains from across the world, and 15,000 domestic buyers.

The three day event will include global conference with six themes, to be chaired by concerned Union ministers. The valedictory session will be presided by Union Finance minister Arun Jaitley.

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

2.1. The mega challenge of job creation

Livemint, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, 25 May 2017

The biggest opportunity for generating more employment in manufacturing lies in exporting simpler consumer goods to the world market

The challenge of creating jobs has moved to the centre of the political stage all over the world, and India is no exception. However, the scale of the problem in India is not easy to measure. The latest National Sample Survey (NSS) data for 2011-12 show unemployment was only 2.2% of the labour force, which is very low. On this metric, unemployment in India is much less of a problem than in other countries. On the other hand, we often hear reports of hundreds of thousands of applications every time a few hundred low-level government jobs are to be filled.

The scale of the problem

The low unemployment rates are misleading because many of those shown as employed are actually engaged in low-paid jobs that they take up only because there is no alternative. Economists call this “disguised unemployment” or “underemployment”. Equally, the hundreds of thousands of applications for a few government jobs are misleading because the applicants are not all unemployed. Since government jobs at the lower levels pay much better than the market rate, those employed in the private sector want to switch to government jobs if they can.

A recent survey of youth unemployment shows that educated youth face greater problems. The unemployment rate for 18-29-year-olds as a group is 10.2%, but for illiterates it is only 2.2%, rising to 18.4% for graduates. As more and more educated youth enter the workforce in future, we can be sure that unless the quality of jobs available for them improves dramatically, dissatisfaction will mount.

Three structural changes are needed

At the macro level, three structural changes are needed to tackle the problem.

First, the workforce employed in agriculture must decline. In 2011-12, agriculture accounted for 18% of gross domestic product (GDP) and it absorbed about 50% of the workforce. Productivity per person in agriculture was therefore 18/50 = 36% of the national average. If the economy as a whole grows at 7.5% per year over the next 10 years, and agricultural growth accelerates to 4%, the share of agriculture in GDP will fall to around 11% by 2027-28. To maintain agricultural productivity at say 36% of the national average, the share of employment should decline to 31%. This is almost certainly too sharp a decline, but even if the employment share declines to 35%, it implies a major shift out of agriculture. This places a huge burden of on non- agricultural employment, which will have to expend sufficiently to absorb the shift out of agriculture plus the normal increase in the total workforce.

The second structural change needed is to reduce the expectation from manufacturing as a provider of non- agricultural jobs. Faster growth in manufacturing has long been central to our economic strategy and must remain so. However, we have to recognize that technological change is likely to make manufacturing less employment generating than in the past. Even if Artificial Intelligence and 3D printing are distant developments in India, there can be no doubt that any successful manufacturing strategy will involve application of capital- intensive techniques, especially if we propose to integrate more fully with the world and with global supply chains.

At present, manufacturing accounts for about a quarter of total non-agricultural employment. Another quarter comes from non-manufacturing industry (mining, electricity and construction) with services accounting for the remaining half. Most of the growth needed in non-agricultural employment will have to come from construction and the services sector, including health services, tourism-related services, retail trade, transport and logistics and repair services. A careful review of policies is needed to see how impediments to expansion in these sectors can be removed.

The third structural change needed is a shift from informal sector employment to formal sector employment. The NSS data for 2011-12 showed about 243 million people employed in the non-agricultural sector, and as many as 85% of these were in the “informal sector”, including both self-employment and wage employment. However, much of the demand for “high quality” employment opportunities today is a demand for jobs in the formal/organized sector. A shift away from the unorganized/informal sector to the organized/formal sector is desperately needed if we want to meet the expectations of the young.

Policy implications

It is obvious that no single policy initiative can achieve all the structural changes listed above. Multiple interventions are needed at different levels and some general pointers are given below.

Rapid growth has to be central to any employment strategy for the simple reason that a faster growing economy will generate more jobs. Any notion that we can generate the employment we need without high growth would be seriously misleading. We can probably generate low quality, low productivity employment even if we fail on the growth front, but that is not what young people want. This means all the policies that are likely to accelerate growth are also critical for generating employment.

The biggest opportunity for generating more employment in manufacturing lies in exporting simpler consumer goods to the world market, an area which China has long dominated, but which it is now likely to exit, as its wages rise. How well we can do this depends upon our ability to compete with others such as Bangladesh, Vietnam. Paradoxically, becoming competitive would involve faster modernization of these industries, which will involve a shift away from labour intensity, but if it allows an increase in the scale of operations, total employment could increase.

Small and medium enterprises generate much more employment than large capital-intensive enterprises but we have not done enough to encourage this segment. India’s industrial structure suffers from what is called “the missing middle”. There are a few large enterprises, as is the case everywhere, and at the other end there are a large number of firms at the very small or micro level. There are too few middle-sized firms, employing between 100 and say 1,000 workers, and it is these firms that can upgrade technology, increase productivity, and demonstrate competitiveness in world markets.

The policies needed to develop this middle group include lowering of corporate tax rates and abolition of incentives that favour more capital-intensive units, better public infrastructure, especially access to quality power supply at reasonable rates, improved logistics, greater ease of doing business, better access to finance, ample availability of skilled labour, and more flexible labour laws. Development of skills through a combination of apprenticeships and training institutes run by the private sector, with an eye to the demand for skills in the market, is also critical.

We have the advantage of being located in Asia, which is the fastest-growing region in the world and which has not turned inward. We should work to reach an early conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) + 6. Indian industry has been ambivalent about RCEP because it fears that lower duties will make it difficult for them to compete. This underestimates the ability of the industry to become competitive if it has to. However, industry has legitimate concerns about having to pay high duties on inputs from outside the RCEP group, which would make us uncompetitive. The solution lies in lowering our general customs duties as much as possible.

The imminent introduction of the goods and services tax (GST) will help by providing a level playing field for domestic producers competing with imports in the domestic market. This is because the same tax will also be levied on all imports, which is not the case today because imports escape state indirect taxes. Any additional support needed for competitiveness can come from a judicious use of exchange rate policy.

Start-ups are a new phenomenon and India has made a good beginning in this area. Technically skilled and business-oriented youth should be encouraged to explore the entrepreneurship option, and create jobs, rather than looking for secure wage employment. The ecosystem required for start-ups to flourish includes scientific and technical universities acting as innovation hubs, tax policies which encourage angel investing and other forms of start-up financing, a legal system which supports high standards of corporate governance, and supportive tax policies which encourage start-up financing. It goes without saying that a large proportion of start-ups will fail. They should be allowed to do so, without government stepping in compulsively to shore them up all the time. Those that succeed will expand and generate much more employment than the employment lost in the failures.

Finally, we need to deploy all policy instruments to promote the shift from the unorganized/informal to the organized/formal sector. This is relevant in both manufacturing and services. In the past, there has been a tendency to view the unorganized sector as a potential source of employment, and this has at times been used to justify a more lax attitude, especially in the matter of applying regulations. Ideally, all discrimination against the organized/formal sector should be phased out to create a level playing field. If the exempted level in the GST is not adjusted over time, if safety regulations are strictly enforced for both small and larger firms, if tax avoidance by smaller firms is plugged, and if labour laws are made more flexible, there will be a strong incentive for units to move progressively into the organized/formal sector. This will improve the quality of employment, which is a major concern today.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia was the deputy chairman of the erstwhile Planning Commission

2.2. Why trade is integral to human advancement

Livemint, Sumit Mishra, 4 Jun. 2017

The work of this year’s John Bates Clark Medal winner Dave Donaldson highlights the impact of economic integration on modern societies

With the introduction of a goods and services tax in July, India will be one step closer to a common market. Most economists agree on the benefits of economic integration but to understand the profound impact of such integration on modern societies, one can do no better than to turn to the work of a young Stanford University economist, Dave Donaldson.

Donaldson, who has been in the news for winning the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal this year, recently authored a fascinating research paper (bit.ly/2swMaYE) with his frequent collaborator Arnaud Costinot of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on agricultural trade within the US which showed that gains from intra- country trade were roughly equal to gains from productivity growth.

Donaldson and Costinot collected data on crop markets for more than 2,000 US counties spanning more than 100 years between 1880 and 1997. The duo consider the price gaps between different places for the same crop as an implicit measure of transaction cost. If market integration did indeed work, these price gaps should decline. Costinot and Donaldson documented that this fall in price-wedges resulting from greater market integration has the same effect on total output as that arising from greater farm productivity.

It is because of such careful empirical work based on data running across many years that Donaldson has won the Clark medal this year. The Clark medal is the second most prestigious award in economics after the Nobel Prize, and is conferred every year on an outstanding American economist under 40. Twelve of the 39 economists who have won the medal have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in economics.

Donaldson’s most famous work, which was cited in the statement announcing the award, is on India, and it shows how creating the right infrastructure at the right time can remove barriers to trade by lowering transport costs, and thereby lead to greater prosperity (bit.ly/2o2pYrr). Mining archival data, Donaldson looked at the economic impact of the Indian rail network, built during the British Raj.

After spending a decade collecting and analysing the data for this project, Donaldson concluded that the railway network’s expansion led to a fall in trading costs, increased goods traffic, and that the economic benefits greatly exceeded the cost of construction.

For his work on the Indian railways alone, Donaldson is a worthy winner of the Clark medal. But there is a broader scholarship to Donaldson that deserves our attention. The central element of this scholarship appears to be an inquiry into the historical patterns of intra-country and inter-country trade ties. Pick any Donaldson paper and you will find a very important question answered using data collected from archival material, and careful use of econometric techniques.

The theory of trade rests on the foundations laid exactly 200 years ago by a 19th century British economist, David Ricardo. The theory of comparative advantage postulates that a country which is more productive in the output of all goods and services compared to others may still gain in trade because of “comparative advantage”. Consider a brilliant lawyer who also happens to be a very efficient typist and organizer. The lawyer has a choice: either she can do all her work on her own, or she can hire a secretary to allocate the secretarial part of her work to that person. The theory of comparative advantage says that both the lawyer and the secretary will be better off by this trade: the secretary will have a job, and the lawyer can focus on the more lawyerly aspects of her work in which she has a comparative advantage, and end up earning more. This is the basic takeaway from the Ricardian model: everyone gains from trade. Although the theory seems pretty straightforward and intuitive, testing Ricardian theory has been a difficult task in a world with many countries and varieties of goods. Given the predictions of the theory, many countries will already have specialized completely in certain goods and stopped producing others altogether, therefore making it difficult to find out the differences in “relative productivity” of workers, the variable that lies at the heart of the Ricardian model.

Donaldson and Costinot tackle this problem in an innovative manner in a 2012 research paper (bit.ly/2rjbnrJ). They turn again to agriculture, a sector in which scientific advances have allowed scientists to compute how productive different regions can be given differences in water availability, soil conditions and so on. If the Ricardian model indeed explains patterns of specialization, we should expect to find actual production patterns following patterns of productivity predicted by agronomists. Using Food and Agricultural Organization data for 17 major farm crops and 55 major agricultural countries, the duo show that the Ricardian prediction indeed holds true.

In a more detailed study (bit.ly/2rj8Fmg) published in The Review of Economic Studies, Donaldson, Costinot, and Ivana Komunjer of the University of California, San Diego, show how it is possible to calculate relative productivity levels even in case of manufactured goods by developing an alternative measure of “revealed comparative advantage”. They then use this gauge to empirically establish that countries export those goods in which they have greater relative productivity levels. According to the study, “The removal of Ricardian comparative advantage at the industry level would only lead, on average, to a 5.3% decrease in the total gains from trade.”

In a 1961 paper, Swedish economist Staffan Linder propounded the idea that local demand for a product spurs international trade. Countries with greater domestic demand for certain goods are also the ones that ship these products to other countries. If two countries demand different kind of goods, each will specialize in the industry for which it has the larger home market. Further, each will be a net exporter of goods in which it specializes.

Testing the theory that local demand affects exports, just like testing the theory of comparative advantage, is difficult. Donaldson and his co-authors compiled information on countries’ demographic composition and used that as a predictor of diseases. Using this information, they determine the demand for drugs within countries. They find (bit.ly/2smdKJ0) those countries that had greater local demand for certain kind of drugs also exported more of those drugs, providing a neat empirical validation of Linder’s insights.

In many ways, Donaldson’s work harks back to an earlier era of economic historians led by Nobel Prize- winning economist Robert Fogel, who pioneered the use of quantitative methods in economic history. Historians were of the opinion that railroads were the engine of economic growth in 19th century US until Fogel showed in his 1962 Journal of Economic History paper (bit.ly/2swNrPn) that rail expansion had limited impact on economic development in the US.

Donaldson of course arrives at the opposite conclusion for India but given that unlike in the US, alternative modes of transport such as roads or inland waterways were barely developed during the British Raj, his analysis sounds plausible. However, like Fogel, Donaldson’s work also challenges the mainstream historical narrative of the British Raj and its impact on the Indian economy.

Most nationalists were opposed to the British investments in railways in India as they felt it was a drain on national resources. This was in line with the dominant view among nationalists that British rule was a drain on the Indian economy, and had led to deindustrialization of the economy.

The birth of “economic nationalism”—or the idea that India needed to be free because foreigners had ruined its economy—gave a boost to India’s freedom struggle, but it proved detrimental to a dispassionate assessment of economic history, argued economic historian Tirthankar Roy in a 2015 Economic and Political Weekly article (bit.ly/2s19RLW).

The contributions of Marxist scholars such as Paul Baran and Samir Amin bolstered this view and led many influential leaders of the developing world to view openness with suspicion. The rich world became so by exploiting poor countries such as India, the Marxist scholars argued, and the narrative of drain and deindustrialization in India acquired even greater legitimacy.

Roy argued that deindustrialization was a myth, simply because factory production and employment had taken firm roots in British India by the early 20th century and grew at a rapid pace in the first half of the 20th century. But with rare exceptions such as Mahadev Govind Ranade, most nationalist thinkers viewed both trade and railroads with great suspicion. Donaldson’s careful work shows that whatever be its political and military imperatives, investment in railways was a boon rather than a bane for India.

In a 1975 research paper, economist John Hurd was the first one to explain how the railways helped integrate the food market in India. Hurd utilized data for average wheat and rice prices from 1861 to 1921 and showed that the coefficient of variation in prices was lower for districts that had railways vis-à-vis those that didn’t. Donaldson, who collected archival data from 1861 to 1930 on agricultural prices, trade data for eight types of salt and information on the spread of the rail network, confirmed Hurd’s findings that the railways helped in integrating markets, lowering price fluctuations and raising income levels. He estimates that real incomes shot up by 16% on average, a staggering figure given that total increase in income during that period was only about 22%.

In another paper co-authored with Robin Burgess of the London School of Economics, Donaldson showed that “the arrival of railroads in Indian districts dramatically constrained the ability of rainfall shocks to cause famines in colonial India”. Donaldson and Burgess track districts from 1875 to 1919 and find that on an average, a district was more vulnerable to famine before the railways arrived.

Donaldson’s work warns us against relying on simple nationalistic narratives to look at the past. It also warns against relying too much on the currently fashionable discourse of economic nationalism, which portrays trade as an enemy of the people. At a time when trade and economic integration seem to be under increasing attack, Donaldson’s scholarship reminds us that despite its drawbacks, trade has played a vital role in the march of human civilization.

Sumit Mishra teaches economics at the Institute for Financial Management and Research, Sri City.

3.1. Cabinet approves Pan-India implementation of Maternity Benefit Program

Press Information Bureau, May 18, 2017

New Delhi: The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has given ex-post facto approval to Pan-India implementation of Maternity Benefit Program which now has been extended to all districts of the country w.e.f. 01.01.2017. The Prime Minister in his address to the nation on 31.12.2016 had announced Pan-India implementation of Maternity Benefit Program.

The Maternity Benefit Program will provide compensation for the wage loss in terms of cash incentives so that the women can take adequate rest before and after delivery and not be deprived of proper nutrition. The total cost of the proposal for the period from 01.01.2017 to 31.03.2020 including Central and State Government share is Rs.12,661 crore. Government of India’s share during the period 01.01.2017 to 31.03.2020 comes to around Rs. 7932 crore.

Objective of the Scheme

i) To provide partial compensation for the wage loss in terms of cash incentives so that the woman can take adequate rest before and after delivery of the first living child.

ii) The cash incentives provided would lead to improved health seeking behaviour amongst the Pregnant Women and Lactating Mother (PW&LM) to reduce the effects of under-nutrition namely stunting, wasting and other related problems.

Target Group

All eligible Pregnant Women and Lactating Mothers (PW&LM), excluding the Pregnant Women and Lactating Mothers who are in regular employment with the Central Government or State Government or Public Sector Undertakings or those who are in receipt of similar benefits under any law for the time being. It has been decided to give the benefit of Rs.5000/- to PW&LM in three installment for the birth of the first live child by MWCD and the remaining cash incentive as per approved norms towards Maternity Benefit under existing programmes after institutional delivery so that on an average, a woman will get â‚¹ 6000/-.

Conditions and installments

Pregnant Women and Lactating Mothers who are eligible will receive a cash benefit of Rs.5,000/- in three installment at the following stages as specified in the table given below:

The eligible beneficiaries would continue to receive the remaining cash incentive as per approved norms towards Maternity Benefit under existing programmes after institutional delivery so that on an average, a woman will get â‚¹ 6000/-.

Mode of cash transfer to the Beneficiaries

The conditional cash transfer scheme would be in DBT mode.

Background:

The Government of India is committed to ensure that every woman gets adequate support and health care during pregnancy and at the time of delivery and every newborn is immunized on time which is the foundation for better health of the mother and the newborn. Normally, the first pregnancy of a woman exposes her to new kinds of challenges and stress factors. Hence, the scheme intends to provide support to the mother for safe delivery and immunization of her first living child. The improved health care seeking behaviour of the PW&LM would lead to better health status for the mother and the child.

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

3.2. The growing business of religion in India

Livemint, Pranav Gupta &Sanjay Kumar, 19 May 2017

Improvement in tourism infrastructure at religious places can unlock the economic potential of religious tourism

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Pranab Mukherjee visiting the holy shrines at Kedarnath and Badrinath in Uttarakhand earlier this month, chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat is optimistic about the state’s prospects in the new tourist season. How popular is religious tourism among Indians? Does religion or class affect the probability of people undertaking pilgrimages?

Studies conducted by Lokniti at the Delhi-based Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) help us answer such questions. The studies show that nearly one in two Indians plan to undertake religious tourism in the next two years and a bigger number reported doing so in the past two years.

A study conducted by Lokniti on Religious attitudes, behaviour and practices in 2015 shows that a significant section of the population in all major religious groups in India reported having undertaken religious tourism over the past two years. Religious tourism is defined as going for a pilgrimage and it may or may not involve an overnight stay. There was significant inter-religious variation in prevalence of religious tourism though, with the figure being around three-fourth for Sikhs and one-third for Muslims and Christians.

Does class play a role in people undertaking religious tourism? Among Hindus, class does not seem to have any influence on religious tourism, but among Muslims, lower classes seem to have a slightly higher probability of undertaking pilgrimages. The results are based on Lokniti’s multi-dimensional economic class index which takes into account income, asset ownership, place of residence and occupation.

The popular perception that older people are more likely to go for pilgrimages seems to be slightly misplaced. Among Hindus, we find no age-based pattern as respondents from all age-groups were equally likely to have undertaken a pilgrimage. Among Muslims, those aged 56 years or above were relatively much more likely to have undertaken a pilgrimage. While there is no gender-based difference among Hindu pilgrims, Muslim men are more likely to undertake pilgrimages than women.

Given the rise in religiosity in the country, going for pilgrimages may increase in times to come. The same study also shows that more than 25% Indians reported having become more religious over the past 4-5 years. The trend is valid across religions and in keeping with other attitudinal surveys. Between 2007 and 2015, the share of respondents in India who perceived religion to be very important increased by 11 percentage points to 80%, according to the Pew Global Attitude surveys.

Religious places are ranked high in preferred tourist destinations for Indians, according to the State of Nation Study conducted by Lokniti in 2008, which found that 39% of the respondents reported pilgrimages/holy sites as their most preferred location for a vacation.

These findings, however, are slightly different from a National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) report on domestic tourism for 2008-09. The report found that social purposes accounted for almost three-fourth of all overnight trips, while pilgrimages and religious trips accounted for only around one in 10 such trips in the year preceding the survey. Although the NSSO released a similar report in 2014-15, it can’t be compared with the Lokniti findings as NSSO figures are based on response for the last 30 days, against Lokniti’s period of past two years.

Nonetheless, the NSSO report does show that average expenditure on religious trips has more than doubled during this period, and it is ranked second in terms of average number of persons per household who go on such trips.

The broad trends seem to suggest that religious tourism should be accorded priority in India’s tourism policy. This story is based on survey data shared exclusively with Mint.

Pranav Gupta is a researcher with Lokniti CSDS and Sanjay Kumar is professor and currently director of CSDS

4.1. Why India needs more women entrepreneurs

Livemint, 6 Jun. 2017

In a job-starved market, women will be creating jobs and opportunities for themselves, and bringing other women on board

For quite a few years now, we have known that there is a major problem with India’s labour force: the women are missing. Indian women are not only staying out of the workforce, they are doing so in increasing numbers across the board. The World Bank’s latest development update for India reiterates these trends but also draws attention to an interesting insight: Women employers tend to hire a significantly greater number of women. Of course, this is partly the result of the kind of businesses that women set up in what is already a heavily gendered labour force. For example, a beauty salon or a small tailoring unit owned by a woman can be expected to mostly hire other women. Also, many of these women-owned firms have only a single worker, which also skews the picture. But the trend holds true even in medium-sized firms. This lends credence to the idea that a targeted focus on women’s entrepreneurship might be the tool needed to improve the labour force’s gender balance.

The World Bank’s report builds on a working paper by Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover Goswami, Sari Kerr and William Kerr, Will Market Competition Trump Gender Discrimination In India?, which finds “a clear pattern of gender segmentation in both manufacturing and services, where, for instance, about 90% of employees in female- owned business in unorganized manufacturing are females”. Gender segmentation is a double-edged sword in the sense that just like female-owned or female-led firms tend to hire more female workers, male owners and employers have the same tendencies. A 2014 paper, Political Reservations And Women’s Entrepreneurship In India, by Ghani and others noted that “97% of working men are employed in male-owned enterprises”. In the long run, such extreme levels of gender segmentation are obviously undesirable and inefficient. But in the short term, it may help to view this trend as a catalysing opportunity that will bring more women into the workforce.

In this context, it is worth considering why the labour force participation rate (LFPR) for working-age women (15 years and older) is so abysmally low in India—at about 27%, it performs only slightly better than Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Experts offer a whole host of reasons—that young women are studying longer; that as incomes have increased, women who worked only out of necessity have retreated to their homes (the first phase of the U-shaped female labour force function described by economist Claudia Goldin); that as agriculture has come under stress and rural women have been squeezed out of their farm jobs on the one hand, educated urban women haven’t moved into the workforce in considerable numbers on the other, etc. The pressures of urbanization, social norms and biases, and infrastructure issues put these trends in context but they still do not fully explain why the numbers are so low. Specifically, why have urban women, who seem to be the big drag on women’s overall LFPR, not been able to find a place in the country’s supposedly booming women-friendly services sector?

One reason for this is the lack of jobs overall, paired with men taking the lion’s share. Another reason is the quality of jobs. Women want jobs that are well-paying, close to their homes, and have flexible working hours, according to World Bank research, and these are hard to come by. Also, there are many jobs to which women’s access is restricted by law, such as those in mines and hazardous industries. Resolving this mess will, of course, require a multifaceted response from regulatory changes to public awareness campaigns to improving law and order so that women feel secure outside their homes. But encouraging entrepreneurship in women can be a good starting point: Women will be creating jobs and opportunities for themselves, and bringing other women on board.

India currently ranks 70 out of 77 nations on the Female Entrepreneurship Index, but moving up that index might not be as difficult as it seems. Certainly, long-term, structural reforms are needed but in the short term there are a few examples from around the world that indicate how targeted policy measures can deliver specific goals even when the rest of the infrastructure (such as ease of doing business, access to credit facilities and affordable childcare) may not be in place.

A good example here is Bangladesh, where the export-oriented garment industry has brought a large section of women into the workforce. Indeed, the Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs 2017 notes that even though Bangladesh fares poorly in terms of its ‘women’s advancement outcomes’, ‘knowledge assets’, ‘financial access’ and ‘supporting entrepreneurial conditions’, it ranks sixth among 54 countries on ‘women business ownership’, while India is at the bottom of the pile along with Iran, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Ultimately, it is important to keep in mind that improving female LFPR is not just a women’s issue, or only about ensuring gender justice and equality—though they are worthy goals in themselves. When women have productive, paying jobs, they have greater agency and that has a positive impact on their men and children, which reflects in higher human development indices. In economic terms, a low LFPR slows down growth, while bringing women into the fold is known to increase GDP. In short, if India’s growth story has to translate into shared prosperity for all its people, then it cannot afford to have one half of its population sit out.

Is female entrepreneurship the key to bringing more Indian women into the workforce? Tell us at views@livemint.com

4.2. More than 11,7 Million people skilled under Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship programmes

Press Information Bureau, Jun. 07, 2017

Marking the completion of three years of inclusive growth and development under the NDA government, Minister of State (I/C), Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Shri Rajiv Pratap Rudy said that his Ministry has trained more than 1.17 crore aspirants in various skills through MSDE schemes and programmes since the inception of Skill India. This is apart from the numbers contributed through skill development schemes and initiatives under other Central Ministries.

Addressing media persons here today on 3 years of NDA government, shri Rudy said, that Skill India is a silent revolution that is underway and it is a joint investment that the government along with the private partners is making for the future growth of the country. He said it is a path that needs to be tread very carefully since it involves the future of the youth of our country. He said, what we sow today is what we will reap tomorrow. We have hence taken the first two years, to set our base right and align the skill ecosystem to national standards of skill qualification.

Shri Rudy said that Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), which was launched on July 15, 2015 alone has witnessed more than 26. 5 lakh people getting trained in skills of their choice till date, of which 50 per cent are women candidates.

He said it is good to see that more and more women candidates are coming forward to take up skills. Last year women participation under PMKVY was 40%. “I am elated to see that we have an equal male female ratio this year cumulatively” the Minister added.

Shri Rudy said, “The industry/private sector will only partner when they see quality workforce coming out from Skill India. We are seeing that transition happen gradually. More and more corporate are partnering with us on different levels whether is it on engaging with apprentices, extending infrastructure support, contribution through CSR funds and hiring of resources.”

Answering questions on monitoring of fraudulent practices, shri Rudy said, “A handful of organizations claiming to be PMKVY agencies promising jobs to unemployed youth were taking money and duping the public in the name of MSDE. Such advertisements were found more in vernacular dailies. We condemn such practices and have filed FIRs against them.” He cautioned the public at large to be vary of such frauds and check for the right affiliated centres before joining.

Secretary MSDE Shri K P Krishnan said that vocational education is one of the point amongst the 52 items mentioned in the Concurrent list under 7th schedule of the Constitution of India which means that the States have to primarily drive this mandate within the State, along with Centre’s support. The Centre’s support comes in the form of funding, alignment with national standards etc. He said, MSDE have aligned short term trainings with the State Skill Development Missions; and World Bank schemes like SANKALP are also being implemented at the State level. He said, our efforts will cover the last mile very soon.

The officials of the Ministry also stated that they are trying to move away from the supply driven skill development scenario to demand driven one, so that we do not have skilled youth who are unemployed in India.

During the media interaction it was also emphasised that how there has been a five-fold increase in the number of students who are taking up apprenticeship today. This is essentially the result of comprehensive reforms that have been done in the Apprenticeship Act NAPS where the government is incentivising the industry to encourage engaging with apprentices. Till date there have been 5.9 lakh apprentices who have been engaged under NAPS.

Out of all the achievements of Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, the key achievements can be notified as:

More than 1.17 crore people trained under MSDE programs
26.5 lakhs candidates trained under MSDE's flagship scheme Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana
More than 4.82 lakh people were brought into the organised sector through the recognition of prior learning program under PMKVY which recognises existing skills and certifies youth (13000 Rubber Tappers, More than 250 Railway Porters and 1500 Employees of Rashtrapati Bhawan)
More than 480 Pradhan MantriKaushalKendras have been announced which would be model centres for skilling and would be in each district of the country for ease of skilling. 162 are already been established.
More than 1381 new ITIs have been opened with more than 5 lakh seats and the entire ecosystem of ITIs have been reinvigorated and reenergised
More than 1 crore people have been trained under NSDC's short term skilling ecosystem since its inception
Pradhan Mantri Yuva Yojana was also launched to promote young entrepreneurs and self sustainability. Target to cover 14.5 lakhs over the next 5 years
To cater to the increasing demand for drivers, MSDE also launched Driver Training institutes across the nation. There is a target to open 50 of them by end of 2017.
Special schemes like Udaan in J&K and others in North East have brought avenues of growth and opportunities to youth in these focused regions
4 new ATIs have been upgraded into India institute of skills modelled after ITE Singapore
MSDE focuses on bringing heavy quality focus in skills through Adhaar alignment, strengthened monitoring and better curriculum. It is also supported by world bank schemes like strive and SANKALP
MSDE has established convergence through common norms, National skills qualification framework and ISO certification of ITIs
Skill India also promotes Inclusion and diversity across all programs specially for disability • India has partnered with 11 countries in the skills agenda promoting global mobility
Skill support all national missions and partners with 18 out of 20 ministries today
MSDE also has support from states on infrastructure and skill education in schools/universities
MSDE has successfully created Industry linkages through apprenticeship, CSR, partnerships in infrastructure and hiring. More than 6 lakh apprentices have been engaged under NAPS
MSDE with MHRD has partnered to create bridge courses For academic equivalence of ITI students
Skill India through its technology applications brings in ease of managing systems in process in India
MSDE has conducted special skill development projects with Armed Forces (Navy, Army, AirForce) , CRPF jawans etc.

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

5.1. GST to cut inflation by 2%, create buoyancy in economy: Adhia

PTI, BusinessLine, 22 May 2017

Inflation will fall by 2 per cent on implementation of the goods and services tax (GST) and create buoyancy in the economy, Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia has said.

With the stage set for the biggest overhaul of India’s tax system since Independence, the government will launch a massive awareness campaign to educate consumers about GST so that they are not fleeced by traders in the name of new tax.

In an interview to PTI, he said the all-powerful GST Council will meet next week to decide on tax rates of contentious items such as gold, bidi and biscuits, just in time for its rollout from July 1.

The Council over the two days last week assigned tax rates to more than 500 services and 1,200 goods by setting them in five broad rates of 5, 12, 18 and 28 per cent.

Adhia and his team visited this picturesque hill station near Srinagar for a short break before heading back to Delhi.

The rates, he said, have been so fixed that incidence of taxation has come down in many and remained at the same level as now in most of the remaining goods and services.

“I don’t think inflation will at all go up because of GST. We have taken special care to ensure inflation does not go up. Our internal estimate is that after the rates are decided, inflation should come down by 2 per cent,” he said.

While the current indirect tax regime suffers from significant cascading, which leads to higher cost of goods and services, a free flow of credits across transactions under the GST framework will bring down the tax cost for businesses.

Also, taxpayers or consumers currently have to pay both the Centre and state taxes on a single sale, which adds to increased costs for businesses and consumers. Such an increase in costs adds to the inflationary pressure.

GST will be a single nation-wide sales tax replacing a string of central and state levies.

“That is how we have managed to keep our inflation basket under control,” Adhia said, promising to fix any compliance issues that crop up during implementation.

The Revenue Secretary said GST will create buoyancy in the economy through better compliance and ease of doing business.

“I wouldn’t say anything is pending, but I would say the government has to reach out to the trade and industry and also the machinery of explaining the GST procedures in townhall meetings. We need to accelerate this,” he said on the task ahead.

Most importantly, consumer education campaign has to be taken up, he added.

“Because we have taken care to ensure the average tax incidence on commodities does not go up... There may be some traders who will try to tell consumers that under the changed GST rates, they will have to pay more. We have to educate them,” he said.

Consumers, he stressed, need not be charged more in all cases even though the headline rate may go up as input tax credit or setting off the tax paid on raw material is available.

“We need a lot of consumer education for that,” he said.

To safeguard consumer interest, the GST law provides for an anti-profiteering mechanism that will ensure industries that have got relief by way of lower taxes actually pass on the benefit to consumers. “We will try to set it (anti-profiteering machinery) up as early as possible or we will try to identify an agency which will do it. We are working on it,” Adhia said.

Even if setting up the agency takes three months, the agency can do a post mortem to see if anybody has unduly profited from GST.

“Even if it is set up after three months, it doesn’t matter because if anybody has done profiteering, the books (of accounts) will speak for themselves and so, we can do a post mortem of those cases and we can take care of that,” he said.

But the effort for now is to hold consultations with the trade and industry. “We will urge the big corporates that in the interest of smooth implementation of GST, they should not increase any rates now,” he said. The secretary said rates for all items but for six like gold, bidi, biscuits, textiles, footwear and natural or cultured pears and semi-precious stones have been decided.

“We decided to keep the things on which a lot of people have a lot of things to say — like bidi, gold, precious metal — and we will take up those at a later meeting. The main achievement now is we have been able to inform people about the tax rates of many commodities except six,” he added.

Adhia made the point that rates of many items have reduced while some have been put on the exemption list. “Our estimate is revenue loss on account of this will be more than offset by the revenue gain which we gain because of better compliance,” he added.

He expressed confidence that the requirement of compensation to make up for revenue loss of any state will be fulfilled from cess on demerit and luxury goods like cars and tobacco. Adhia claimed that the IT network for GST is on track and there are no issues of privacy being compromised.

5.2. GST to help India achieve 9% growth rate: NITI Aayog CEO

PTI , BusinessLine, 6 Jun. 2017

The Goods and Services Tax, to be rolled out next month as the biggest tax reform since independence, will help India achieve 9 per cent growth rate, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant has said.

He said GST will simplify India’s taxation system and help deal with tax evasion.

“GST is India’s biggest tax reform since 1947...GST will help India in achieving 9 per cent growth rate,” Kant said at an event here today. Noting that the implementation of GST is a dream of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, the NITI Aayog CEO said it will bring a big revolution in India’s taxation structure.

Several experts have also said that GST is estimated to boost GDP by 1-2 per cent and bring down inflation by 2 per cent over the long term.

Kant’s comments come against the backdrop of India losing the fastest growing economy tag to China for the March quarter with the GDP growth slipping to 6.1 per cent. China recorded a growth rate of 6.9 per cent during the January-March quarter.

However, on an annual basis, India's GDP grew 7.1 per cent in 2016-17.

Narendra Modi had yesterday reviewed the preparedness for the new indirect tax regime, slated to be rolled out from July 1.

The meeting was attended by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia and senior officers from the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC).

This was the first review by the PM after the GST Council finalised the rates, and the second since May 2. The GST Council, chaired by Jaitley and comprising his state counterparts, has already finalised tax rates on almost all goods and services. It will meet again on June 11 to review some of the rates and discuss other pending issues.

All goods and services have been put in slabs of 5, 12, 18 and 28 per cent, with the exception of gold and precious metals, which will attract 3 per cent GST, and rough diamond at 0.25 per cent GST.

5.3. Has demonetisation really boosted income tax collections?

Livemint, 23 May, 2017, Roshan Kishore

News reports have quoted government officials making claims about a record increase in the number of income tax payers in 2016-17. Should such claims be seen as a success of demonetisation in forcing unscrupulous individuals to become a part of income tax net? An analysis of direct tax collection statistics and income tax department’s income tax return (ITR) filing data calls for scepticism about any immediate claims of demonetisation leading to a dramatic turnaround in India’s direct tax collections.

Union Budget 2017-18 has predicted an annual increase of 25.4% in income tax collections over revised estimate (RE) figures for 2016-17. RE figures for 2016-17 show an annual increase of 23.3% over 2015-16 actual estimates. These growth figures are the highest in this decade, and seen at face value, suggest a dramatic improvement in India’s income tax base in the past one year.

However 2016-17 income tax collections need to be seen in the context of Income Disclosure Scheme 2016, which led to the disclosure of Rs65,250 crore of undisclosed income. At 45% rate of taxation, the scheme would have brought in mostly one-time extra income tax revenue of around Rs30,000 crore.

After adjusting for this value, the annual increase in income tax collections for 2016-17 seems more modest, and as a result, 2017-18 targets appear to be much more difficult.

ITR e-filing data from income tax department shows that number of ITR filings increased from 43.3 million to 52.9 million between FY16 and FY17. In absolute terms, the increase is not significantly more than what was achieved between FY15 and FY16. To be sure, the ITR filing and payment process for the previous fiscal year is still underway and income tax returns/tax payments could continue to increase. However, data available till now does not suggest a spectacular increase in India’s income tax base due to demonetisation.

It is reasonable to assume that a large amount of income tax evasion happens on account of non-salaried classes, as those getting salaries have their taxes deducted at source. The income tax department classifies ITR filings on the basis of type of tax payers (see details here). At present there are nine such categories, where ITR 1 and 2 represent individuals or Hindu Undivided Family (HUFs) earnings from salaries, interest, house income etc. These categories account for close to half of ITR filings in the country. The ITR filing data for FY17 does not show any significant change in composition of ITR filings by different categories compared to previous years.

To be sure, there could still be an increase in tax collection if such elements have been forced to declare their ill-gotten wealth (result of under-reported incomes in earlier tax-returns) kept in cash to tax authorities. But for any such increase to be inferred as a result of demonetisation and not one-off gain due to Income Disclosure Scheme, the trend must sustain itself for a few years rather than being a one-off thing.

The short point is one must wait for a few years before declaring any significant victory for demonetisation in India’s battle to bring undisclosed incomes in the tax net.

– AGRICULTURE, FISHING & RURAL DEVELOPMENT

6.1. Rajasthan has a sweet deal for orange processing units

BusinessLine, TV Jayan, 21 May 2017

Among the top producers of the fruit, the western State plans to offer 50% subsidy

Rajasthan, which is now the country’s fourth-largest producer of oranges, has drawn up plans to woo entrepreneurs to set up processing units in State.

“We plan to give 50 per cent up subsidy — of up to ₹20 lakh — to those who are willing to establish post- harvest processing units here,” Rajasthan Minister for Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, Prabhu Lal Saini, said last week. These units should engage in grading, waxing and packaging as well as pulp extraction at the farm gate, he said.

“We would like to market them under a newly-coined brand name Raj Santara,” the Minister told a group of journalists here.

Rajasthan’s Kota division, which accounts for 98 per cent of the 2.67-lakh tones of oranges produced in the State, already has a Centre of Excellence for Citrus, which is developing newer varieties suitable for its farmers.

The centre has developed 16 varieties of oranges and eight varieties of lemons so far. Some are being currently tested on an experimental basis, said Rashid Khan, in-charge of the centre.

Set up with help from Mashav, Israel’s internation aid agency, under the National Horticultural Mission, the centre is also training farmers on modern agricultural practices such as mulch, drip- and ridge- bed system for irrigation.

Among the varieties of oranges being grafted at the centre include globally popular varieties such as Jaffa, Valencia, Daisy and Clementine. Currently, the centre has facilities to graft as many as 50,000 plants annually and each plant will be priced at a subsidised rate of ₹50, said Khan.

“Adopting new cultivation practices may cost them 15 per cent more, but the yield will leap 35 per cent or more,” said Khan. Atuljeet Singh Jhala, a farmer who has an orange orchard in Jhalawar district, said he was impressed with the work being done at the centre and was willing to set aside a small area in his farm for trying out newer varieties, if they can convince him about the benefits.

“Farmers like me normally sell oranges at prices as low as ₹8 per kg, whereas the same is sold for ₹80 in city markets,” said Jhala, adding that the coming up of processing units might help the farmers get a better price.

(The writer was in Rajasthan recently on the invitation of the State government)

6.2. Indian mangoes take wing, find a new destination in South Korea

BusinessLine, M Somasekhar, 29 May 2017

South Koreans have finally got a chance to taste the delicious Indian mango. Consignments of a few varieties of the ‘King of fruits' reached Seoul at the end of the week.

The initial consignment of 2.5 tonnes was airlifted the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA)’s Cargo Terminal, operated by Hyderabad Menzies Air Cargo. In June 2016, the Ambassador of the Republic of Korea in India Cho Hyun had told BusinessLine in a interview that all hurdles for exports had been removed and the mangoes would be going to South Korea soon.

“Normally mangoes from the Philippines flood the market. “Indian mangoes have a big market here if properly marketed. Cost is not a problem. The Philippine varieties are much cheaper,” says Ram Garikapati, an Indian- origin professional settled in Seoul.

India exports 4,500 tonnes of mangoes annually. The fruit goes mainly to West Asia, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Exports to Japan, South Asian nations and the EU are low due to import issues there.

Teams from the GMR Hyderabad International Airport Limited (GHIAL), which operates the airport, and Hyderabad Menzies Air Cargo. worked with the farmer community at Vizianagaram to develop a pack-house, create markets, get requisite approvals and the export Suvarnarekha variety of mangoes to South Korea. With this, RGIA becomes the first airport in India to facilitate export of mangoes to South Korea directly through a farm-based infrastructure. The export volume to South Korea is expected to grow up to 10 tonnes per day for the rest of the season, it said.

GHIAL and Hyderabad Menzies are in the process of identifying and enabling similar infrastructure across the catchment areas in Telangana State, Andhra Pradesh, Northern Karnataka and Eastern Maharashtra among others to boost exports.

According to Sudhakar, DGM of APEDA, “Telangana and AP are the largest producers of mangoes in India, with a 25 per cent share.”

Says SGK Kishore, CEO of GHIAL: “Our effort to diversify into perishables exports has been realised now with the initiative of mango exports to South Korea. We will establish a dedicated perishables handling facility at the Airport soon.”

7.1. The cycles of distress in Indian agriculture

Livemint, 26 May 2017

The anniversaries of the Champaran agitation led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Naxalbari uprising provide an opportunity to refocus on structural challenges in agriculture

It is now 100 years since Mahatma Gandhi mobilized the indigo cultivators of Bihar’s Champaran district. This was his first mass political protest after his return from South Africa. It is also 50 years since the peasants of Naxalbari in West Bengal began their violent uprising against landlords. The Chinese Communist Party said at the time: “A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India”.

There is at one level little in common between these two anniversaries. The Champaran agitation was a peaceful protest against the policies of the colonial state. The Naxalbari uprising was an attempt at a violent Communist attack on the constitutional state. What is important is that both these historic events were based on the grievances of Indian peasants. Their distress was the root cause of important flash points in Indian history.

Modern Indian history has been marked by several peasant revolts that were based on underlying economic fault lines. The Deccan riots in the mid-19th century were perhaps the first challenge to colonial rule since 1857. It is useful to remember that at least two of the major political movements launched by Gandhi were timed with a massive deflation in the prices of agricultural commodities—after World War I, and then during the Great Depression. Naxalbari also took place when Indian agriculture had been hit by two successive droughts.

It is worth asking why India has not seen similar episodes in the past few decades despite persistent cycles of farmer distress. There are two possible interlocking reasons. First, Indian agriculture has moved on from feudalism. The tight hold that landlords had over peasants has eased thanks not just to the rise of capitalism in farming but also the possibilities of getting non-farm jobs in the rural areas on the one hand, and migration to cities on the other. Second, the Indian state has, since the Green Revolution, taken at least some of the risk out of agriculture by providing farm inputs at subsidized costs as well as providing guaranteed prices for certain types of farm produce. The growing importance of agricultural subsidies in Indian budgets can at least partially be understood as a reflection of the growing clout of that part of the peasantry that was enriched by the Green Revolution.

The major farmer or peasant protests since the 1980s have thus been focused on getting more benefits from the government rather than making any fundamental changes in the way agriculture is organized. Think of either someone like Charan Singh, who worked through the party system, or Mahendra Singh Tikait, who led his protests as a political outsider. The focus of their politics was inevitably to lower input prices or higher support prices.

The system of state support is now buckling under fiscal pressure. There is little offered by way of alternatives. The Narendra Modi government has committed itself to doubling farmer incomes by 2022—but without articulating a strategy on how to reach this commendable goal. One alternative is to reduce the number of people employed in agriculture. B.R. Ambedkar had argued in a brilliant academic paper he wrote in 1918: “A large agricultural population with the lowest proportion of land in actual cultivation means that a large part of the agricultural population is superfluous and idle…this labour when productively employed will cease to live by predation as it does today, and will not only earn its keep but will give us surplus; and more surplus means more capital. In short, strange as it may seem, industrialization of India is the soundest remedy for the agricultural problems of India.”

The second alternative is to free Indian agriculture from price controls, restrictions on movement of farm produce, commercial risks due to volatile prices, and the lack of access to global markets. Farm leader Sharad Joshi used to argue that the solution to farm distress lay in dismantling the system of state controls that were in effect a massive tax on farming. Joshi was convinced that what the Indian farmer needed was a free market rather than state handouts.

Farmers are trapped in a new cycle of distress at a time when the fiscal capacity of the government is weak. The anniversaries of the Champaran agitation led by Gandhi and the Naxalbari uprising led by the Maoists thus provide a good opportunity to refocus on the structural challenges in Indian agriculture. Indian history tells us that anger in the Indian countryside can have very profound political consequences.

What can the Narendra Modi government do to double farmer incomes? Tell us at views@livemint.com

7.2. 8,130 Million person days of job generated in last 3 years in Rural Schemes-Tomar

Press Information Bureau, May 29, 2017

28,000 Arsenic & Fluoride affected habitations to get safe drinking water by 2021.

The Ministry of Rural Development has created employment opportunities of more than 813 crore person days during the last three years (2014-17) in the schemes of MGNREGA, Pradhan Mantri AawasYojna, Grameen (PMAY-G) and in Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna (PMGSY). Briefing the media here, Union Minister for Rural Development, Drinking Water & Sanitation and Panchayati Raj, Shri Narendra Singh Tomar said that during the last three years while 636.78 crore person days were generated under MGNEREGA, about 78 crore person days under PMGSY and 99 crore person days under PMAY. Apart from this, under Deen Dayal Upadhyay-Grameen Kaushal Yojana (DDY-GKY), 86,120 candidates were trained in the year 2014-15 and 54,196 got jobs. Similarly, in 2015-16, about one lakh thirty-five thousand candidates were placed after the skill training, while in 2016-17, the number of candidates getting placement is 84,900.

Shri Tomar said that in the current year, the Ministry of Rural Development proposes to train 5 lakh candidates with an assured placement of over 70 percent of these youth in Wage and Self Help employment programmes. He said that Rural Self Employment Training Institute (RSETIs) trained 4 lakh rural youth in 2016-17 for Self Employment.

Shri Tomar said that under MGNREGA during FY 2016-17, more than 1.23 crore assets have been geo tagged and placed in public domain and about 96% of wage payments were electronically credited into the accounts of the workers through DBT system. So far, 8.73 crore Aadhar number of workers have been seeded in NREGASoft (MIS) and 4.73 have been enabled for Aadhar Based Payment with their consent. He added that Job Card verification/updation was taken on priority basis during FY 2016-17 and more than 1 crore Job Cards have been deleted after verification.

On the subject of PMAY-G, Shri Tomar said that in line with the government’s stated objective of “Housing for All” by 2022, the Government intends to provide houses to 1 crore poor people by 2019 in rural areas. A total of 34.82 lakh houses have been constructed during 2014-15 to 2015-16, against a target of 45.98 lakh houses under the erstwhile scheme of Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY). During 2016-17, a total of 32.14 lakh houses have been completed with an expenditure of Rs. 16,074 crore under the revamped scheme PMAY-G.

On PMGSY, the Minister said that the pace of construction of road has reached a record of 130 kms. per day, which is the highest average annual construction rate, in the last 7 years, with a record 47,447 kms of PMGSY roads constructed during 2016-17 thereby connecting 11,641 habitations, which implies providing connectivity of an average of 32 habitations every day, the highest ever in the last 7 years. He said, during 2016-17, “Road Connectivity project in LWE Affected Areas” has been launched for construction of all-weather roads in 9 LWE states in 44 worst affected LWE districts and adjoining districts with estimated cost of Rs 11,725 crore. This would be completed by March, 2020.

Dwelling on the issues of drinking water and sanitation, Shri Tomar said that providing safe drinking water is one of the top most priority of the government and the Government is committed to providing tap water on a sustained basis in every household by 2030 as per the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for which Rs 23,000 crore of central fund will be required annually till the target is achieved. The Minister said that the dream of ‘Har Ghar Jal’ cannot be realized without the involvement of the citizens. Referring to the launch of National Water Quality Sub Mission on Arsenic and Fluoride to provide safe drinking water to about 28,000 affected habitations in the country by March 2021 with an outlay of Rs 25,000 crore, he said that there will be no discrimination of funds against any state to address the twin challenges of drinking water and sanitation. He said that sanitation coverage has increased from 42 percent 2014 to 64 percent in the current year and more that 4 crore toilets were constructed.

Shri Tomar said that under the 14th Finance Commission, Centre will be releasing more than 2 lakh crore rupees to Gram Panchayats for 5 years to undertake physical and social infrastructure projects in the villages. The Minister said that earlier about Rs 30,000 crore was allocated to the Panchayats in the 13th Finance commission, wherein Panchayats found it difficult to execute developmental projects in a holistic fashion. So far, Rs 51,234 crore were allocated to the states and 44 lakh panchayat functionaries were provided training.

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

7.3. Government aims to make India "food factory" of the world: Badal

PTI, Jun. 12, 2017

New Delhi: Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal today said the government wants to make India a "food factory" of the world and is fully committed to provide transparent environment to investors.

Laying the foundation stone for a mega food park being developed by KINFRA at Palakkad in Kerala, Badal said the government has made food processing a major thrust area of 'Make in India' initiative.

"The present government is fully committed to providing an environment that is smooth, transparent and easy for investors wanting to start an enterprise in India in a bid to make the country a resilient food economy and 'Food Factory' of the world," Badal said.

The food park is being set up on 78.68 acres at a cost of Rs 119.02 crore.

"Giving a big push to the infrastructure development for food processing in the state of Kerala, foundation stone of two mega food parks are being developed by Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (KINFRA) at Palakkad and other by Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC) at Alappuzha has been laid today," a statement from the ministry of food processing said today.

The foundation stone for the food park being developed by KSIDC at Alappuzha was laid by Chief Minister of Kerala Pinarayi Vijayan, it said. This is being set up on 68.18 acre of land at the cost of Rs 129.15 crore. "Government of India is providing financial assistance of Rs 50 crore to each of the projects," the statement added.

Each of the mega food parks will leverage an additional investment of about Rs 250 crore in 25-30 food processing units in the park and generate a turnover of about Rs 450-500 crore annually, Badal said. "Each of the Parks will also provide direct and indirect employment to 5,000 people and benefit about 25,000 farmers in the Central Processing Centre (CPC) and Primary Processing Centres (PPC) catchment areas," the statement added.

Minister for Food Processing Industries said that the modern infrastructure for food processing created at the food parks will benefit the farmers, growers, processors and consumers of Kerala and prove to be a big boost to the growth of the food processing sector in Kerala.

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

8.1. Our Country is the Largest Producer of Milk in the World: Shri Radha Mohan Singh

Press Information Bureau, May 29, 2017

New Delhi: Under Rashtriya Gokul Mission, on the lines of Gokul Gram, ‘ Gir Cow sanctuary’ has been Approved. It Is the Responsibility of Veterinarians to Contribute in Keeping the Nation Healthy By Increasing Availability of Animal Protein.

By 2022 the Government of India is committed to Double Farmers' Income Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Shri Radha Mohan Singh today said that the Government of India has undertaken several new initiatives in the field of animal husbandry in Gujarat. Under Rashtriya Gokul Mission, on the lines of Gokul Gram ‘Gir, Cow Sanctuary’ has been approved. This will be established in Dharampur, Porbandar under Livestock insurance coverage. Earlier only two milk animals were included, now 5 milk animals and 50 small animals are included. This scheme has been implemented in all the districts of the state, whereas earlier only 15 districts were included. During the year 2014-16, about 26,000 animals have been insured in the state. To fulfil the shortage of veterinarians, a veterinary college has been established in Junagadh. The Agriculture Minister was speaking at the inauguration ceremony of polytechnic at Kamdhenu University, Sabarkantha.

The Agriculture Minister said that it is a matter of immense pride that our country is number one in milk production in the world. In the year 2015-16, the growth rate of milk production has been 6.28 per cent due to which total production has reached 156 million tonnes. And now, per person milk availability is 337 gram on an average, while on the world level it is 229 gram. It is worth mentioning that in comparison to the years 2011- 14, the growth in milk production during the years 2014-17 has been 16.9 per cent.

He said that the standard of living of urban and rural families is rising, therefore, the demand for the animal protein is increasing. So, it is necessary that we constantly make effort to increase the production of our livestock, poultry and fish so that the country's citizens are well-nourished and healthy. That is why it is the responsibility of veterinarians to contribute in keeping the nation healthy by increasing availability of animal protein.

He said that the Government is committed to double farmers' income by 2022 and veterinaries play a significant role in fulfilling the Government’s resolution to double the farmers’ income. A healthy animal will result in greater production which will automatically enhance the farmer’s income and the country will proceed on the path of economic prosperity.

Agriculture Minister said that India is world’s highest livestock owner at about 512.05 million out of which 199.1 million are bovines, 105.3 million buffaloes, 71.6 million sheep and 140.5 million goats. In the case of goats, India is at the second position in the world and it is approximately 25 % of the livestock. India is second largest poultry market in the world and it includes the production of 63 billion eggs and 649 million poultry meat. India's marine and fish industry are growing at around 7 percent compound annual growth rate. Overall, India’s livestock sector is growing fast and emerging as a major contributor in the global market.

The Agriculture Minister said that the Government of India is ensuring the quality of education in universities is of international standards. In this direction, ICAR’s Fifth Deans Committee Report has been approved. Schemes like ‘Student’ and ‘Arya’ have been started with scholarships. Students’ scholarship amount has been increased.

In the end, the Minister said that to see our nation prosper and agriculture sector and farmers flourish, we need to work together. When the agriculture will grow, the farmer will be happy and the country will move forward.

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

8.2. India has highest animal wealth in the World with 512.05 million numbers

Press Information Bureau, Jun. 05, 2017

Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister, Shri Radha Mohan Singh has said that there is a tremendous potential for working on the development of dairy in Maharashtra. In Nagpur Vidarbha and Marathwada Center, the dairy profession can be a major source of livelihood for rural households. The Agriculture Minister said this on the occasion of inauguration of Nagpur Dairy and Mother Dairy booth here today. On this occasion, Union Minister of Road Transport & Highways and Shipping, Shri Nitin Gadkari and Chief Minister of Maharashtra Shri Devendra Fadnavis were also present.

Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister, Shri Radha Mohan Singh said that according to the data of May 28, 2017, the total production of milk in 2015-16 reached 156 million tonnes which is 6.28 percent annual growth rate. It may be worth to mention here that milk production during 2014-17 has increased by 16.9% when compared to the year 2011-14. Per capita availability of milk in India is 337gms/day while World average is only 299 gms/day. As far as Maharashtra is concerned, milk production increased from 9.54 million tonnes in 2014-15 to 10.1 million tonnes in the year 15-16 with a growth rate of 6.4%, which is more than country’s growth rate of 6.28%, but per capita availability of milk has been 239 gms/day in 2015-16 which is substantially lower than national average, he added.

The Agriculture Minister said about Marathwada and Vidarbha region,

Out of the total milk animals in the state, 41 per cent are in these areas, whereas it contributes only 28 per cent (261 lakh kg per day) in the State's total milk production. This is due to the presence of large number of low-productive indigenous cows and buffaloes.
The average milk productivity of animals in this area is 3.21 kg per day which is less than the state and the country average of 4.42 kg per day and 4.32 kg per day respectively.
Only 13 percent of reproductive animals are reproduced with artificial insemination. Thus there is a great possibility of improving the genetic potential of milk animals by artificial insemination.
58 percent of those who keep milk cattle have only one cattle per family.
Per capita availability of milk in these areas is only 170 gm per day, which is less than the state and country average of 239 and 337 grams per day respectively. The consumption of milk in this area is quite less and malnutrition is increasing.
Institutional structure is weak for milk procurement from milk producers. In this area, the marketable surplus milk available is 37% of the milk production, but, the milk procurement by Milk Unions in the region is only about 8% (4.3 lakh kg per day). Most Milk Unions either receive lesser amount of milk or are not currently functional - about 30 percent of these Unions gets more than 10,000 kilograms of milk per day.
States of Rajasthan and Gujarat with similar climatic conditions are in second and third place in terms of milk production, while Maharashtra is at sixth place. Dairy industry is the main source of livelihood for the rural families of these states. As far as milk production and procurement through milk cooperative societies are concerned, this state is above national level. According to the "19th Census of Livestock-2012", the population of livestock in Maharashtra has dropped by 9.5 percent from 3.59 million in 2007 to 3.25 crore, in 2012.
Frequent famine, dry wells, dry hand pumps, low-productive animals are common in Marathwada and Vidarbha areas, due to which the dairy industry is more progressive in the western part of the state, where more than one-third of the state's milk cattle inhabits.
Therefore, dairy industry in Marathwada and Vidarbha is important for rural development and is working with NDDB and its subsidiaries for the development of an integrated (integrated) 3-year plan.
In these areas, Mother Dairy has been targeting 3000 villages of 11 districts- Amravati, Akola, Nagpur, Jalna, Wardha, Buldhana, Latur, Osmanabad, Chandrapur, Yavatmal and Nanded for procurement of milk in the first 3 years.
Mother Dairy started procurement of milk in Amravati districts on October 5, 2016 and after this it was started in districts of Wardha, Nagarpur and Chandalpur in Vidarbha and in Nanded, Osmaknabad districts of Marathwada.
Presently, 377 milk Producer Institutions cover 725 villages where 7969 Milk Producers are pouring 38131 liters of milk in 46 Bulk Milk coolers and 2 Milk Chilling Centers. As per the available report, this milk is mainly going to Mumbai and Hyderabad for sale.
100 percent of the farmers are receiving the direct payment in their bank account. By the end of this year, Latur and Buldhana districts and 1300 villages will be covered.

Agriculture Minister said that Mother Dairy has completely renovated this dairy plant in the record period of four months after the lease agreement between Maharashtra Government and Mother Dairy was signed for Nagpur Dairy in the presence of Chief Minister of Maharashtra on September 14, 2016, and its present capacity is 50,000 liters per day, which can be expanded to 2,00,000 liters per day. Apart from this, work on capacity expansion is going on for the construction of dairy products like curd, buttermilk and lassi and it is expected to be operational by September 2017. Mother Dairy is also setting up milk outlets in the city of Nagpur, which will provide a broad range of products and also offer digital payment options for consumers.

At the end, the Agriculture Minister informed that Mother Dairy is also going to set up a new state-of-the-art plant for processing of milk and milk products in Bhiwandi. The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), is working actively to increase productivity through pilot ration balancing programme, establishment of semen stations, providing artificial insemination services to farmers door, feed &fodder development activities, supply of quality feed supplement and animal health services at the village level. He expressed confidence that due to these activities in these areas, milk production and productivity will increase, the income of the farmers will also increase and the dream of our Prime Minister will also be fulfilled.

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

9.1. Agri grew at robust 5.2% in March quarter

Business Standard, June 01, 2017

New Delhi: The country’s gross value added (GVA) in the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector grew 5.2 per cent in the JanuaryMarch quarter, final one of the 2016-17 financial year.

This was the highest in two years, with record production of foodgrain and horticulture. The GVA for agriculture and allied activities during the same quarter of the year before was 1.5 per cent. Output of grain was a record high despite the acute cash crunch right in the middle of the rabi sowing season. On November 8, 2016, the Centre had announced that the currency notes of ~500 and ~1,000 denominations would cease to be legal tender from midnight.

Even so, farmers brought a higher area under cereals, pulses and oilseeds as compared to previous years. The full-year GVA growth in agriculture, forestry and fishing is estimated ato 4.9 per cent, as against 0.7 per cent in 2015-16. Foodgrain production in the 2016-17 crop year was estimated at 273.38 million tonnes, the highest since Independence. Horticulture output is projected at 295 mt. Wheat production is estimated at a record of a little over 97 mt. That of pulses is estimated to be 22 mt. The southwest monsoon in 2016 was the first normal one after droughts in 2014 and 2015.

The rains aided a record kharif output and seemed to have a positive impact on the rabi.

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

9.2. Production of horticulture crops during 2016-17 is 3.2% higher as compared to the previous year's 2015-16 estimates

Press Information Bureau, May 31, 2017

The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare has released the Second Advance Estimates of Area and Production of Horticulture Crops for 2016-17. These estimates are based on the information received from different State/UTs in the country.

The following table summarizes the Second Advance Estimates of area and Production of horticulture crops for the year 2016-17 along with First Advance Estimates for 2016-17 and Final Estimates for 2015-16:

Highlights of the “Second Advance Estimates” for 2016-17:

The production of horticulture crops in the country during 2016-17 is estimated to be more than 295 million tonnes which is 3.2 % higher as compared to the previous year’s 2015-16 estimates.
The area under horticulture crops has increased from 245 lakh ha to 249 lakh ha in 2016-17 recording an increase of 1.9% over previous year.
Fruits production during the current year is estimated to be 93 million tonnes which is 2.9% higher than the previous year.
Production of vegetables is estimated to be around 175 million tonnes which is 3.5% higher than the previous year.

With 21.6 million tonnes estimated onion production in the country, there is an increase of 3% over the previous year. The major onion producing States are Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Gujarat.
Potato production in the country has increased from 43.4 million tonnes to 46.5 million tonnes in the current year which is 7.2% higher than the previous year. Major Potato growing States are Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab.
During the current year tomato production is estimated to be around 19.7 million tonnes which is 5.1% higher than the previous year. The major tomato growing States are Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Odisha and Gujarat etc.

Production of flowers is estimated to be around 2.2 million tonnes which is 2.9% higher than the previous year. Production of Aromatics & Medicinal Plants is estimated to be around 1.03 million tonnes which is marginally higher by 0.8% than the previous year. During the current year the production of Plantation crops is estimated to be around 17 million tonnes which is 1.3% higher than the previous year. Production of spices is estimated to be around 7.1 million tonnes which is 1.3% higher than the previous year.

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

9.3. Dairy firms secure sourcing to grow in new markets

Livemint, Soumya Gupta, 4 Jun. 2017

South Indian dairy firms such as Heritage and Hatsun are entering North Indian markets with a combination of acquisitions and painstakingly slow moves

Mumbai: Dairy firms are experimenting with various sourcing strategies as they begin an expansion spree, providing clues on how to enter new geographies in India’s fragmented milk market.

South Indian dairy companies are moving into north Indian markets with a combination of acquisitions and painstakingly slow moves.

“We are not a firm that has ever wanted to expand too fast,” said Prasanna Venkatesh Jayaraman, associate vice-president of marketing at Chennai-based Hatsun Agro Product Ltd. The maker of Arokya Milk and Arun ice-cream has recently expanded operations to Solapur and Sangli districts of south Maharashtra.

“We started with south Maharashtra because it could be catered to from our plant in Belgaum (Karnataka),” Jayaraman said. “On the ground, there are agents who will collect milk from farmers in the area and bring them to a company’s collection centre. That does not let you control the supply of milk. Instead, we waited and slowly built a network of milk farmers of our own.”

Hatsun now has its own network of 5,000-6,000 farmers who come to the company’s milk collection centres in Solapur and Sangli. The firm took nearly a year to scale operations up to this level.

In contrast, Telangana-based Heritage Foods moved quickly into north India by acquiring Reliance Dairy, part of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Retail Ltd. A known brand in the region, Reliance Dairy gave Heritage access to about 150,000-200,000 litres a day in sales, along with five new north Indian markets—Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh.

“We completed acquisition of Reliance Dairy in mid-April and are now trying to understand how to integrate the businesses better,” said Brahmani Nara, executive director of Heritage Foods. “We also got two new brands— Dairy Life and Dairy Pure.”

For Heritage Foods, too, all strategies are built to secure sourcing. “We are locally procuring milk as close as possible to our (go-to) markets to supply the best and freshest milk,” she said. “We will focus a lot more on dairy value-added products, and are already a formidable player in curd, where margins are higher and the market is growing.”

Value-added dairy products bring much needed margins to the sector where milk and other daily use, high value goods sell on wafer-thin margins. One firm that entered the market with value-added products is PepsiCo India, which launched its Quaker Oats brand of oats and fibre-fortified milk in two flavours in May. “We are outsourcing all manufacturing to Schreiber Dynamix”, Deepika Warrier, vice-president of nutrition category at PepsiCo India, had said in May.

For multinationals, who have always found it hard to break into India’s fragmented, regionally varied and cooperative-dominated milk market, third-party manufacturing can come as a relief. Schreiber Dynamix Dairies Ltd is a dedicated dairy products manufacturer, but also makes PepsiCo’s Tropicana line of juices in India and counts other leading dairies, including the National Dairy Development Board (Mother Dairy) and Danone SA, among its clients.

All three strategies for expansion have their own advantages and problems but there is a lone common thread among them—sourcing.

“At the base level, sourcing and procurement (of milk from farmers) is scattered in India,” Harminder Sahni, founder and managing director at retail advisory firm Wazir Advisors said. “The common theme (for all dairy businesses) is who has access to the farmer. Cooperatives have a definite advantage over multinationals in acquiring farmers.” Cooperatives such as Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), which owns Amul, dominate the Indian dairy market with its direct access to farmers.

However, private Indian and foreign firms struggle to get similar access. In such a situation, acquiring a brand helps. “That is also a good strategy for someone who does not have access to procurement,” R.S. Sodhi, managing director of GCMMF, said. “It takes time to contact farmers and they will supply milk only to a brand they trust.”

In fact, Sodhi says building your own direct network of farmers take a very long time. “It took Amul 70 years to do so,” he said, adding GCMMF now has 3.6 million farmers in its procurement network who supply milk to Amul’s collection centres directly.

“You have to meet milk farmers, convince them, then set up milk procurement centres. All this takes time.” However, the payoff can be huge because in the long run, and it helps control quality and costs. “In our collection centres, we electronically weigh the milk and test it in front of the farmers,” Jayaraman said. However, for multinationals with little time to attack the Indian dairy market, it makes sense to defer to third party manufacturers as PepsiCo has done.

“If you want to expand rapidly, you will need acquire a brand or procurement (such as an existing dairy farm),” an analyst with an equities brokerage firm said, requesting anonymity.

But you need to have a good brand that will support the procurement or capacities you will acquire.”

This acquired procurement helps reduce the timeline and allows companies to focus on designing their products. PepsiCo’s Warrier said that while Schreiber Dynamix produces the company’s Quaker Oats milk, the recipe and soluble oats technology is patented by the multinational.

Yet, milk supply would no longer be in the company’s control in such a situation. “For any dairy, how will you control costs?” Sodhi said. “You are in the hands of these (companies) while you are building a big business.” In India, every dairy firm’s expansion decision will be a trade-off between rapidity and controlled sourcing of milk, the lifeline of all dairy businesses from packaged milk to value added complex products.

– INDUSTRY, MANUFACTURE

10.1. LG India eyes 50% market share with new OLED TV range

BusinessLine, Meenakshi Verma Ambwani, 7 Jun. 2017

LG Electronics India is betting big on the super premium TV segment this year. The South Korean consumer electronics major on Wednesday launched its new OLED TV range with nine models priced in the range of about ₹3.25-30 lakh.

Rishi Tandon, Business Head-FPD, LG Electronics India, said: “The super premium TV segment has grown by about 100 per cent over last year. The segment, which was just about 3,500 units earlier, grew to about 7,000 units last year. We believe this will grow to about 20,000 units this year and with our range of unique products, we aim to have 50 per cent share in this segment.”

Tandon said the company’s aggressive focus on this segment was also strategic in nature, as it hoped to strengthen its positioning in the premium category across all products.

The company is also launching 52 new models to enhance its position in the overall flat panel TV segment. Tandon said consumers in India were fast transitioning to smart-TVs and the segment was witnessing a growth rate of 60 per cent.

At present, the overall flat panel TV market is pegged at about 10 million units, including non-smart TVs, smart TVs and the 4K TVs.

LG India had earlier said it would soon launch a range of premium products under a new ‘Signature’ brand.

The company has kick-started these plans with the launch of its top-of-the-line LG Signature OLED TV models. By next month, it is likely to launch refrigerators, washing machines and air-purifiers under brand Signature.

10.2. 10 standout start-ups taking an AI leap in India

Livemint, 26 May 2017

Mint Lounge profiles 10 tech start-ups that have tapped Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to transform sectors such as healthcare, education, auto, banking and retail

The rise of a technology has Bill Gates issuing warnings of an apocalypse. Elon Musk, too. Even Stephen Hawking.

What’s worrying these technologists? It’s Artificial Intelligence or AI, an idea whose time has come—it is incubating in science labs and being deployed by start-ups and industrial units alike.

Why are Gates and Co. worried? Specifically, it’s over machine learning, an early form of AI that has in recent years become mainstream, causing both delight and nervousness among AI experts and technology companies.

AI involves building computers capable of taking smart decisions by themselves, the way humans do. Machine learning and various other sub-fields such as deep learning are the means to achieve AI.

Google announced this week that it is rethinking all its products to base them on AI; it has created a new unit called Google.ai to facilitate this shift.

The revival of interest in machine learning has been driven by a confluence of factors, such as the massive increase in computing power, emergence of neural networks (connected transistors that replicate the structure of neurons in the human brain) and the easy availability of vast amounts of data, thanks to the Internet. Compared to AI leaders in the Silicon Valley and China, India is a laggard but even here, nearly 300 start-ups are using some form of AI, according to Tracxn, a start-up tracker. Among dedicated AI-only Indian start-ups, 23% are working on providing solutions to multiple industries, 15% are in e-commerce, 12% in healthcare, 11% in education, 10% in financial services, and the rest in fields such as retail and logistics, according to a 2017 report by Kalaari Capital, a venture capital firm. Internet companies tap machine learning techniques for a range of uses—to recommend products for you, for instance, or to predict where cabs should be placed so that when you open your cab-hailing app, there’s one a couple of minutes’ drive away.

Healthcare start-ups use AI to help hospitals make speedy and accurate blood reports and medical diagnoses, saving lives. Others get fashion brands and retailers to buy the right quantities of stock. Suddenly, AI is everywhere.

Lounge looks at 10 exciting start-ups that are using AI and machine learning techniques to transform healthcare, education, auto and retail. Their success is far from assured. They struggle to find quality talent; they face stiff competition from other AI start-ups; their solutions haven’t yet stood the test of time (most are less than five years old); and they are vulnerable to a variety of other factors that typically bring down start- ups, AI or not.

Given the number of AI start-ups, the list is far from comprehensive. Yet the work that these 10 start-ups (and others like them) do is exciting and sometimes cutting-edge, holding out the promise of a significantly improved product or service.

How does this work? Traditional code writing entailed programming computers, essentially telling computers what to do. With machine learning, computers are taught to do things themselves. Pedro Domingos, a professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, puts it fittingly in his book, The Master Algorithm: How The Quest For The Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World: “The Industrial Revolution automated manual work and the Information Revolution did the same for mental work, but machine learning automates automation itself.”

This is what has people worried—and thrilled. The likes of Gates and Musk fear that machines that learn to think for themselves may become smarter than humans and start taking control of things—the stuff of science fiction. But others such as Domingos believe it will lead to a near-utopian state where people, freed of chores and menial work (now automated), will pursue things that truly excite them.

No matter which side of the fence you are on, there’s little doubt that AI represents potentially the most disruptive leap in technology in decades.

Apart from disrupting incumbents across businesses, AI may worsen a major socio-economic headache for India: employment. The threat from automation to engineering jobs in Indian IT companies is well documented. But IT is by no means the only business where jobs are at risk. Automation may be a threat to 69% of the jobs in India, according to an October 2016 World Bank report. Even Domingos, who expresses a never-failing belief in the potential of AI to do good for humankind, acknowledges that the technology is likely to make many jobs redundant.

Case in point: One of the 10 start-ups we feature replaced its 40-strong content team with a few computer scientists when it adopted machine learning techniques.

That represents only a mild threat from AI, especially in a country that is already failing to meet the growing demand for jobs. Investors and experts in AI privately worry about this threat—but they aren’t worried enough yet to look for solutions.

That must say something about where their priorities lie—and about the disruption that Artificial Intelligence will cause.

—By Mihir Dalal

***

Netradyne co-founder Avneesh Agrawal

Netradyne, Bengaluru and San Diego, US

nvestment: Raised $16 million (around Rs102.8 crore) from Reliance Industries Ltd in June 2016. The team: Founded by Avneesh Agrawal, a former Qualcomm Inc. president for India and South Asia, and David Julian, a former principal engineer at the US-based chip-maker.

Intelligence factor: Netradyne’s Driveri, a powerful camera that analyses driving patterns and can help determine the cause of an accident. The soap-bar-sized device is attached to a vehicle’s rear-view mirror and rests on the inside of the windscreen, pointing towards the road.

In July 2015, Agrawal, along with his long-time friend and colleague Julian, set up Netradyne, wanting to tackle that intractable problem of the modern world—road accidents.

Netradyne’s main product is Driveri, which packs in four high-definition cameras generating 360-degree footage of the vehicle’s path (transmitted on a real-time LTE network), has a global positioning system, gyroscope sensors and accelerometer, and a Nvidia processor, the same one that is used in the iPhone 5. The unit captures visuals of the car’s surroundings, analyses driving patterns and stores the data on a cloud platform.

It uses machine learning and deep-learning systems to analyse the entire scene in front of the car: traffic lights, stop signs, objects in its course, distance to every other vehicle, relative speeds and direction. The data generated enables the platform to determine whether the driver is overspeeding or driving rashly, adhering to traffic rules, is potentially drowsy or drunk, or taking multiple halts along the route. In the event of an accident, it also sends real-time alerts to the fleet operator.

According to Agrawal, similar technology is used to power autonomous car projects across the world, such as those being developed by Google (Alphabet Inc.), Uber Inc., Robert Bosch GmbH and large car-makers like Toyota, Volkswagen Group and Daimler AG.

After testing the product for over 750,000 miles (around 1.2 million kilometres), Netradyne launched Driveri in the US market in March and plans to launch it in India by June-July. It recently signed its first US client, Load One, a mid-sized cargo company that operates a fleet of 350 trucks. The solution is also useful for retail customers like parents of first-time teenage drivers.

Agrawal says Netradyne’s main focus currently is to ensure driver safety. The product is being marketed to commercial fleet operators to enable them to monitor drivers and enhance the safety of cargo. “Using the solution, fleet managers can train drivers on safe driving practices, besides maintaining a close check on valuable cargo....

They can also create a scorecard for drivers and incentivize them on safe driving,” says Agrawal. Agrawal, whose company employs around 60 people, expects Driveri customers to see a significant reduction in the number of traffic violations and accidents; in turn, safer driving would result in greater fuel efficiency and lower maintenance costs.

The other big market is insurance.

“What we are essentially doing is quantifying risk,” Agrawal says. His plan is to bring Driveri to every car in the world with insurance partners who agree to use its data for investigating accidents and deciding on a more accurate premium amount.

— By Yuvraj Malik

Embibe founder Aditi Avasthi

Embibe, Bengaluru

Investment: $9 million from venture capital investors such as Kalaari Capital and Lightbox.

The team: Founded by Aditi Avasthi, a former Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Barclays executive.

Intelligence factor: In a country where the overall quality of education consistently lags behind those in developed nations, Embibe’s core AI product can be a game changer.

In the book (and movie) Moneyball, a baseball coach and an economics graduate from Harvard use an analytics engine to ditch decades of baseball practice and identify a world-class team that ends up breaking numerous Major League Baseball records. Major teams end up adopting the model.

Embibe is hoping to create a similar impact in the world of education.

Its learning platform is being used by thousands of students and the start-up is in talks to ally with educational training centres. Embibe, which runs a website and a mobile app, collects data from students, charging only for advanced analysis and personalized learning recommendations. Students can actually improve test scores by fixing basic mistakes using its AI platform.

For instance, Embibe’s First Look Accuracy metric trains students to maximize scores in a given test by first answering the questions they can attempt confidently and then moving on to the tougher ones. Another metric, “‘Time Spent On Questions Not Answered’, indicates no confidence, an inability to know what you know yourself. You’re unsure of your ability. This value is actually 41 minutes for Indian kids for the IIT exams out of 180 minutes—in an exam where 1 mark is almost equivalent to 10,000 ranks. So, think about it—if you’re able to bring this value down by 50%, the scores automatically trend up,” explains Avasthi. The company says it has identified 27 parameters that can, for instance, predict scores in an IIT entrance exam with 93% accuracy.

To get the bulk of data that its core cloud-based platform crunches, the start-up bought 100Marks, another ed- tech start-up, in 2015.

Embibe uses advanced-level analytics besides its core AI engine, including self-learning algorithms, machine learning and cognitive computing akin to IBM’s Watson. It started out as an analytics company in 2012 and began using AI and machine learning tools in 2014 in an effort to create personalized solutions for individual students.

Embibe started with a 40-member team that was primarily responsible for content creation; now it’s down to just three. The cost of creating content is down “from the high hundreds to Rs20 per unit of content through automation,” says Avasthi, who has hired three machine learning and AI experts from top companies, including IBM.

— By Anirban Sen

Tricog Health Services co-founder Charit Bhograj.

Tricog Health Services PVT. LTD, Bengaluru

Investment: $2 million from Inventus Capital Partners, Blume Ventures and angel investors.

The team: Charit Bhograj, a cardiologist; Zainul Charbiwala, who worked at IBM India and Qualcomm; Udayan Dasgupta, who worked at Texas Instruments; and Abhinav Gujjar, who worked at Thomson Reuters and Microsoft.

Intelligence factor: What can take up to 6 hours before treatment starts, Tricog accomplishes in a few minutes.

Nearly 7.5 million people die every year of heart disease. Around 1.5-3 million of them are in India; half of them can be saved by early diagnosis, according to Bhograj.

“Yet almost 70% of the general physicians do not have an ECG (electrocardiography) machine,” he adds. ECG—a heart health test—is conducted through a machine which records the heart’s electrical movement. These machines are not widely available in India, nor are there enough cardiologists to interpret ECG data. And it can take up to 6 hours before a patient is diagnosed and sent for treatment, says Bhograj. So Tricog set out to help doctors make instant diagnoses of heart attacks and ensure treatment is not delayed. While Tricog sources ECG machines from General Electric Healthcare, it has built its own sensory device and fits it on the machines. It gives these devices to general physicians, clinics and nursing homes on a subscription basis. Through the Internet, this device sends the ECG or recorded heart movement to a set of algorithms, which then generates a report. Before the report is sent, a specialist doctor verifies it. In 2016, Tricog processed the ECG reports of 200,000 patients; about 11,000 of them were diagnosed with a heart attack. The company claims it has never reported false results.

Yet, given the stakes, Bhograj reasons that “no matter how accurate the algorithm gets, there will always be a specialist (cardiologist) to verify the report churned out by it.”

Founded in 2011, the company spent close to four years putting the technology together and launched the product in February 2015. As of April, Tricog had 600 clients (general physicians, clinics and nursing homes) across 178 cities and towns, and 20 specialist doctors, including clinical cardiologists, who study the reports. In the next five years, Tricog aims to be present in 100,000 locations—it claims that though such a scale would ordinarily require around 700 doctors, it would be able to deliver comparable service with only 50 doctors.

— By Arushi Chopra

Arya.ai, Mumbai

Arya.ai’s co-founder Vinay Kumar Sankarapu.

Investment: An undisclosed amount from YourNest Angel Fund and VentureNursery.

The team: Vinay Kumar Sankarapu, chief executive officer, and Deekshith Marla, chief technology officer.

Intelligence factor: Many start-ups are working with AI to solve problems in banking and insurance. Arya.ai tells them how to.

Last year, world champion Lee Sedol was pitted against AlphaGo, a computer program made by Google, in a game of Go, an abstract board game. All AlphaGo needed to be told was the desired result. It figured out the rest for itself. Sankarapu, seated in his office in Mumbai’s Andheri area, says the day isn’t far when a business firm will be able to apply AI for similar results. His company, Arya.ai, is taking steps towards this; it is helping build AI that “becomes more intelligent the more it is used. The next generation of AI will be built by AI,” he says.

Many start-ups in India are working with deep learning, which aims to make human effort minimal. Arya.ai works as an “enabler”. For instance, if a consultancy firm is building AI for its investment banking client, Arya.ai will provide the firm with the tools to build it, creating the “neural network”—a vast computing system that mimics the human brain; it will create a cloud system which will allow the AI to evolve, learn from its earlier tasks and apply them to the next one.

“Basically, we help build a complicated system really fast, help you automate a lot of stuff. An algorithm may take months to build. We could actually help you build a complete system in weeks,” he says.

Arya.ai also has direct clients, such as banks or insurance companies, where cases of fraud claims and bad loans can be identified with precision. The change is already visible: the phone call you get from your bank when an irregularity in your transaction pattern is registered is courtesy its AI-enabled system. This is the result of the data fed into it, based on geographical location and your records of the past 30 days. But as hackers get sharper—making low-key transactions over a long period of time after carefully observing the customer’s banking habits—deep learning will take it to the next level, with greater accuracy.

Currently, Arya.ai is engaged with one of the world’s biggest consultancy firms, New York and London-based banks, global insurance companies and leading manufacturing firms. Their work is mostly at the business-to- business level but the effects, says Sankarapu, will also be felt by the man on the street. “Things will become super-fast, personalized and cost-efficient for the end consumer,” says Sankarapu, who grew up in Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district and now shuttles between Mumbai and San Francisco.

In 2015, Arya.ai was chosen as one of the 21 most innovative start-ups by Paris&Co, a French innovation agency. Arya.ai started out as a way of making the lives of researchers easier in 2013, at a time when Sankarapu was studying at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. If there were 200,000 books on a particular subject, it was not humanly possible to read them all; Sankarapu was trying to build AI that would absorb as much information as these books would hold in less time than the human brain ever could. “I soon understood that the bigger problem is not building a solution but enabling it. Everyone wants to use deep learning, but they don’t know how to use it,” he says.

Sankarapu is a Marvel fan but he’s never had any romantic notions about AI. He says that like any new, exciting technology that comes every decade or so, AI has been hyped beyond its capabilities. To him, it is a formula, one which is more exciting than fantasy. “When you start understanding how to build it, you start understanding what we are made of. The human brain is nothing but a simple mathematical computer.”

— by Sankhayan Ghosh

Locus.sh’s founders Geet Garg (left) and Nishith Rastogi.

Locus.sh (Mara Labs INC.), Bengaluru and US

Investment: At least $2.75 million from Exfinity Venture Partners, Blume Ventures, BeeNext and others. The team: Nishith Rastogi, who has worked with Amazon and eBay; and Geet Garg, who was with Amazon. The two had co-founded PinChat, a location-based conversational platform, in August 2014.

Intelligence factor: Locus has developed route-planning algorithms so companies can chart the best possible route to deliver an order and allow a salesperson to cover the maximum number of points in the shortest time possible.

Locus aims to automate all the human decisions involved in sending a package. With clients such as Hindustan Unilever, Quikr, Urban Ladder and Lenskart, it has a lot on its hands.

The company, which says it has more than 25 clients, has developed a route-planning engine, its core business, apart from a 3D packing engine that provides configurations for loading cargo into containers. Locus also offers companies a weekly schedule of the most efficient routes and outlets for their sales teams. Rastogi says each schedule planned by their routing engine takes 5-10 minutes, whereas a skilled human being would take 1-4 hours to process the same data. The company says it helps its clients reduce their logistics costs by at least 25%.

Locus offers solutions for both intracity and intercity operations. It estimates the domestic freight industry is around $100 billion; a bulk of this is intercity logistics.

Planning the best possible route is not as easy as it sounds. “In many cases, we will have a landmark and street name with a wrong pin code. We have to convert this information into latitude and longitude. For this, our systems need to understand and interpret the English language and build natural language processing systems,” says Rastogi.

“Let us say you have to deliver a package before hitting the gym at 6pm. But if you reach the gym 5 minutes late, that is also fine. How do I make the system understand that it is better to reach the gym by 6.05pm instead of not delivering the package at all? In the real world, if a truck is full, the driver can keep one package next to his seat. It is important in the real world to understand what that soft threshold is. It is important for the system to understand this world fuzziness,” explains Rastogi.

Companies provide Locus the origin of the package, destination and expected time of delivery. Locus sources all the possible routes from Google Maps or sifts through data on past deliveries. This data is then processed, factoring in weather information, traffic, historical data on time taken to cover the distance, etc. to arrive at a few best routes.

If the client is new, logistics solutions take about three months. Are the companies willing to wait? “We haven’t lost a single client yet,” says Rastogi.

—By Sayan Chakraborty

Mad Street Den’s co-founder Ashwini Asokan.

Mad Street Den, Chennai

Investment: $1.5 million from Exfinity Ventures and growX Ventures, in addition to an undisclosed sum from Sequoia Capital.

The team: The husband-wife duo of Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran. Asokan, who previously worked for Intel Corp., and her husband Anand Chandrasekaran, a neuroscientist, who is the firm’s chief technology officer, both worked in the US before deciding to return to India in 2013.

Intelligence factor: One of the several AI start-ups trying to improve the retail experience in India. Asokan, among a handful of people in India who speak openly about the skewed gender representation in the start-up business, runs Mad Street Den, a start-up that is trying to make the business of retail more efficient.

The start-up’s main product, Vue.ai, offers visual search technology, product recommendations, and personalized home pages based on the tastes of individual shoppers, among other features.

The AI-based technology offers several benefits to customers: uploading pictures and finding matching products, browsing in a way that is specifically tailored to their tastes, discovering products they may otherwise not have been aware of, and reducing the amount of time they spend shopping or having a more efficient shopping experience. As the customer experience improves, it results in better conversion rates for retailers. Vue.ai also helps retailers reduce cataloguing errors and product returns and make merchandising more customer-friendly. The company also hopes to turn omni-channel retail, so far a pipe dream, into reality. Mad Street Den currently works with firms such as furniture e-commerce site HipVan in Singapore and fashion e-tailers such as TataCliq, Craftsvilla and Voonik in India.

The Chennai-based company is one of the tens of start-ups selling efficiency-improvement tech to retailers. Others, such as Stylumia, Staqu and SnapShopr, offer similar services.

Mad Street Den, however, is expanding into gaming and other businesses this year.

"Scale markets globally, scale our AI systems and establish ourselves as the first computer vision business that’s making money on scale,” says Asokan.

She sounds the part of a change-the-world entrepreneur.

“To build generalizable AI is one of the founding principles of why we started this. The second part of the founding principle is making AI accessible to millions of people across the globe. Not just to build it, but actually to build it on the scale that applies to people across the world. The first one represents Anand’s vision, the second one represents why I am here,” says Asokan.

— By Sadhana Chathurvedula

Niki.ai’s founders (from left) Sachin Jaiswal, Nitin Babel, Keshav Prawasi and Shishir Modi.

Niki.ai (Techbins Solutions PVT. LTD), Bengaluru

Investment: Niki.ai raised undisclosed seed investments from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures, Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and Haresh Chawla of True North between October 2015 and December 2016. Niki.ai declined to disclose the quantum of funds raised.

The team: Founded by four Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, alumni. Before starting the venture, Sachin Jaiswal, chief executive officer at Niki.ai, had co-founded InnovAccer Inc., a healthcare analytics company in the US. Technology head Keshav Prawasi was a software engineer at Amazon; Nitin Babel, who looks after support and marketing, worked for Ipsos, a global market and opinion research firm; and business head Shishir Modi came from a stint at a multinational energy distribution company.

Intelligence factor: Niki is used for over 20 services, including hotel, cab and movie ticket bookings, ordering food and paying bills. If you’re rude, it will reprimand you and can even block you. Chatbots—like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Allo—are essentially computer programs that make human-like conversation with users.

Banks, retailers and others use chatbots to answer basic customer queries and help users navigate their websites.

Niki, one of the early chatbots developed in India, is designed to serve as a virtual shopkeeper that assists in the purchase of products and services. It can help you book a cab, order food from the nearest restaurant, book tickets for movies and events, and pay general utility bills. Flight bookings, payments for insurance and courier services will be introduced soon.

Niki was conceived in early 2015 and rolled out to customers in October that year.

It works on a series of sophisticated algorithms that understand human language by breaking it down into structured queries that the machine can understand. Another set of codes then generates a response relevant to the query, and this goes on till the task is accomplished.

The core of the platform rests on language-recognition systems. “We started with off-the-shelf solutions like Stanford CoreNLP and went on to develop our own custom models,” says Babel.

These were developed by studying the interactions on Niki and constantly tweaking algorithms to accurately determine what the user is looking for.

Currently, Niki has over 300,000 users; 50-60% of them are in the age group of 24-35, 20-30% in the 18-24 age group, and about 10% are over 35.

“We have been collecting the conversational commerce data for Indian customers for the last two years. Close to 50 million interactions have happened on Niki and have been used to improve the accuracy from 50-60% to 90%,” says Babel.

He says the company earns revenue by charging a commission on each service or product purchased on Niki. Earlier this year, the company launched a software development kit that allows other sites and apps to integrate Niki with their platforms. It is available on HDFC Bank’s OnChat, the Oxigen Wallet app and the operating system of Intex smartphones (as the LFTY feature). The company will launch 20 more partnerships soon.

— By Yuvraj Malik

Zenatix’s co-founders (seated in front, from left) Amarjeet Singh and Vishal Bansal.
Zenatix Solutions PVT. LTD, Gurugram
Investment: Rs11.5 crore from pi Ventures, Blume Ventures, Rahul Khanna, managing partner, Trifecta Capital, Rajan Anandan, vice-president and managing director of Google, South-East Asia and India, and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
The team: Vishal Bansal, who worked as portfolio manager at ING Insurance; Rahul Bhalla, who worked in the legal outsourcing industry; and Amarjeet Singh, who worked as an assistant professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi.
Intelligence factor: Zenatix helps businesses save energy and cut down their electricity bills.

Zenatix, a team of 35, works with large chains of quick-service restaurants (QSRs), bank ATMs and retail stores which have anywhere from 200 to more than 1,000 stores/outlets.
A Zenatix client that has around 1,000 stores, each 2,500 sq. ft in area, used to spend Rs80-100 crore annually on electricity. Zenatix helps it save 10-30% of this amount.
All these outlets have electrical assets such as ATM machines, air conditioners, and ovens and exhaust fans in the case of QSR kitchens.
When it comes to ACs in a workplace, someone would generally switch them on at the start of the day and switch them off at the close of day. “The person is not equipped with the intelligence that, based on the occupancy of the space, temperature outside and even time of day, the usage of AC can be optimized. Or consider, if an ATM breaks down, it could take a few hours to days (depending on where it is located) to get it fixed,” says Bansal.

“If we know that a grocery store or an ATM sees a minimum footfall during certain hours of a day, one set of ACs may be switched off to maintain the same ambient temperature inside,” he adds.

Through its WattMan device, Zenatix captures data points such as the time of day, electricity consumed, and outside temperature, every 30 seconds. Based on this, it can reboot an ATM when it stops working, predict when an AC in a retail store will break down or needs servicing, and automate its switching on and off. Zenatix plans to double WattMan’s presence to 1,000 sites by June, as its existing clientele of over 20 companies hands over more stores/outlets to Zenatix. As of April, it had installed WattMan at 500 sites. Zenatix wants to build accurate computing and predictive models. “Imagine if a door to cold storage is left open, and as soon as it reflects a change of temperature, the door closes automatically. That’s the kind of advanced temperature profiling we want to build.... We want that when an air conditioner is not working properly, the correlation between temperature and electricity can tell us whether it is the gas, filter or compressor causing the problem,” says Bansal.
— By Arushi Chopra

Active.ai’s co-founder Ravi Shankar.
Active.ai (Active Intelligence PTE LTD), Bengaluru and Singapore
Investment: $3.5 million (around Rs22.5 crore) from Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures India.
The team: Ravi Shankar, chief executive officer and co-founder, has worked with banks such as HDFC Bank, ABN AMRO and YES Bank; Shankar Narayanan, the chief operating officer, founded the start-ups Fastacash and Cazh and co-founded Tagit; Parikshit Paspulati, chief technology officer, founded Finoculus and co- founded Tagit. Narayanan and Paspulati are Singapore-based, where the company is headquartered; more than half the workforce is based in Bengaluru.
Intelligence factor: Let’s say, you need to know your account balance and don’t really have the time to walk into an ATM or even look into the bank’s app. Send a message to the bank through Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp and you will get the reply. Chances are high that your bank is using Active.ai platform, an intelligent interface that allows banks and consumers to connect over chat.

Shankar, Narayanan and Paspulati have all worked with banks and fintech start-ups. Perhaps naturally then, Active.ai wants to improve customer engagement for banks and insurance companies.
“Say you type, I lost my wallet. What will the bank understand? There is no transaction for ‘lost my wallet’. The system will understand that it means all the cards are gone. The bank will say I will block your card,” says Shankar. “Now, let’s say you are at an airport. The bank will say, ‘Looks like you are at an airport and travelling. Can we help you with a (travel) insurance policy?’ The ability to hold this conversation is what we bring to banks.”
According to Shankar, Active.ai will help banks almost halve their customer engagement costs.
Active.ai essentially offers a platform that has chatbots through which banks can interact with customers. The more customers interact, the more the Artificial Intelligence behind Active.ai’s platform will learn about them and the better it will be able to offer personalized advice and service, increasing customer engagement and loyalty.

Usage for consumers can range from opening an account and getting balance information, to transferring money to other accounts or paying bills. Banks, on the other hand, can push relevant products and services, drawing on the data available on customer history.
The bot can be integrated via various channels, including WeChat, LINE, Kakao Talk, Facebook Messenger, Amazon Echo and Siri. Largely, the company sources data from banks and other partner financial institutions, apart from Envestnet | Yodlee, a data aggregation and analytics platform.
Active.ai has developed algorithms that can convert unstructured messages, i.e. input by consumers, into structured instructions for banks using natural language processing and machine learning.
“Say you are typing on Facebook. This is unstructured messaging. We convert that into entities and intent. For instance, you type, ‘I want to know what is happening in my account.’ Here, entity is the account and intent is ‘I want to know’. Our algorithm captures this and it then figures out the context. That is the third component. So the system will think this guy has an account and wants to know what is happening there, I should get his balance,” explains Shankar.

In India, the company counts Axis Bank as a client; deals with several others are in the pipeline. It says it has already signed up with banks in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Discussions with banks in North America are under way, says Shankar.

“Apart from reducing the costs of customer engagement, banks can cross-sell or upsell. It helps them retain customers with higher engagement and client service levels. It also helps banks reach out to new consumers, especially the youth, via chat,” he adds.
Having started with the banking sector, Active.ai now plans to work with insurance companies to boost customer engagement.
— By Sayan Chakraborty

SigTuple’s founding team: Tathagato Rai Dastidar, Rohit Kumar Pandey and Apurv Anand.
Sigtuple, Bengaluru
Investment: $6.4 million, from investors such as Accel Partners, Axilor Ventures, IDG Ventures, pi Ventures, Endiya Partners, VH Capital and Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal.
The team: Started by former American Express executives Rohit Kumar Pandey, Tathagato Rai Dastidar and Apurv Anand.
Intelligence factor: SigTuple is helping hospitals and healthcare centres improve the speed and accuracy of blood reports.

In medicine and healthcare, accuracy and time are important factors. A delay of even half an hour can result in loss of life; and a wrong diagnosis could prove tragic. SigTuple is looking to address both these issues through its AI-powered Manthana platform, which can, among other things, analyse blood samples and generate medical reports in less than 10 minutes—and with complete accuracy, according to Pandey, who is also the chief executive officer.
“From the moment someone reaches the labs and provides a blood sample, the total time taken for the generation of a report and review by a pathologist is less than 10 minutes,” says Pandey.
Manthana is being used by a number of mid- to large-sized hospitals, diagnostics labs, and eyecare and healthcare chains. Among their prominent clients is Anand Diagnostic Labs, one of Bengaluru’s biggest chains, which uses one of SigTuple’s digitization tools to analyse blood samples.
Now the team is working towards making Manthana available for a complete diagnosis.

At present, Manthana can analyse blood, semen and urine samples—Pandey says the platform is capable of generating complete blood reports, which typically analyse 21 different parameters, including red and white blood cell count and platelets. For example, SigTuple has used the AI-powered platform to analyse a blood sample to catch a malarial parasite, says Pandey.
Accuracy is another area that the team hopes to improve on—currently, SigTuple’s accuracy rates differ for different solutions. For instance, accuracy rates for urine samples stand at around 85-88%.
For SigTuple, evolving from traditional analytics to machine learning was a crucial pivot, since it wanted to create tools that could analyse medical cases, just like a doctor would.
“Earlier, the algorithms that were being used, as soon as they saw new data, the results used to get skewed. With the advancement of AI, as more and more new data keeps coming in, the machine continues to learn— like humans. And it starts generating solutions, which was not possible with traditional algorithms,” says Pandey.
The limitations of traditional algorithms were addressed by machine learning, where a machine is trained to mimic a human brain—somewhat like IBM’s Watson.
For example, a hospital chain which wants to open a lab in a tier-II or tier-III city usually has to spend hundreds of crores of rupees on hardware, equipment and medical experts.
With SigTuple’s platforms such as Manthana, hospitals can scale up in smaller cities and towns. Since it also eliminates the need for labs to ship blood samples to different locations, it helps diagnostic chains save on logistical costs and, more crucially, time.
“There is no need for a manual review by a pathologist by putting a slide under a microscope. Second, remote diagnosis is made possible, because the pathologist need not be sitting next to the microscope or blood slide. No shipping is required—the pathologist can be anywhere,” says Pandey.
SigTuple gets most of its data from the labs and hospitals that it works with. Over the next year, a top priority for the company is to gather more data through more such partnerships to improve the accuracy of Manthana. —By Anirban Sen

11.1. Elevator major Kone to set up second plant in Tamil Nadu

BusinessLine, 8 Jun. 2017

Finland-based elevator and escalator major Kone Corporation will set up its second manufacturing plant in India in Tamil Nadu and add another 100 engineers in its R&D facility.

Kone Corporation President and CEO, Henrik Ehrnrooth, told newspersons on Thursday that the plant in Tamil Nadu will be the second largest after the one in China. “We are investing increasingly in India. Our R&D centre is an important hub for us,” he said. Kone’s first plant is also based in Tamil Nadu.

He said during the first half of the current calendar year, the industry’s growth showed a negative trend but during the second half, it is expected to do well.

“The market will improve once the new reforms kick in and housing demand is expected to increase,” Ehrnrooth said.

Note ban impact

Amit Gossain, Managing Director for Kone in India, said demonetisation was a bit of a dampener, but after some time, the money supply got better and with lower interest rates, the need for housing will grow. He also pointed out that the commercial space has not been affected as much as housing during the last six months. Ehrnrooth said internet of things (IoT) has changed the perception of customers because of its huge benefits for them. He said the company has launched 24X7 connected services in a few countries.

For Kone Corporation, India is the second largest market globally after China. Its leads the market in both China and India. Its market share of 50,000 units per year in India is about 20 per cent.

11.2. Ikea to follow three-step retail strategy in India: CEO Juvencio Maeztu

Livemint, Deepti Govind, 24 May 2017

Ikea India CEO Juvencio Maeztu says apart from brand building, the furniture firm will focus on e-commerce explore store formats to sell products. Ikea India stores will located in the outskirts of cities, but the company doesn’t think that will be a problem.

Bengaluru: Swedish furniture retailer Ikea will follow a three-step retail strategy in India, Ikea India Pvt. Ltd chief executive Juvencio Maeztu said.

The first priority is to build the brand in India through large-format stores, said Maeztu, adding that this is important for companies that place a huge emphasis on the so-called touch-and-feel aspect of retailing. The next step will be e-commerce, but “always over the base of an Ikea store,” he added.

The third step will be to experiment with new formats. “In other parts of the world, you have smaller sized stores, a pop-up store, or different concepts that we are exploring and trying,” said Maeztu on the sidelines of a workshop organized by the company in Bengaluru.

Ikea to decide India ‘quality’ strategy at Bengaluru workshop

The company has identified 49 Indian cities where it wants to set up physical stores. Its first store in Hyderabad will open in December according to material provided by the company during the conference. Last week, Ikea started work on its store in Navi Mumbai.

Experts say the growth in destination shopping in India and the wide variety of products available at an Ikea store will lure shoppers.

“The growth of destination shopping in India where the family steps out to spend 4-6 hours (shopping) over the weekend—people today travel even 10 km to go to a mall of their choice. Second is being a global brand, they could bring in significant product variety which is not common in India as well as have products that focus on space and storage needs,” said Sreedhar Prasad, a partner at KPMG in India.

In India, Ikea will look to sell what it thinks the local market needs, offering pressure cookers alongside its iconic Billy bookcases. It is also thinking about tailoring stores to cities. The one in Hyderabad, for instance, could present products differently (and also offer different products) from the one in Mumbai because average home sizes in the two cities are vastly different.

Ikea says it has conducted extensive research on how its products will be received in India, with its executives visiting over 500 homes across the country. According to the company, it has tested products ranging from couches and mattresses to kitchens and bathroom accessories to see how they withstand the weather, especially humidity.

Swedish businesses confident about investments in India, says Ann Linde

“It really is about making sure that the dampness and the humidity can’t get into the natural fibre. So it’s about sealing edges, putting feet on the bottom of furniture, putting stronger braces and stronger shelves on bookcases so they don’t bend when it gets very humid and damp,” said Karen Hopkinson Pflug, the company’s quality manager.

The home furnishings market in India grew at a compound annual growth rate of 10.9% between 2011 and 2016, according to Euromonitor data. Euromonitor includes furniture in the home furnishings category. Growth will be faster between 2016 and 2021, Euromonitor said—11.2%.

Ikea is also hoping its restaurants (attached to its stores) will be a draw in India. The company’s popular meatballs will be on the menu, but contain only chicken. The 1,000-seater restaurant at the Hyderabad store will offer a mix of Swedish and local cuisines (Biryani and samosas are on the menu). “There will be something for everyone and the focus is on healthy and sustainable food and beverages,” said Henrik Osterstrom, country food manager for India.

Ikea’s stores in India are located towards the edges of cities, but the company doesn’t think that will be a problem. “Ikea is the biggest playground in the world. So people will come; they will absolutely come. And the restaurant will have an important role to play,” Maetzu said.

12.1. Made in India iPhones to hit stores this month

Business Standard, May 18, 2017

Bengaluru: Buyers of Apple iPhone SE could soon find a “Made in India” tag on their devices. Taiwanese contact manufacturer Wistron would be making it at their plant in Bengaluru.

The company recently conducted a trial run at the factory. The few phones made during the trial run will be in stores in two weeks.

Full-scale production will take more time, according to a person familiar with Apple’s plans. The global tech major confirmed the production at the sole facility in India.

“We are beginning initial production of a small number of iPhone SEs in Bengaluru. We’ll begin shipping to domestic customers this month,” Apple said in an email.

Karnataka was quick to claim credit for this. Its Information Technology Minister Priyank Kharge said, “It shows the Bengaluru ecosystem is able to attract the world’s best companies. If the Make in India initiative has to work, we need to incentivise manufacturers to gradually increase local sourcing.”

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook visited India last May and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They reportedly discussed manufacturing of iPhones in India, for the local market and export. Since then, the government has turned down Apple’s demands for tax sops. But, the fast-growing domestic market seems too attractive for the company.

With a dip in iPhone sales in developed markets like the US and China, India is now a major focus for Apple. Since the country’s appetite for expensive flagship devices is still small, Apple continues to produce its four- year-old iPhone 5s to compete with Xiaomi, Motorola, Samsung and others in the mid-level market. Is domestic production going to cut prices? There is no clarity on that yet. Experts said assembling devices locally will help it save 12 per cent in taxes.

One can buy an iPhone SE for Rs 27,200 but on Flipkart and Amazon, it is available for as low as Rs 20,999. Apple is known to maintain price parity across the world. In the US, the iPhone SE starts at $399 (about Rs 25,000).

“Prices might go below Rs 20,000 only in October,” said Neil Shah, research director, devices and ecosystems, Counterpoint Research. “At that price it has to compete with Chinese rivals Oppo and Vivo.”

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

12.2. India offers tax concessions to Apple to expand production

IBEF, May 24, 2017

New Delhi: The Government of India has agreed to give partial tax concessions to Apple Inc on select imported mobile handset components, which cannot be locally procured, to manufacture iPhones at its Taiwanese contract manufacturer Wistron’s plant in Bengaluru. However, the company would have to procure such components locally over time. The government has offered a phased program to Apple for increasing local value addition in mobile phones manufacturing in phases of three, five, seven and 10 years, as the local capacity builds up, in a bid to boost manufacturing in the country. Once the iPhones and their components are fully manufactured and assembled in India, the prices of the Apple devices will come down drastically. Total value of mobile phones manufactured in India had touched Rs 90,000 crore (US$ 13.90 billion) in 2016, as compared with Rs 54,000 crore (US$ 8.34 billion) in 2015.

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

13.1. Royal Enfield to push expansion abroad

Business Standard, May 18, 2017

New Delhi: Royal Enfield (RE), the motorcycle manufacturer, plans to almost double its exclusive retail presence abroad.

The Chennai-based entity has identified Thailand, Indonesia, Colombia and Brazil as having the potential to become very large markets for itself over time. It will be investing in all four.

Siddhartha Lal, managing director of Eicher Motors, the parent entity of RE, said there were around 25 exclusive stores abroad and the plans was to add another 20-25 this year. The pace would continue in the coming year, too.

On the four country markets mentioned earlier, RE has five or six exclusive stores in Colombia and only a single one in the other three.

RE is adding single stores in a couple of other markets, too, with the hope that they reach a stage in the next year or two for an expansion.

“We expect that over the next five years, the developing markets will be on a different order of magnitude. Therefore, our retention would be much higher there,” said Lal.

Adding: “Our North America market, our first owned subsidiary there, has taken us a little bit of time -- we have just been adding dealers and getting up to speed in the US market.” He said he expected a good year in America and Europe. There are five countries in the latter -- Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain – where RE has about 50 dealers each. Some are exclusive to it but most are multibrand. The company is selling well in some of these markets but the size in each is low. And, normally of slightly higher powered motorcycles than RE has in its current portfolio.

“That means we are still a niche player here than a mainstream player, which we plan to be in developing markets,” said Lal. The oldest of its brand is Royal Enfield itself, in continuous production with the focus on 350-500cc ones.

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

16.1. How RJio has India hooked to the Net
BusinessLine, Rajesh Kurup, 19 May 2017

42% of active internet users now on RJio network: study

About 42 per cent of the total mobile internet users in the country are now on Reliance Jio’s network. Of this about 22 per cent are new Internet users via Jio while the balance have moved from incumbent players, according to a report by digital advertisement company SVG Media.
The study said that users of Samsung phones are among the biggest users of RJio with about 64 per cent of existing owners taking a Jio connection. However, owners of expensive handsets such as Apple were reluctant to move over to Jio, with only 36 per cent of iPhone users moving over to the latest entrant. The study, titled ‘The Jio Revolution’, is expected to be released soon. SVG Media is now a part of the London-headquartered Dentsu Aegis Network, after it bought the Gurgaon-based digital media network company in April.

Better bandwidth
“A significant reason of surge in Jio users is its bandwidth, which is better than that of incumbents’ and RJio’s drive was primarily driven around data. However, the primary reason was the services were free for the first six months after Jio launch and prices were lower compared with that of incumbents,” Mustali Kachwala, Technology Head at SVG Media, told BusinessLine.
According to the report, 95.2 per cent of Jio users have dual-SIM handsets, suggesting they might be on another operator’s network too. About 73.8 per cent phones used by Jio subscribers are 4G-enabled, while one out of every four Jio users access mobile internet through Wi-Fi dongles.
Among the app consumption, 23.96 per cent used tools, while communications was used by 20.46 per cent and productivity by 12.81 per cent, with the remaining shared by entertainment (9.59 per cent), video players and editors (7.37 per cent) and news and magazines among others.

16.2. Internet Trends report underscores India’s mobile obsession, Jio disruption
Livemint, 1 Jun. 2017

The growth in mobile data consumption indicates the disruptive effect of Reliance Jio on the Indian Internet and telecom market. The volume of wireless broadband data consumed by Indians has risen sharply—from less than 200 million GB a month in June 2016 to around 1.3 billion GB a month in March 2017, according to the Internet Trends 2017 report by Kleiner Perkins.

New Delhi: The volume of wireless broadband data consumed by Indians has risen sharply, from less than 200 million gigabytes (GB) a month in June 2016, to around 1.3 billion GB a month in March 2017, according to the Internet Trends 2017 report by storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB).
The growth indicates the disruptive effect of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd on the Indian internet and telecom market. Data prices per GB have fallen from around $3.5 to $1.8 in the same period, according to the report released on Wednesday in the US. Reliance Jio itself charges around $0.17, the report said, although most consumers probably pay less.

The report highlights the growing dominance of mobile as the medium of choice in India which, according to it, has 355 million internet users (June 2016) and 277 million broadband users (March 2017). Only China, with around 700 million internet users, has more. Interestingly, 72% of internet users in India are less than 35 years of age.
Eighty per cent of all web traffic in India emanates from the mobile, a proportion that is the second highest in the world, after Nigeria. Indians also spend 28 hours a week on the mobile, compared with four hours on TV and two hours reading print publications and books. Of the time spent on the mobile, 45% is on entertainment, 34% on search, social media and messaging, and 4% on shopping.
Android is the king of mobile operating systems in India, and the country has the highest usage of Android phones (by time spent, and the data doesn’t include China) and sees the most number of downloads from the Google Play Store (which is not available in China).

Chinese mobile phone makers currently dominate India’s smartphone market and account for over 50% of all smartphones sold; other global sellers account for around 35%.
The report also highlights one of the big challenges to the mobile ecosystem in India—cost. While prices of smartphones have fallen, a typical one still costs around 8% of per capita gross domestic product (GDP). That puts it out of reach for many Indians.
India fares better on the data front, with the annualized cost of 1 GB of data a month working out to less than 2% of per capita GDP.
KPCB’s Internet Trends report is published every year and is considered one of the most authoritative reports on the internet economy and ecosystem around the world. It is authored by Mary Meeker, a partner at the firm who was once described by Fortune magazine as the best at “spotting big-picture trends” before they become big or even trends. Meeker was previously an analyst at Morgan Stanley, which she left in 2010. A full copy of the Internet Trends 2017 report can be found at www.kpcb.com/internet-trends.

17.1. 28 hours a week: Indians spend 7X more time on smartphones than on TV
Business Standard, Jun. 02, 2017

Indian consumers spend as much as 28 hours a week on their smartphones, seven fold more than the time they end up spending in watching programmes on television as more users access internet on their mobile phone.
According to the Mary Meeker report, released on Wednesday night, the delivery of entertainment, education, healthcare and marketplaces is being reimagined in India with the mobile phone emerging as the primary device for access to consumers.
In education sector, the report said education technology firm Byju’s has shown 15 per cent improvement in the quality of learning by accessing content on smartphones. In the healthcare sector, prices of laboratory tests have dropped by 50 per cent due to the aggregate inventory maintained by startups such as 1Mg and Portea. Customers made savings of around 20-30 per cent due to drug comparison on these platforms. As far as payments are concerned, the unified payment interface (UPI) and use of Aadhaar is yielding results in areas such as the direct benefit transfer and instant money transfer schemes.

Users spend nearly half their time in watching entertainment content, while around 4 per cent of the time is invested on social networks and search engine sites such as Facebook and Google. News and media content remained low on priority at 2 per cent.
Around 4 per cent of the time is spent on online shopping from marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart. This could potentially help Indian consumers take a gaint leap away from traditional formats as users stream content on their smartphones, aided by the massive rollout of 4G services by Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio.

Launch of Jio in India has accelerated internet adoption by bringing down data prices to 17 cents per GB of data in March, from $2.7 in September last year.
People spend just two hours on print, a primary vehicle for consumption across India for decades, as multimedia content on smartphones account for a majority of their lives. Most of the content they consume is shared on platforms such as ShareIt and WhatsApp.
According to the report, there are around 355 million internet users in India, which is second only to China. Nearly 80 per cent of the users access internet through their phones.

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

17.2. Amazon to dominate Indian e-commerce market in the long run: KPCB report
Livemint, Jun. 02, 2017

Bengaluru: Amazon India is likely to emerge as the dominant e-commerce company in the country in the long run, while the overall number of Internet users in the country continues to grow rapidly, according to the latest Internet Trends report by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers.
According to the KPCB report, the number of internet users has grown 40% over the past year to about 355 million. The report also indicated that Amazon India is most likely to dominate the country’s online retail market in the long run.
The report pointed to Amazon’s rate of growth and investments in the country over the past three-and-a-half years. The company has pledged to invest at least $5 billion in India and grown rapidly to challenge local e- commerce poster boy Flipkart’s leadership position.

In April, Amazon said it posted an 85% increase in gross sales volumes in the three months to March from the same period a year earlier, growing much faster than the overall market.
So far, Amazon’s strategy of offering the widest product selection, backed by aggressive marketing and advertising, is working well in India. Moreover, its subscription programme Prime, which was launched in July 2016, is proving to be a key differentiator and is helping the firm retain many existing customers and getting them to spend more.

And even though the overall online retail market continues to grow at a sluggish pace, experts pointed out that Amazon has “patient capital” at its disposal and can afford to wait 10-20 years for the number of regular, purchasing users to touch critical mass.

“Amazon has done a great job in India so far—they’ve adapted to the local market very well. Some of their solutions from there (in the US), they are customizing those for what makes sense here. And they’re leveraging their great knowledge and capital,” said Sandeep Murthy, partner at venture capital firm Lightbox Ventures Management Ltd.
Even though Flipkart continues to be the leading e-commerce company, the report pointed to the pace of Amazon’s expansion in India and indicated that it was likely to emerge as the dominant player in the market. Flipkart and Amazon are now neck-and-neck and the battle between the two will be much more closely fought this year compared with most of last year, when it looked like the American retailer would supplant Flipkart at the top of India’s e-commerce market. In fact, for two months last year—July and August—Amazon briefly overtook Flipkart, before the latter struck back during the Diwali season sale and wrestled back its position at the top.

Experts also pointed out that while Amazon has the luxury of pools of capital at its disposal, rivals such as Flipkart and Paytm also have significant firepower from deep-pocketed investors such as Tencent Holdings Ltd, Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd, Tiger Global Management and SoftBank Group Corp.
“The challenging thing about e-commerce though is that if you look globally, there are only 12 companies that have over a billion (dollars) in revenue, over a billion in market value and are public. In India, you have at least four (companies) fighting for that position,” said Murthy.
The problem with the Indian market is that while the number of Internet users is growing rapidly, the number of online shoppers is not growing proportionately—and while the large Internet base in India looks attractive, making money from users remains a significant challenge for all leading e-commerce firms.

“We are also in a market and business today where we don’t have the consumption capacity yet to merit the level of spend that has gone in. We need to have consumption growth first—until then it’s a bit of a waiting game,” said Murthy.
“And during that waiting game, it’s a question of who has the staying power. The fortunate thing for Flipkart is that they have Tencent in their backyard, Paytm has Alibaba and Amazon being Amazon is a good thing. So, we now have some staying power. Now it’s about waiting and watching,” added Murthy.
On 27 December, Mint reported that the online retail market is set to show little or no growth in 2017, raising worrying questions about the potential of the e-commerce market relative to the rosy projections of investors who have pumped billions of dollars into Flipkart, Snapdeal and other Internet start-ups.

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

17.3. Geographic information system driving digital transformation in India
Livemint: May 19, 2017

New Delhi: Around the world, we see digital-first businesses disrupting long-established companies and dramatically changing how business is conducted. Governments are getting it, and they are harnessing these same tools of cloud computing, mobile devices, and configurable applications to extend services to citizens. This change is giving governments greater feedback on the impact of their policies, and it’s giving citizens a more direct involvement in how their communities evolve.
The Digital India initiative is under way with 22 projects on digital infrastructure and on-demand government services.
The Smart Cities Mission aims to transform more than 100 cities to become more citizen-friendly and sustainable. With these initiatives, India is becoming a leader in digital transformation. Its leaders are not just talking about it; they’re doing it.

It’s no coincidence that geospatial technology is a key enabler of this transformation. Geographic information system (GIS) technology helps users unlock the full potential of data to improve operational and business results. At Esri, we call this the ‘Science of Where’.
GIS has evolved and is becoming much smarter. We have engineered advanced analytics that allows users to explore interactions in space and time. We use far simpler maps to navigate daily on the road. With GIS, we create smarter maps that aggregate information and track interactions.
These capabilities are being used across all sectors of the economy, including natural resources, business, transportation, emergency response, health care, and urban planning.
In disaster management and the military, threats are being assessed, and advanced planning is helping to minimize impacts. In health care, GIS was instrumental in containing Africa’s Ebola epidemic. Health care workers are also using GIS to track child immunizations, and they are conducting research to ensure that patients receive effective treatment.

Cities such as Bhubaneswar and Bhopal have defined and are implementing the smart city vision with GIS at its heart. The key innovation has been in institutionalizing the use of GIS across the city functions and citizen services. Cities use GIS for property taxation, water distribution, smart waste management, public safety, emergency response and management, and in health and education services.

The following are some examples of what some Indian organizations are doing with GIS technology:

The Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre provides real-time weather information, forecasts, early warnings, and advisories about natural disasters in the state. The organization deployed GIS to aggregate information coming from 6,000 rain gauges and more than 750 weather stations that transmit data every 15 minutes. This solution automated a system that was largely manual, providing a new real-time visualization and alerting system. The time it takes to generate reports decreased from 20 hours to 30 minutes. The web-based system now allows public users to query and view the weather database.
The National Dairy Development Board applied GIS to dairy planning across India, bringing together all stakeholders down to the village level. It allowed for the analysis of the entire distribution network to maximize coverage and identify new locations for collection centres to improve milk quality. GIS is shared across marketing, processing, and collection departments to better coordinate operations.
Cairn India Ltd, one of the largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies in India, has been using GIS in its exploration division since it began operations. It has since extended GIS use to its land, projects, environment, operations, and security departments. GIS has improved operations in each department and has become critical in the boardroom, where projects can be visualized and analyzed for quick and accurate decision-making.
The department of ecology, environment and remote sensing for the state of Jammu and Kashmir has deployed GIS to analyse its healthcare network. The department faced problems connecting patients to basic healthcare facilities in far-flung areas. By using GIS to model the rough terrain and travel times based on available transportation, department staff identified 237 new sites for health care centres. The additional facilities ensure that each patient can reach a centre within 60 minutes.
This improved accessibility with the GIS technology ties in nicely with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initiatives Startup India and Stand-Up India, which aim to encourage entrepreneurship and spur technology development. This technology is doing more for governments, businesses, and end users than I could ever imagine. I think it will take off and grow like the internet has. Jack Dangermond is founder and president of Esri Inc.

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

18.1. Indian media, entertainment ind. to grow 10.6% (to US$ 45.2 billion by 2021): PwC
Business Standard, Jun. 08, 2017

Mumbai: The Indian media and entertainment industry is expected to grow much faster than the global M&E industry according to the PwC's 2017 Global E&M Outlook. The report pegs the global entertainment and media industry to clock 4.2 per cent CAGR from 2016-21 while India is expected to grow at 10.6 per cent. The Indian M&E industry is expected to exceed Rs 291,000 crore by 2021.
The key takeaways from the report are in line with major industry trends: TV advertising will continue to command a huge share of the advertising pie, though internet advertising will emerge as the fastest growing advertising platform. Also in line with current trends, the report predicts India to be among the largest and fastest growing newspaper markets in the world, owing to the popularity of vernacular publications, and increasing literacy rates.

Frank D'Souza, Partner & Leader-Entertainment & Media, PwC India, comments, "Unlike the global economy, which will see a shrinking contribution from the Entertainment and Media sector over the Outlook period, in India the sector's growth rate will outpace the overall GDP growth rate. Being a relatively under-developed market in terms of per capita spend on entertainment and media, will allow India to grow at 10.57 per cent over the next five years to an overall size of Rs 2,90,539 crore."
He adds, "Also, being the least digitised market, will allow the traditional media to grow without being disrupted by digital competition. Whereas one may be tempted to conclude that India's growth in this sector is divergent from the world's, it will do well for Indian players to keep their eyes on changing landscape globally and prepare for its eventual impact on the Indian market."

Television (TV) subscription revenue is expected to grow at 11.6 per cent (global - 1.3 per cent) CAGR from Rs 52,755 crore in 2016 to Rs 90,713 crore in 2021. Though subscriber numbers are still growing, the report predicts that the explosive growth levels of the recent past will not be replicated in the future. While cable market is approaching a saturation point it will continue to account for over 55 per cent of the total pay-TV market in 2021. TV advertising will continue to hold the larger share of the pie from Rs 21,874 crore in 2016 to Rs 37,315 crore in 2021, growing at 11.1 per cent. Globally, TV advertising is expected to grow at 2.1 per cent for the forecast period.
India is ranked eighth in the Asia Pacific region in the internet advertising market. While the segment is growing faster than any other advertising platform at 18.6 CAGR it is still an immature online ad market due to lack of Internet access among Indians. Fixed broadband penetration remains low at 6.9 per cent in 2016. However, this is double the global growth, estimated at 9.8 per cent. Currently mobile Internet advertising comprises 27.6 per cent of total online spending, marking a clear gap between Indians with mobile access and brands reaching out to the mobile audience.

India's internet video segment revenue in 2016 was Rs 560 crore in 2016 and will grow at 22.4 per cent CAGR (global - 11.6 per cent)to reach Rs 1540 crore in 2021 according to the report. Going forward, transactional video-on-demand is expected to account for over 61 per cent of total Internet video revenues in 2021, with many households not wanting to commit to the regular payments of subscription video-on-demand. In other words, the content providers will see more traction by breaking content into snackable segments and charge only for those, rather than give only long format content. For example, people would be more willing to pay for the highlights of a cricket match than watch the whole match on a paid platform.
Box office revenue is expected from INR 10,957 Cr in 2016 to Rs 18,047 crore in 2021, at a healthy CAGR of 10.4 per cent. Globally, it is estimated that box office revenues will grow by 4.4 per cent CAGR with mature markets like the US already facing challenges while attracting footfalls to the cinema halls. In India, admissions will rise from an estimated 200 crore in 2016 to 230 Cr in 2021 (at a CAGR of 2.4 per cent) and ticket prices will rise at a CAGR of 7.9 per cent in the same period. This is one of the few major cinema markets in which 100 per cent digitisation of screens has not yet been achieved - and it is not expected to occur over the forecast period.

Publishing in India is expected to grow from Rs 38,601 crore in 2016 to Rs 44,391 crore in 2021 at a CAGR of 3.1 per cent. Book publishing is projected to grow at 6.1 per cent CAGR over 2017-2021 whereas magazines are expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.3 per cent for the same period. The Indian newspaper industry continues to grow from Rs 23,161 crore in 2016 to Rs 24,447 crore (1.1 per cent) in 2021, distinctly positive when compared to the segment's degrowth globally (2.7 per cent) predicted by PwC for the forecast period.

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

18.2. The importance of privatizing Air India
Livemint, 1 Jun. 2017

Air India is the perfect case that proves why the government should not be in the business of doing business

Everything that could possibly go wrong with a public sector company has gone wrong with Air India. It is operationally inefficient and unable to compete with private sector operators. The airline has been grossly mismanaged over the years and now controversial decisions taken at the time of the United Progressive Alliance government are being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation. It is tottering under a mountain of debt and is surviving on doles from the government. In fact, Air India is the perfect case that proves why the government should not be in the business of doing business.

As reported by Mint on Thursday, the Narendra Modi government seems to have finally made up its mind on privatizing Air India. Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has said that the NITI Aayog has given its suggestions to the aviation ministry and it will now explore all options for privatization of the airline. This is a step in the right direction and the government should now actively look for a buyer for a variety of reasons. First, the 2012 turnaround plan has not shown the desired results. The government committed itself to infusing Rs42,182 crore of equity between financial years 2011-12 and 2031-32. However, the airline has not been able to achieve the targets set in the turnaround plan. For instance, as highlighted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, compared with the target of raising Rs500 crore annually through monetization of assets in the four-year period from 2012-13 to 2015-16, the company managed to raise only Rs.64.06 crore.

Similarly, it has not been able to meet the operational targets. The company has accumulated debt of about Rs50,000 crore and is struggling to repay. To put the number into perspective, there are only about 50 companies listed on Indian stock exchanges with market capitalization in excess of Rs50,000 crore. The government will have to keep bailing out Air India with taxpayers’ money if it decides to hold on to it. Second, at a broader level, going by the established norms of market economy, the government should not be in the business of providing goods and services where the private sector has a vibrant presence. And this applies to all businesses run by the government. As has also been elaborated by the 14th Finance Commission, the opportunity cost of such investments should be considered. In the case of Air India, the cost is a lot higher as it is consistently making losses and is dependent on the government for survival. Further, the presence of state-owned enterprise distorts the market. A firm with access to government finances and practically no fear of failing affects price discovery in the market and can hurt private sector operators in the business.

Third, divesting the loss-making Air India will send a strong signal to investors that India is serious about reforms and is no longer willing to throw good money after bad. This will also set an example and pave the way for disinvestment of other loss-making companies, such as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL). There is no way that these companies will be able to compete in India’s hyper-competitive telecom market.
To be sure, it will not be easy for the government to privatize the debt-laden Air India. It will have to work with professionals and investment bankers to find ways and make the deal reasonably attractive for a prospective buyer. It will have to bring down the level of debt in the company. This can possibly be done by selling non- core assets. For example, one of its subsidiaries—the Hotel Corporation of India—runs hotels which can be sold to reduce debt. The government can infuse equity capital one last time to bring down the debt and make it attractive for potential buyers. If the financial institutions are willing, a part of the debt can be converted into equity. The government could also choose to start by selling a minority stake in the company and bring in a professional management.

The Modi government will need to explore all the options as the status quo cannot continue for long. The government has fiscal constraints and needs to spend more in important areas such as health and education. There is absolutely no rationale why it should be running a company like Air India.
Privatization is normally seen as a politically difficult decision, but for a government which had the political capital to withdraw 86% of the currency by value from circulation, selling inefficient loss-making public sector companies should be reasonably easy.

19.1. Export target of $900 billion by 2020 not feasible
BusinessLine, 26 May 2017

Exporters say meeting the export target of $900 billion by 2020 seems tough, given the current global economic scenario; a more realistic goal would be $700-750 billion.
The Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) has also expressed apprehensions that paying input taxes first and then claiming refunds under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime could lead to losses worth 2 per cent of export value, and has asked the government to bear that burden.
“Reaching the target of $900 billion set in the Foreign Trade Policy would require exports to grow at a compound rate of 27 per cent (from the current fiscal to 2019-20). Given the current global scenario, the possible rate of growth might be 15 per cent, which would translate into exports of $700-750 billion by 2019- 20,” said FIEO Director General Ajay Sahai.
The Commerce Ministry is expected to announce a review of the FTP 2015-2020 simultaneously with the implementation of GST from July 1 this year.

Refund mechanism
Exporters have expressed their reservations about the refund mechanism for input taxes under GST. “While we welcome the final refund rules on issuing acknowledgement within three days of filing refund claim and issuance of 90 per cent of claim amount within seven days, the interest on delayed payment would be due only after 60 days. This will give a jolt to exporters, particularly in the micro and small sector,” said FIEO President Ganesh Kumar Gupta, who is also an exporter of textile and silk items.
FIEO has made various suggestions to the government to help exporters deal with the financial burden of delayed refunds.
One proposal is to allow e-currency, under which a certain percentage may be credited into an exporter’s account based on their previous year’s exports. That e-currency can be used to make payment for input taxes by debiting the amount.

When the refunds happen the e-payment debited from the account would be credited back. “When refunds happen, if it is observed that claims were more in certain cases than the payment due, then the difference can be paid for in cash by the exporter,” Sahai explained.

Incentive rates
Another suggestion made by FIEO is that the losses that the sector is likely to suffer due to the possible delay in refunds of input taxes can be compensated by increasing the rates of incentives under the existing merchandise export incentive scheme (MEIS).
A third proposal by the export organisation is that the interest on delayed refunds of input taxes paid by exporters be due after 10 days of filing claim instead of 60 days, as it would affect the competitiveness of small and medium units.
“While the Revenue Secretary was agreeable to most of the proposals, the GST Council has to take a final call,” Gupta said.

19.2. Internet users to double to 829 mn by 2021: Report
PTI, Jun. 12, 2017

Mumbai: Internet users in the country will double by 2021 to 829 million users from 373 million users in 2016, driven by digital transformation according to a recent report.
This means roughly 59 per cent of the Indian population will use the internet. Also, there would be two billion networked devices in 2021 up from 1.4 billion in 2016.
Overall IP traffic is expected to grow 4-fold during the same period of five years at a compounded annual growth rate of 30 per cent, the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast said.
"Combining device capabilities with faster, higher bandwidth and more intelligent networks is leading to wide doption of high bandwidth data, video and advanced multimedia applications that contribute to increased mobile and Wi-Fi traffic," said Sanjay Kaul, Managing Director, Service Provider Business, Cisco India SAARC.

"The need for optimised bandwidth management, network automation, end to end security and ultimately network monetisation through cost efficient data production is fuelling the growth of network automation, mass market 4G deployments and adoption, soon to be followed with 4.5G and 5G," Kaul added.
The report further explained that mobile to mobile (M2M) connections will represent 22 per cent of the total two billion devices and connections and will account for five percent of IP traffic by 2021.

Advancements in IoT applications such as smart meters, package tracking, digital health monitors and a host of other next-generation M2M services is driving this incremental growth.
Video will continue to dominate IP traffic and overall Internet traffic growth representing 76 per cent of all Internet traffic in 2021, up from 57 percent in 2016, the report noted.
India will reach 84 billion Internet video minutes per month by 2021, which is one hundred and sixty thousand years of video per month, or about thirty two thousand video minutes every second, it explained.

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

20.1. Railways to promote use of clean fuel, cut emission by 33% by 2030
IBEF, Jun. 05, 2017

New Delhi: The Indian Railways is taking increased efforts through sustained energy efficient measures and maximum use of clean fuel to cut down emission level by 33 per cent by 2030. The Railways will use 5 per cent bio diesel as well as CNG/LNG for traction and take the use of renewable energy to 10 per cent by 2030. In order to boost the use of renewable energy sources, the Railways have set a target to achieve 1,000 megawatt (MW) of solar power, of which 20 MW has been commissioned; and 170 MW of wind power, of which 36 MW has been commissioned. Further, the Railways will recycle water and focus on rain water harvesting and revival of water bodies. The Railways have set a target of planting 50 million trees over the next five years, of which 12 million trees have already been planted. The Railways have also initiated fitting of bio-toilets in all of their 55,000 coaches by 2019.

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

20.2. Tejas Express all set to run from May 22
Press Trust of India, 20 May 2017

The much-awaited Tejas Express, which boasts several modern facilities on-board like LED TV and tea, coffee vending machine, will be flagged off from Mumbai to Goa on May 22.
Since the train is equipped with better facilities, the fare will also be slightly higher as compared to normal mail/express service, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said while inspecting the new Tejas coaches here.

Fully loaded
Equipped with CCTV cameras besides smoke and fire detection system, the 19-coach Tejas Express equipped with bio-vacuum toilets and GPS-based passenger information display system.There will be comfortable seating arrangements and each seat will have LED TV with touch control system and call bell facilities.
Manufactured at the Rail Coach Factory in Kapurthala, the coaches will have automatic entrance door, first in a non-suburban train in Indian Railways.
There will be tea and coffee vending machines and snack tables at each coach in the newly designed coaches.
Promised in the budget, Tejas Express will also be pressed into service in Delhi-Chandigarh and Delhi- Lucknow sectors, according to the Indian Railways.

INDIA & THE WORLD

21.1. A Goa state of mind in Lisbon
Livemint, Raul Dias, 20 May 2017

Authentic flavours from India’s sunshine state are popping up in restaurants across Lisbon and are leading a new culinary wave in the Portuguese capital

The moment seems too epiphanic to be real as I sit at the tiny, rough-hewn, jute-cloth-covered wooden table with a bowl of steaming caril de peixe (fish curry). Next to it is a small salver bearing a two-by-three matrix of small, freshly baked paos, whose concave tops glisten in the light of the wall sconces that also highlight a colourful Ganesha mural. I’ve just had my first morsel, mopping up the marigold orange-hued curry—the tender white pieces of the pampo (pomfret) will wait—with a scoop fashioned out of the bread. Suddenly, an apparition in white enters my peripheral vision. Chef Jesus Lee is standing beside the table, arms akimbo. “How’s it going?” he asks with a beatific smile. “It’s just like mum’s fish curry back home,” my filial reflexes take over as I go in for a second bite.

And then it happens. For the second time in my life, I feel tears welling up in my eyes while eating. The first time was at a hole-in-the-wall called BBQ King in Sydney’s Chinatown, where I literally sobbed while tucking into a plastic tub of sublime char siu pork, roast goose and sesame oil-spritzed, blanched gai lan—hitherto the best meal of my life. But that sunny June afternoon, Lee, the Goa-born chef and owner of Lisbon’s Jesus é Goês on Rua São José—in my opinion, the best Goan restaurant this side of the Zuari river—had me. But then, with Goan food currying favour with Lisbon’s food cognoscenti over the last couple of years, Lee has little option but to stay true to the antecedents of this very complex cuisine, which he learnt to cook by observing his mother Paulina at home in Goa. So, while his stash of malt vinegar is flown in every other month from Goa, his annual trips back home help replenish his spice stockpile—used deftly in everything from shark ambot-tik to a transcendent camarão (prawn) reichado.

“There’s absolutely no room for faking Goan food. By now, we all know our xacuti from our xec xec,” laughs my friend, fellow food writer and proud Lisbonite Xavier Colaco, who sees the burgeoning number of Goan restaurants in Lisbon as a great way to pay homage to both Portuguese and Indian cuisines, the progenitors of Goan food. “But this has not always been the case. Though we’ve had Goan restaurants since 1961— propelled by nostalgic Portuguese returnees from Goa yearning for a taste of their ‘other home’—the hip quotient of ‘going for Goan’ is a recent phenomenon.”
Lisbon-based Goan food historian Anna Philomena Dias é Lobo, whom I meet up with for high tea at Lisbon’s Time Out Market, spends half her year in Goa, trawling though ancient recipe books and manuscripts of crusty old Goan matriarchs in order to distil the very essence of the cuisine that, she feels, is influenced by a number of Portugal’s other colonies.

“Consider these pastéis de bacalhau,” Lobo says, pointing to the three differently spiced Zeppelin-like fried orbs of flaked dried cod that is reconstituted with milk and then mashed with boiled potatoes—a play on the typically Portuguese-Goan bolinho de peixe (fish croquettes) that use ghol or ravas in place of bacalhau. “While one is made with fresh coriander, a throwback to Goa, the other has piri-piri chillies from Mozambique and the third gets its reddish tint from Brazilian annatto seeds! “Speaking of Mozambique, did you know that the famous Goan chicken cafreal owes its genesis to the African nation?” she says of the fiery hot, dry greenish-blackish roast chicken, which she believes was prepared by Mozambican slaves—called cafirs—brought to Goa by the Portuguese colonists to work in the palm groves.

Dinner at the Cantinho da Paz in Lisbon’s historic quarter of São Bento teaches me to never judge a restaurant by its shabby doorway. Owned by a man of Goan origin who came to Portugal in 1964, the place serves modestly priced, home-style comfort food like chouriço de Goa (spicy Goa sausages), pork sorpotel and an absolutely divine, if tad commonplace, beef vindaloo.
The fact that the vindaloo crops up on restaurant menus from Vienna to Vladivostok should in no way take away from this highly complex dish that has gone back and forth a fair bit between Portugal and Goa, before evolving into what the Portuguese know and love as vindaloo today. Apparently, Portuguese explorers carried with them on sea voyages a simple dish of pork marinated with wine and garlic called the carne de vinha d’alhos: The red wine helped preserve the meat and the pungent garlic masked odours, if any. They would then stew this over low heat and eat it with dried loaves of chewy bread. After the conquest of Goa, this well- travelling dish underwent a sea change, with palm vinegar standing in for the wine and spices like Kashmiri chillies and toasted cumin seeds adding a new dimension. The Portuguese version today is a lot less spicy and a wee bit less vinegar-y than its Goan sibling.

But as I was to discover on an emergency grocery run to the Lapa branch of Pingo Doce, Portugal’s largest supermarket chain, Goan delicacies have found a firm footing in the country’s consumer goods sector as well. So, while I noshed on an impulse purchase of a two-pack spicy-prawn-in-white-sauce-in-breaded-pastry risole de camarão—exact doppelgängers of the ones served as hors d’oeuvres at house parties in Goa—the also- spotted-and-sampled-right-away seven-layered bebinca was almost the real deal.

The real deal, of course, is the calorific egg yolk-butter-sugar-coconut milk concoction that we should thank a group of canny 16th century Franciscan nuns in Goa for— or so my grand-aunt Tia Antoinette would have me believe. With no apparent need for the leftover yolks once the egg whites were used to stiffen their wimples, the resourceful Mother Abbess conjured up this recipe that the nuns then baked with seven successive layers representing the seven hillocks that they had to ascend and descend every day in order to reach the church from their hilltop convent in Old Goa.
Imbued with legends and stories—the veracity of which is at best a moot point—the mélange of Portuguese- Goan cuisines has resulted in something so tangible and real that it exists not just in the yellowed, dog-eared pages of old recipe books, but is celebrated as a living, edible bite of history that’s so very hard to resist, be it in Loutolim or far away Lisbon. I’m sure Lee would agree.

21.2. Chasing dolphins in Goa—with kindness
Livemint, Chryselle D’Silva Dias, 27 May 2017

Take an eco-friendly route to spotting some of Goa’s most beautiful residents

The summer sky is not yet blue when my husband, our eight-year-old son and I set out for Chapora Bay. We’re on an early morning quest to go dolphin spotting. In nine years of living in Goa, we have consciously stayed away from this popular tourist attraction. On north Goa’s busy beach belt, hundreds of small boats line up during the season, from October-April, to take tourists on a 45-to-60-minute ride to spot humpback dolphins. From friends who have been on these trips, we’ve heard of how the boats chase the dolphins, play loud music, and dump empty water bottles and plastic wrappers overboard. We had no desire to add to this chaos.
Then we heard that a new company called Terra Conscious was offering eco-sensitive dolphin-watching trips and decided to try it out. It is run by Puja Mitra, who was a senior programme coordinator for World Wildlife Fund (WWF) India, managing the Goa State Marine Programme. The tour begins at Chapora, about 9km from the busy Calangute beach.

We join other guests at the Marina Bay Resort to watch a 20-minute presentation about dolphins, the three different kinds found around Goa’s coast, their habitats, sounds, and other things to watch out for while on a boat trip. As we wait for the tide to come in, we sip coffee and soak in the delicious quiet of the still-waking village. Mitra, a champion of Goa’s fragile marine ecology, tells us more about her dolphin conservation work, which extended to ensuring that their use in circuses and entertainment venues was banned.
We get on to the 16-seater fibreglass boat and motor out to calm open water. “Look out for gulls and for fishing trawlers,” Mitra says softly. “Where there are fish, there are dolphins.” Everybody looks around at the miles of clear water; even the children are engaged and eager. A few miles in, we spot a dolphin fin. Instead of gunning the engine, Maneck, who is driving the boat, switches it off and the boat idles quietly in the water. Undisturbed, the dolphin shows off for us in the distance, leaping gracefully between the waves. Then it wanders off after a nearby trawler. Despite our excitement, we keep noise levels down, reminded constantly by Mitra that the mammals have to “talk over” extraneous noise, which disorients them, to communicate. We have breakfast at sea. Maneck passes around poi bread with feta and vegetables, hummus and baba ganoush, watermelon slices and lemonade. Once the dolphins have left, some of us put on life jackets and jump into the sea for a swim.

Once the swimmers have been coerced back on to the boat, the boat heads back— but not to shore. Instead, we stop at a sandbank where everybody gets out to collect garbage, leaving it clean for the gulls that huddle around this beautiful little curve in the middle of the water.
Back on shore, I think about the magnificent dolphins and the other treasures of Goa’s biodiversity that could become the state’s calling card, rather than the rampant, ill-managed tourism that is crippling coastal towns and villages. Mitra’s work with boat operators includes educating them on the possibilities of a profitable, yet sustainable tourist-related business that does not harm animals and the environment. As travellers we can contribute by choosing the right kind of tours.

22.1. After Myanmar success, storage major SLCM eyes other S-E Asian markets
BusinessLine, TV Jayan, 11 Jun. 2017

After a successful foray into Myanmar, warehousing management firm Sohan Lal Commodity Management Private Ltd (SLCM) plans to enter other South-East Asian countries.
SLCM, which revolutionised warehousing of agricultural commodities by implementing scientific monitoring and storage methods, said it was actively looking at countries like Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, which have very high post-harvest losses.

“Post-harvest losses in most South-East Asian countries are very similar to that in Myanmar. If Myanmar has a post-harvest loss of 30-32 per cent, in these countries it is in the high 20s,” said SLCM CEO Sandeep Sabharwal.

SLCM, which entered the Myanmar market in April 2014, has so far managed nearly 13 million sq ft of commodity storage space in 51 industrial zones and handled 171 commodities with a total volume of 2.33 million tonnes.
Even though the size of its operation is much smaller than that in India, where it manages a throughput 200 times more and storage area three times larger, SLCM Myanmar has managed to break-even in two years, flat. Apart from offering storage solutions to farmers and traders, SLCM has been helping them get finance from banks and financial institutions using commodities as collateral.

Both in India and Myanmar, SLCM has been able to reduce post-harvest losses to 0.5 per cent, and thus helped every player in the farm-to-market chain.
The success that it achieved in a greenfield market like Myanmar has encouraged SLCM to turn its attention to the Asean market, Sabharwal said.
The problems in these countries are very similar to India and Myanmar. Moreover, microfinance institutions, which fund most farmers in these countries, are desperately looking for better post-harvest storage solutions for two reasons. First, it will help the farmers get more from their fields. Second, it will help them (the MFIs) securitise the loans that they hand out to the farmers, said Sabharwal.

“Unlike in India and Myanmar, where we had to market ourselves hard, these microfinance organisations have been inviting us to come in as they know the value of proper storage of grains,” Sabharwal told BusinessLine. What is currently holding the firm back is structural issues in some of these markets. They, he said, lack clearly laid-down policies when it comes to allowing foreign firms in the farm sector and they want to ensure the companies that enter do not have hold over the land.
Sabharwal, however, is confident that they will start operations in at least one of these countries in the coming financial year.
SLCM is looking at the African commodity storage market. “We have been looking at the African market for two-three years. The reason why we haven’t penetrated the African market is that we are yet to assess which countries will make commercial sense to us,” said Sabharwal.

22.2. With $6 b, Reliance & BP recommit to KG Basin
BusinessLine, 16 June, 2017

PTI BP Plc Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley and Reliance Industries Limited Chairman Mukesh Ambani coming out after meeting with Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan at Shastri Bhawan in New Delhi on Thursday.

Partnership to range from exploration and retailing to renewables & mobility

Just when the industry and experts had begun to think that Mukesh Ambani had grown disenchanted with the oil and gas exploration business, the chief of Reliance Industries, and its partner BP Plc announced an investment of ₹40,000 crore ($6 billion) in the controversial KG-D6 block.
After separate meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the Reliance chief and Bob Dudley, BP’s Group Chief Executive, unveiled their plans for the entire energy value chain — from exploration and production to retailing of petroleum products, and from natural gas and LNG imports, to green energy.
“BP-Reliance have agreed to award contracts to progress the development of the R-series for the ultra deepwater gas field in block KG-D6 off the East coast of India in an integrated way, producing approximately three trillion cubic feet of discovered gas reserves,” Dudley told reporters.
Dudley said this is expected to bring 30-35 million standard cubic meters of gas per day (mmscmd) of new domestic gas production, over 2020-2022. “We plan to submit field development plans for the next two projects, the satellites under D-55, for government approval, before the end of 2017,” he said.

Controversy
The KG-D6 asset has been dogged by controversy, with declining output from the current producing areas of D6 (today, the block produces less than 7 mmscmd of gas from the wells which are seeing natural decline) even as public sector giant ONGC is accusing RIL and its partners of monetising gas from its adjacent acreage.
According to Ambani, besides investments in upstream sector, BP and RIL have agreed to a strategic cooperation to expand their existing partnership.
“Under this new cooperation, our two companies will jointly explore options to develop differentiated fuels, mobility and advanced low-carbon energy businesses in India,” the Reliance Industries CMD said.

Asked what triggered his return to the sector, especially when he is contesting the government on certain issues, Ambani said: “The new policies that have been announced have facilitated this investment.”
“We still have some pending arbitrations and we will follow the legal process to bring those arbitrations to an end as per the normal course of law.”
Industry watchers feel the development would invigorate the sector and trigger investment flows.
Former ONGC Chairman and Managing Director RS Sharma said: “…this will enthuse investor sentiments. Although gas pricing is an issue, I am sure they would have got some assurance from the government, from which they draw this confidence.”

23.1. Africa takes tips from India to cut food import bill
BusinessLine, 23 May 2017

Inspired by India’s self-sufficiency in foodgrain production, Africa has now set a target of cutting down its $35- billion food import bill.
Speaking at the opening of the 52nd annual meeting of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), the President of the bank, Akinwumi Adesina, said India has shown the world a roadmap to become self sufficient in foodgrain production within a short span of three years.
“We are here to draw inspiration from India’s Green Revolution,” said Adesina, adding that Africa spends about $35 billion on food imports, which may rise to $110 billion by 2025.

“In 10 years, Africa has to feed itself and become net exporter of food,” he added.
Highlighting the cooperation between India and Africa, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said it is not a one- off event but part of a strategic policy over the last several years.
“India and Africa together can shape the future of the world. The present government has provided fresh impetus to these efforts. India’s share of announced greenfield projects grew from 3.3 per cent in 2003-08 to 6.1 per cent in 2009-15. India is among the most important emerging investors in Africa. In terms of greenfield projects, India was the fourth largest investor with 45 projects in 2015 after the US, the UK, and the UAE,” said Jaitley during his address at Mahatma Mandir here on Monday.

He also reiterated India’s commitment to support Africa in achieving its development agenda.
The five-day summit will have its formal inauguration on Tuesday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is also on two-day tour to Gujarat.
The meeting is aimed at boosting India-Africa bilateral trade further as well as India’s co-operation with AfDB in areas like solar power, food and agriculture and infrastructure such as railways, said Adesina.

23.2. Africa key for India, trade has doubled in 5 years: Narendra Modi
Livemint, May 24, 2017

Gandhinagar: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said his government has made Africa a top priority for foreign and economic policy, while recalling India’s long-standing relationship with the continent.
Pitching for an Asia-Africa growth corridor, Modi said trade between Africa and India had multiplied in the last 15 years.
“It has doubled in the last five years to reach nearly $72 billion in 2014-15. India’s commodity trade with Africa in 2015-16 was higher than our commodity trade with the United States of America,” Modi said at the opening of the Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group.

The event in Gandhinagar was attended by AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina, Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani and Union finance minister Arun Jaitley among others. India, Modi said, is working with the US and Japan to support African development. Delegates from more than 50 African countries are attending the event. “As one plank of this cooperation, India extends lines of credit through India’s Exim Bank. 152 credits have been extended to 44 countries for a total amount of nearly $8 billion. During the Third India-Africa Forum Summit, India offered $10 billion for development projects over the next five years. We also offered grant assistance of $600 million,” Modi said. He also recalled the third India Africa Summit in 2015 in New Delhi, attended by delegates from all 54 African countries.
India’s private sector has been at the forefront of Africa-India ties, and from 1996 to 2016, nearly a fifth of Indian overseas direct investments went to Africa. Modi said India is the fifth largest country investing in Africa, with investments over the past 20 years amounting to $54 billion.

He also acknowledged the support of African countries to the International Solar Alliance, launched by Modi and former French president Francois Hollande at the UN Climate conference in Paris in November 2015. The prime minister also pointed to India’s attempts in direct subsidy payments and the campaign to persuade cooking gas users to give up subsidies. Two crucial factors behind India’s growth were universal banking and universal biometric identification, he added.

“We have made unprecedented increases in capital investment in infrastructure, covering railways, highways, power, and gas pipelines. By next year, no village in India will be without electricity. Our Clean Ganga, Renewable Energy, Digital India, Smart Cities, Housing for All and Skill India missions are preparing us for a cleaner, more prosperous, faster growing and modern new India. Our aim is that India must be an engine of growth as well as an example in climate friendly development in the years to come,” Modi said.

Modi also credited the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana for bringing bank accounts to “virtually every Indian family” and said biometric identification has helped plug leakages in government payments.
Finance minister Jaitely said the ‘High 5 Strategy’ adopted by AfDB has similar priorities and policies as that of the Indian government for creating sustainable socio-economic development. He said the 21st century will belong not only to Asia but also Africa -- which is why India and Africa should navigate the journey together to shape their future.
Lauding the growth story of Gujarat, especially in rural electrification and the solar sector, the AfDB president said that it has inspired Africa to build the world’s largest solar plant.

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

24.1. GMR Infra arm wins bid to develop airport in Greece
BusinessLine, 7 Jun. 2017

GMR Airports Ltd has been selected to develop, operate and manage the new international Kastelli airport project in Heraklion, Crete island of Greece, in partnership with Greek infrastructure major Terna S.A..
GMR Airports will be the designated airport operator in the consortium for this project, the company said in a BSE filing on Wednesday.
The concession period for the greenfield project will be 35 years, including phase-1 construction of 5 years, the company added.
Earlier this year, GMR Airports and Terna had placed a bid of €480 million for the construction and operation of the new airport — much below the expected estimation of ₹850 million, Reuters had reported in April. The new Kastelli Airport will replace the existing Heraklion Airport, which handles over 6 million passengers annually and faces capacity constraint.

“The airport is in line with the asset-light strategy we have adopted for overseas expansion and will see GMR participate in project management and commercial management in addition to airport operations,” Srinivas Bommidala, Business Chairman, GMR Airports, said. The company did not comment on the cost of the project. The Greece project will be GMR Group’s second in Europe after it had developed Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport.
GMR Infra is also developing Mactan Cebu International Airport (MCIA) in Philippines in partnership with Megawide Construction Corporation.
The new overseas project comes as a time when the debt-laden GMR group is in the process of restructuring its debt and divesting assets, mainly in the road and power sectors.

Financial performance
GMR Infrastructure had recently announced reducing its consolidated debt to ₹19,856 crore in FY17 from ₹37,480 crore in the last fiscal, as a result of debt restructuring exercise and divestment campaign. The company, however, reported a 39 per cent increase in standalone net loss for the quarter ended March 2017 to ₹2,478 crore from ₹1,787 crore in the same period of the last financial year. The company’s standalone total revenue declined to ₹272.4 crore from ₹395.2 crore in the previous fiscal.

24.2. Breaking barriers with ‘Baahubali’
Livemint, 19 May 2017

The success of ‘Baahubali’ worldwide and ‘Dangal’ in China indicates the untapped business potential of Indian movies on foreign shores

The tremendous success, both at home and abroad, of S.S. Rajamouli’s latest Baahubali offering marks a seminal moment for the Indian film industry. Just about every day since its release three weeks ago, the larger-than-life war fantasy movie has smashed a record or two—most notably, the Rs1,000 crore mark (1 crore=10 million)—and is now well on its way to the Rs1,500 crore mark. It was expected that the film would draw viewers in large numbers to movie theatres, given the stellar box-office performance of its 2015 prequel. But this level of success is unprecedented—and the big bucks is just one part of the story.

Two other trends deserve attention: First, the reshaping of the Indian cinema dynamic wherein only Hindi films produced in Mumbai have been perceived to be pan-national, while all other films produced in different parts of the country are considered “regional”. The Baahubali franchise has challenged that dynamic in a way few other “regional” films have.
Produced in Telugu and Tamil and dubbed in Malayalam and Hindi (and German, French, Japanese and English), both the Baahubali films were taken beyond their traditional markets and released to a country-wide audience. This was a big step, especially for the first film, for it brought unfamiliar actors from the Telugu film industry on to the national stage and made them household names across the country. Even Kabali, the 2016 Tamil gangster drama that was screened widely outside south India and is possibly the only comparable film in this context, had the distinctive advantage of being a Rajinikanth starrer.

The second Baahubali film builds on the successes of the first, consolidates the trend and proves beyond doubt that it is entirely possible for a film not produced in Hindi and not featuring Bollywood stars to have a nationwide viewership. This is an important message for film-makers across the country who will hopefully be inspired and encouraged to bring their art and craft outside their regional centres and cater to a much larger audience.
The second trend that has emerged with Baahubali’s phenomenal performance is the untapped potential of Indian movies in foreign markets. Here, the Baahubali franchise is in good company; the wrestling drama Dangal not only followed it into the Rs1,000 crore club but was able to do so on the back of impressive performances in China and Taiwan. Indeed, in China, the Aamir Khan-starrer even beat Hollywood’s Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 to make it to the top spot in box-office sales for the week ending 14 May. In fact, Dangal has made more money in China than its entire Rs387.38 crore ($58.2 million) lifetime collection in India.

What makes this development even more fascinating is that China is generally not considered to be part of the “traditional” foreign market for Indian films, which includes the US, United Arab Emirates, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, some north African countries like Morocco and Egypt, some pockets in Western Europe, and India’s immediate neighbours. Note that most of these traditional markets are either home to Indian diaspora or share some sort of cultural affinity with India. China doesn’t really fit into either category. And yet, Dangal’s success there proves what some industry analysts have been saying for a long time—that the large Chinese market holds a lot of promise for Indian films, if only filmmakers are willing to take the risk and venture out. This is exactly what Khan did. Already a familiar face in China, where his previous film 3 Idiots was hugely popular, he conducted an extensive publicity tour for Dangal and made his presence felt on Chinese social media as well.
To be sure, Bollywood has a long history, going back to the 1930s, of screening its films abroad. In the 1950s, Raj Kapoor-starrers Awara and Shree 420 took Moscow by storm. Later, Haathi Mere Saathi, featuring Rajesh Khanna and Tanuja, created history in Singapore and Malaysia, while the Mithun Chakraborty-starrer Disco Dancer registered the highest turnout for any film in the Soviet Union in 1984. In Egypt, Amitabh Bachchan is still a much loved icon, evidenced by the rousing reception he received in Cairo in March this year.

More recently, Indian producers have also been seeking out new markets in hitherto unexplored territories. For example, Ki & Ka was released in Zimbabwe and the Ivory Coast, Bajrangi Bhaijaan was screened in Poland, and Mary Kom in several Central Asian countries. Yet, in most cases, they have struggled to break into the mainstream. This is where Baahubali and Dangal have succeeded, prompting comparisons with Hollywood productions that are as much part of the mainstream as the movies produced locally. Indeed, Hollywood makes a significant amount of its revenue overseas, and it will be interesting to see if Indian film-makers can do the same.
Baahubali and Dangal have shown that it is possible but the question is: Are they just one-off successes or will they emerge as trendsetters in the long run?
What does the success of Baahubali and Dangal overseas mean for the Indian film industry? Tell us at views@livemint.com

25.1. CPPIB scales up India investments, pumps in Rs 9,120 crore in fiscal 2017
Livemint, May 30, 2017

New Delhi: Toronto-based Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), which opened its India office in 2015, has quickly scaled up its investments since then, figures from its annual report show.
The pension fund had investments of around Rs13,440 crore in the country by March 2016, and pumped in Rs9,120 crore more in the next year to take its total India exposure to Rs22,560 crore by 31 March 2017. Canada’s largest pension fund has been investing in India since 2010 and made its first active investment in the country through a C$100 million commitment to Multiples Private Equity Fund in that year. (1 CAD=Rs48) Most recently, CPPIB joined hands with Everstone Group’s industrial and logistics real estate development platform, IndoSpace, to form a joint venture named IndoSpace Core to acquire and develop modern logistics facilities in India. The Canadian pension fund will initially commit around $500 million and own a significant stake in the joint venture.

It has also formed a strategic investment platform with The Phoenix Mills Ltd (PML) to develop, own and operate retail-led mixed-use developments across India. The pension fund will initially own 30% in the platform, known as Island Star Mall Developers Pvt. Ltd, a PML subsidiary, which owns Phoenix MarketCity Bangalore, for about C$149 million. CPPIB’s total commitment to the platform is around C$330 million, which will increase CPPIB’s stake in the platform up to 49%.
In an interview published in Mint on 9 January, Mark Machin, who worked as CPPIB’s first president for Asia and was named president and chief executive of the pension fund a year ago, said India had the best profile as an investment destination in the world.

“There are three things that are discussed from time to time: the stability and the effectiveness of the government to effect change, the second thing is the oil price spike which is a real challenge for India and third thing is high interest rates. But right now, we are in a good place and that is why a lot of money is looking at India,” he said, adding that the pension fund’s emerging markets allocation is expected to grow from 15% to around 20% by 2030. It is looking to ramp up its exposure to emerging markets, in particular India and China. Among its other bets, CPPIB bought an additional 1.5% stake in Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd along with peer Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec (CDPQ) for $352 million in March this year. To date, CPPIB has invested a total of C$1.2 billion in the bank, representing a 6.3% stake.
The same month, CPPIB also bought 3.3% in telecom tower company Bharti Infratel Ltd for $300 million, as part of the purchase of a 10.3% stake alongside funds advised by PE firm KKR & Co. LP, from Bharti Airtel Ltd.

In January, CPPIB agreed to buy around 48% US-based digital product development services firm GlobalLogic Inc., from private equity fund Apax Partners LLP.
Meanwhile, the CPP Fund, which houses investments for CPPIB, saw an increase of about 13.5% in its net assets to C$316.7 billion as of 31 March, 2017 from C$278.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2016, according to a separate statement.
The C$37.8 billion increase in assets for the year consisted of C$33.5 billion in net income after all CPPIB- related costs and C$4.3 billion in net Canada Pension Plan (CPP) contributions. The portfolio delivered a gross investment return of 12.2% for fiscal 2017, or 11.8% net of all costs.
“This was a strong year for the CPP Fund as we achieved one of the largest yearly increases in assets since the inception of CPPIB,” said Machin in a media release.

“As always, we continue to focus on longer-term performance. Year-by-year results will swing, but it is noteworthy that our 11.8% five-year return mirrors our annual return. We believe this is a strong indicator of our ability to generate steady, sustainable returns for generations of beneficiaries to come,” he added. To generate the C$33.5 billion of net income from operations after all costs, CPPIB incurred total costs of C$2,834 million for fiscal 2017, compared to C$2,643 million in total costs for the previous year.
CPPIB’s total costs for fiscal 2017 consisted of C$923 million of operating expenses; C$987 million in management fees and C$477 million in performance fees paid to external managers; and C$447 million of transaction costs. This fiscal year reflected a decline in the operating expense ratio for the second year in a row, as well as a slowdown in the growth of CPPIB’s operating expenses, the company said. In fiscal 2017, CPPIB completed 182 global transactions through four investment departments. Nineteen of those investments were more than C$500 million.

“The composition of our highly diversified long-term portfolio continues to position us well, allowing us to take advantage of the strong performance of global stock markets this year, amid significant global geopolitical developments,” said Machin, adding that the diverse investment programs of the group generated strong earnings, while fixed income investments remained relatively flat.
In the 10-year period up to and including fiscal 2017, CPPIB has now contributed C$146.1 billion in cumulative net income to the Fund after all CPPIB costs. Since CPPIB’s inception in 1999, it has contributed C$194.1 billion.
On the other side, for the five-year period, the net nominal return was 11.8%, contributing C$129.6 billion in cumulative net income to the Fund after all CPPIB costs. While Canadian assets represented 16.5% of the portfolio, and totalled C$52.2 billion, assets outside of Canada represented 83.5% of the portfolio, and totalled C$264.7 billion.

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

25.2. India is the biggest growth driver for Essilor, says CEO Hubert Sagnieres
Livemint, May 30, 2017

New Delhi: Earlier this year, French lens-maker Essilor International SA and Italian frame designer Luxottica Group SpA announced a merger to create a global eyewear giant with a market share of 13-14%. In India, the combined entity will have 15-20% market share in the Rs22,674 crore (as of 2016) eyewear market.
“But the market should actually be three times bigger,” says Hubert Sagnières, chairman and chief executive officer at Essilor International and executive vice-chairman and deputy CEO of Essilor Luxottica, referring to the number of people with bad vision in India and across the globe.
Essilor sells lenses under brands such as Varilux, Crizal, Definity, Xperio and Foster Grant, while frame designer Luxottica operates brands like Oakley and Ray Ban. The companies are expecting to complete the transaction latest by January 2018. Sagnières, who was in Delhi last week, talks about the idea behind the merger, expectations from the Indian market, and how e-commerce has been a game changer for eyewear.

Edited excerpts from an interview:

How will the merger change things?
The main reason why Luxottica and Essilor are in business is to improve the vision of the people. Essilor has been in business for 180 years now; Luxottica is a little younger with 50-55 years. We have developed our activities for improving vision with lenses and Luxottica has done the same with frames. The combination of the two companies is to make sure that we develop the eyewear market which is currently facing two key challenges—awareness and accessibility. There is a lack of awareness when it comes to bad vision. Secondly, there are not enough stores or access points where people can go and have their eyes checked or purchase eye-glasses, contact lens and sunglasses.
Secondly, most of the Luxottica brands which are sold in India are produced mainly in the US. With the merged entity, we can produce Luxottica locally at our facility in Gurgaon. So, the big change will also be on the availability of all the brands that Luxottica has. There will be luxury fashion and affordable fashion with the combined entity.

How do you plan to resolve the issues of accessibility and awareness?
To eradicate poor vision from India, we don’t need to develop any new product. We just need to make sure that people pay attention to their vision. People assume that a good vision is forever but the dust, light and sun can anytime attack your iris and retina. It may not make you blind but you may have eye diseases like glaucoma or retina issues.
In India, we take the young people in rural areas and train them to be basic opticians over a period of one year. We give them a small grant so that they can go back to their own villages and start micro-enterprises. This is one way of solving accessibility issue. We started this about five years back and today we have trained close to 3,000 people. We will add 10,000 more by the end of 2020.

How has overall eyewear market evolved in India?
It’s growing very fast. The uncorrected vision was not being paid any attention earlier. Over the last 15-20 years, there has been a lot of awareness. The cost of poor vision in India is estimated (by World Health Organization) to be over Rs2 trillion annually, that is $37 billion. If you just put glasses on people’s faces, you increase the GDP (gross domestic product) of India by Rs2 trillion every year.
India stands second when it comes to number of people with bad vision. India has 1.3 billion people, out of which 550-600 million people have bad vision. China is number one. At the same time, this ranking is linked to population.

Which are your best markets?
Absolutely none. There is no market where we have eradicated poor vision. In US, 40 out of 300 million people and in France, four out of 60 million people don’t have access to eye-care. We have not solved the problem of poor vision but we are making progress everywhere. Essilor is doing business in every country of the world except North Korea.

Which countries are driving growth for you?
India is the biggest driver. We are growing much faster in India than in China and we are basically the same size in both the countries. India is among top 10 markets for us. It currently contributes less than 5% to our global revenue. Also, some countries in Africa are good drivers, where we have low market share. Certain countries are more organized. Like in Latin America, Colombia is very well organized for eye care. Government has invested a lot in eye care development schools there.

How big a role does e-commerce play in eyewear accessibility globally and in India?
Globally, huge. It contributes around 5% to our global revenue, while it was nothing three years ago. It has solved the problem of accessibility to a great extent. The biggest markets where online eyewear is doing well, are China and the US. In India, it is not where it should be, but it is growing. It is still perceived as a way to get deals and cheap stuff. India is still very small because it just started a year ago. We have recently started a site called www.coolwinks.com.

What is the revenue of the company post merger?
Globally, we have revenue of €7 billion. Combined with Luxottica, it will be €14 billion in a market which is close to €100 billion. The more important fact here is that the industry is underpenetrated because the market is three times bigger. That’s the size of uncorrected, bad vision across the world.

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

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Saturday 17 June 2017

NEWSLETTER, 20-VI-2017

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC.

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NEWSLETTER, 20-VI-2017

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC.

– AGRICULTURE, FISHING & RURAL DEVELOPMENT

– INDUSTRY, MANUFACTURE

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

INDIA & THE WORLD