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Friday 17 August 2018

NEWSLETTER, 20-VIII-2018











DELHI, 20th August 2018
Index of this Newsletter


INDIA

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC. 


1.1.  Transforming India into an AI (Artificial Inteligence) leader
1.2.  Northeast to get Rs 100-bn digital boost on 415 projects by 2022
2.1.  Why private hospitals should join NHPM- National Health Protection Mission
2.2.  PM Modi to launch India Post Payments Bank on Aug 21
3.1. Opinion | Atal Bihari Vajpayee: A titan of Indian politics
3.2. Kerala has topped as the best-governed state and among smaller states Himachal Pradesh topped the list, followed by Goa
4.1.  RBI industrial outlook survey no good news for manufacturing
4.2.  Road construction firms to see 20% growth through 2020: Crisil
5.1. Isro ropes in pvt firms, inks pact with a consortium to assemble satellites
5.2.  New airport projects may be awarded on a revenue sharing basis


– AGRICULTURE, FISHING & RURAL DEVELOPMENT


6.1. Flipkart Supermart to take on Amazon, BigBasket in grocery space
6.2.  Amazon invests another Rs 2,700 crore ($400 million) in India business
7.1.  India earns Rs 18,000 cr ($2,7 bn) per year from export of basmati rice
7.2.  China clears 14 Indian rice companies for export amid trade war with US
8.1.  Walmart looks to double wholesale presence in India, open 20 stores next three years
8.2.  The handmade’s tale: Etsy comes to India
9.1.  Tata Trusts plans to support 1,000 innovations in tech sector
9.2.  IndianOil to invest over ₹20,000 cr in city gas biz
10.1. Nestle India market cap crosses Rs 1 trillion; stock rises 50% from Feb low
10.2. We will make chocolates using Italian tech: Hatsun’s Chandramogan


– INDUSTRY, MANUFACTURE


11.1. RIL net inches closer to ₹10,000-cr mark
11.2. Benelli to set up assembly unit near Hyderabad; will make it a hub in phases
12.1. Automobile industry planning ₹ 58,000 crore capex in 2 years
12.2. Government may give incentives to textiles sector to boost domestic manufacturing
13.1. Titan targets₹40,000 crore from jewellery business by FY23
13.2. Auto parts maker Sansera files draft prospectus for IPO valued at $200 million
14.1. Future Group’s Cover Story brand eyes ₹100 crore in sales this year
14.2. Three’s Company: Rathore, Zegna and Reliance strike a partnership
15.1. Haier India eyes double-digit growth this calendar year
15.2. Breaking Ground: India’s first ceramics triennale


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


16.1. We’ve made some course corrections in our strategy: Infy
16.2. Shifting focus, digital technology help BFSI vertical grow: TCS official
17.1. Opinion: Digitally empowering women in rural India
17.2. Jodhpur, Jaipur are cleanest rail stations
18.1. Sun Pharma’s cancer injection from Halol plant gets USFDA nod
18.2. Aurobindo’s Apotex deal marks ‘Enter Europe’ plan of Indian pharma companies
19.1. IKEA all set to open shop in India on Thursday
19.2. 17 security guard agencies to train over 300.000 guards under the govt scheme
20.1. The Coolest Lab in town
20.2. KHELO INDIA launches unique programme to nurture sporting talent


INDIA & THE WORLD 

21.1. BRICS stand up for multilateral trading system under WTO
21.2. Can the multilateral trading system be saved?
22.1. Hindalco’s US arm buys Aleris for $2.58 billion
22.2. Pharma exports to cross USD 19 bn in FY19: Pharmexcil
23.1. US upgrades India's status as trading partner on par with its Nato allies
24.1. India doubles import tax on over 300 textile products to 20%, may hit China
24.2. India watching China’s measures to ease drug-import norms
25.1. After 12 years, Indra Nooyi steps down as Pepsi CEO
25.2. Independence Day special: A to Z of Independent India


* * *

DELHI, 20th August 2018

NEWSLETTER, 20-VIII-2018



INDIA

– GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC. 



1.1. Transforming India into an AI (Artificial Intelligence) leader
Livemint, 30 Jul. 2018, Samraat Basu & Gargi Rohi

A strong data protection law, such as the one drafted by the Srikrishna Committee, will improve data access and quality, benefitting AI research

There are certain crucial periods which determine the course a country is likely to take in the foreseeable future. India has failed to capitalize and build on the industrial and manufacturing revolutions. Now, the seeds of the next major revolution in the form of big data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), are being sown by major economies around the world. India has the capability to partake in the benefits.

AI has the potential to drastically transform a number of sectors such as transport and traffic management, health, education, agriculture, telecommunications, defence and information technology, to name a few. China is reportedly planning to invest $150 billion over the next decade in AI research and development. France is investing $1.8 billion over the next five years and the foremost private companies and researchers leading the AI race are headquartered or based in the US.

To catch up and potentially lead the AI race, it is imperative for India to form a bold AI policy, along the lines of NITI Aayog’s discussion paper, that focuses on data collection, analytics, research and application—since it is data that fuels the development of AI. Fortunately, India has a strategic advantage in potential access to data due to the large digital footprint of its population. It is important that at this juncture, the Justice Srikrishna Committee has come out with the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018. We believe this will play a key role in unlocking India’s AI potential.

In our opinion, the building blocks of a robust AI ecosystem must have four pillars. First, access to data needs to be enhanced to give firms dealing with AI more data from a variety of sources. However, while it is important to effectuate greater access to data, it is also necessary to ensure adequate protection is provided to personal data which forms a subset of the data pools that big data researchers may have access to. The Bill is a vital step for ensuring robust protection for individuals whose personal data is used in such research.

For example, its provision on research when exempting researchers from certain obligations under the law requires anonymization of personal data as far as possible. Further, a general duty is imposed on researchers to ensure that the individuals whose data they are collecting and processing are not harmed by the research and that such research is not used for the purpose of targeting them. Additionally, when non-anonymized personal data is collected from individuals, researchers would still be required to ensure the security of the personal data and that it is processed in a fair and reasonable manner.

The Bill also makes researchers subject to data protection impact assessments. These are required when processing personal data involves new technologies or the use of sensitive personal data. For all kinds of research which are not exempted by the Data Protection Authority, researchers would still be required to take consent of individuals and inform them of the purposes for which their data could be used. Such individuals should also be allowed to verify the accuracy of such data.

Apart from these measures, if anonymized data does not suit the requirements of the research, measures such as pseudonymization and setting up of ethics committees may be looked at. Alternatively, other forms of differential privacy may be popularized, whereby such data analysis aspires to learn about a particular data set without revealing personal data about a specific individual by studying aggregated data derived out of pools of personal data that they themselves do not have access to. Not only would these measures safeguard the privacy interests of the individuals, they would also encourage them to share their personal data without fear that it may be misused or disclosed without their consent.

Second, the quality of data that entities developing AI have access to has to be improved. This can be achieved through requiring entities to process data in a structured and accurate manner. The Bill does this by making personal data subject to individual access and correction requests.

Third, investments made to support big data research will need to be bolstered by funding from both the public and private sectors, subsidies, tax rebates and so on. The government could identify and fund research projects, or invite domestic and foreign venture capitalists to invest in sectors that it has identified as best placed to reap the benefits. In this regard, the government can set up designated AI research zones in leading universities and research institutes across India.

Finally, a culture of research should be inculcated within students and greater impetus ought to be given to training and employing big data researchers in educational institutions. Until India is able to ensure a steady stream of peer-recognized research, publications and patents, it will be difficult for it to secure a lead in the AI race.

We believe that by encouraging the growth of big data research while also according strong protection to the personal data which may form part of such research, India will be on its way to becoming a responsible and successful global leader in the AI revolution. This belief is in opposition to general industry opinion that data protection laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation are a hindrance to research and innovation. But a strong data protection law will instead improve data access and quality, benefitting AI research.

Samraat Basu and Gargi Rohi are research fellows at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, and part of the team which assisted the Justice Srikrishna Committee by providing inputs for the committee report and the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018.


1.2. Northeast to get Rs 100-bn digital boost on 415 projects by 2022
Business Standard, Aug. 13, 2018

Guwahati: Aiming to make the Northeastern states of the country digitally empowered, the government plans to invest close to Rs 100 billion (Rs 97.61 billion to be specific) by 2022 on 415 projects in the region. The investments will go towards telecom infrastructure, BPOs, electronics manufacturing, digital payments, start-ups and cyber security.

This is part of the NDA government’s vision document for ‘Digital North East 2022’, which was unveiled at a mega event here on Saturday. The document refers to around 50 digital initiatives planned for each state in the region.

The objective is to provide high-speed broadband to all gram panchayats or equivalent local bodies through optical fibre, apart from ensuring mobile phone connectivity to all villages. The other goals include adoption of common service centers, providing better access to quality health, educational and agricultural services through use of digital technologies.

While the National Informatics Centre (NIC) will set up a regional data centre with cloud infrastructure in Guwahati, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) will accelerate the implementation of BharatNet project in the region.

Of the total investment planned for the digital initiative, a major chunk — more than Rs 78 billion — will come from the DoT. The Ministry of Electronics and IT will fund projects to the tune of Rs 14 billion, while the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region will spend more than Rs 4 billion. Another Rs 530 million is expected from the Home Ministry. Also, private sector investment is pegged at Rs 700 million.

"This is the first time that the central government has conducted an in-depth analysis of the strength and weaknesses of the states in the Northeast before finalising a comprehensive investment programme," Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

The Minister added that NDA government is working to realise the party's dream of creating a ‘New India’, which is truly inclusive. The Minister said the Centre's role was to ensure that all people, irrespective of region and race had equal opportunities and were equally benefited from the development initiatives of the government.

The event saw participation from all north-eastern states including chief ministers of Assam and Tripura.

With this mission in place, the government will work to accord a major thrust on electronics manufacturing through special incentives, Prasad said. In fact, an electronics manufacturing cluster has been inaugurated in Guwahati with a potential to create 8,000 jobs. Simultaneously, the government has doubled the seats for BPOs in the region to 10,000 from 5,000 earlier.

"The idea is to leverage digital technologies to transform the lives of the people here and ensure inclusive and sustainable growth," Prasad said.

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


2.1. Why private hospitals should join NHPM- National Health Protection Mission
Livemint, 22 Jul. 2018, Indu Bhushan

The nationally prescribed rates are not intended to cover the cost of capital and infrastructure in the short run but the marginal cost

The government’s announcement of Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM)—is the most significant commitment to date for moving the country towards providing financial protection to all its citizens against catastrophic healthcare-related expenditure. AB-NHPM aims to provide a benefit cover of ₹5 lakh for more than 1,300 specified and other unspecified medical and surgical procedures to more than 100 million families.

As is expected for a scheme of such scale and ambition, it has sparked hope and triggered trepidation in equal measure among the stakeholders. It is only expected, and indeed welcome, that scrutiny, dialogue and discussions have focused on each design aspect of the scheme. In the past weeks, some healthcare provider networks have raised concerns about the viability of the pricing model. While the response to the empanelment drive for hospitals has been overwhelming so far, some private sector healthcare providers have shown reluctance in seeking empanelment under the initiative, saying the rates for treatment packages are too low. This article explains why they should reconsider their decision.

At the outset, let me deal with the elephant in the room—treatment rates. We can all agree that setting treatment rates at the national level is not an easy task, especially when it is being done for the first time. There is, admittedly, a dearth of national-level comprehensive costing studies; that will be one of the core research areas AB-NHPM will be looking into continuously. Nonetheless, the current rates have been determined following a rigorous process. There are large schemes running successfully in states such as Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka which can be a rich source of information for the mission. These schemes have no dearth of empanelled hospitals which are providing healthcare services at the rates so provisioned.

Recognizing the large variations in cost structures across the country, AB-NHPM gives states the flexibility to increase or decrease rates, depending on their contexts. By definition, these rates are median rates, and will need to be adjusted at the state level. A key feature of AB-NHPM’s strategic purchasing is the alignment of incentives to help improve quality as well as availability of service in poor areas. Hospitals accredited to the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers (Nabh) will receive higher rates, as will those located in “aspirational districts”.

As data become increasingly available during roll-out, AB-NHPM will refine its approach. The mission will continue to undertake costing studies and actuarial analysis besides periodically revisiting costing principles to reflect annual fluctuations in productivity and unit costs. The apprehensions of hospitals about the rates have been taken into consideration during the current costing exercise. As earlier, hospitals’ views will continue to be sought as the scheme evolves.

The price model based on the contract package is administratively simpler but is hampered by the inability to handle outliers and complicated cases within the prices specified. However, such cases are expected to average out, given the volumes. AB-NHPM plans to move on to more sophisticated provider payment mechanisms, including variants of diagnosis-related group (DRG) models, which can assuage such concerns.

It seeks to provide quality health services to all beneficiaries and, therefore, would urge all quality hospitals to participate in the process. They should carefully consider the following issues.

One, the hospitals should understand that the nationally prescribed rates are not intended to cover the cost of capital and infrastructure in the short run but the marginal cost. They seek to ensure that excess capacities are utilized, leading to greater efficiency in service utilization of hospitals. This efficiency is not just in terms of empty beds but also more efficient hospital administration, optimum utilization of professionals and easier process flows for the patients with quicker turnaround times.

Two, hospitals, especially the big ones, have a responsibility as well. They should not expect to strengthen their balance-sheets based on services to the bottom 40% people of the country. Universal health coverage is based on a social contract, where the rich need to pay for the poor, the healthy for the sick and the young for the elderly. Large and expensive hospitals need to do their bit as well.

Three, AB-NHPM wants a partnership with all quality hospitals so that the evolution of the scheme benefits from diverse inputs. This partnership will be a win-win situation. The mission will benefit from the private sector capacity to provide services to large numbers. At the same time, this provides the private sector an opportunity for shaping the most ambitious healthcare scheme in the world.

AB-NHPM is not about business as usual—it aims to disrupt the current system. We intend that within the next decade, the unacceptably high levels of out-of-pocket expenditures that poor households across the country currently incur in seeking healthcare—especially secondary- and tertiary-level care—will become a thing of the past. It is often said that the foot soldiers in a revolution are unaware of their role in historic change. I cannot help but feel that we are foot soldiers in this historic paradigm shift. It would be a shame if, 10 years on, we were to regret having lost this chance of working together to tangibly transform the lives of 500 million compatriots.

Indu Bhushan is chief executive officer of the Ayushman Bharat- National Health Protection Mission.


2.2. PM Modi to launch India Post Payments Bank on Aug 21
PTI, Aug. 06, 2018

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 21 will launch long-awaited India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) that will have at least one branch in every district and focus on financial services in rural areas, a senior official said.

"The Prime Minister has given time on August 21 to launch IPPB. Two branches of the bank are already operational. Rest of the 648 branches will be launched across country in every district," a senior official of the communications ministry told PTI.

IPPB will leverage reach of 1.55 lakh post office branches to provide banking and financial service to people in rural area.

"Government is trying to link all the 1.55 lakh post office branches with IPPB services by the end of this year," the official said.

This will create the country's largest banking network with direct presence at village level.

Last week, IPPB CEO Suresh Sethi said that IPPB will go live with 650 branches in addition to 3,250 access points co-located at post offices and around 11,000 postmen both in rural and urban area will provide doorstep banking services.

IPPB has permission to link around 17 crore postal savings bank (PSB) account with its account. 

With IPPB in place, people in rural area will be able to avail digital banking and financial services, including money transfer, to any bank account either with help of mobile app or by visiting a post office. 

IPPB was the third entity to receive payments bank permit after Airtel and Paytm. Payments banks can accept deposits up to Rs 1 lakh per account from individuals and small businesses. 

The postal payment bank has permit to carry RTGS, NEFT, IMPS transaction that will enable IPPB customers to transfer and receive money from any bank account.

The payment bank will be used by government to distribute NREGA wages, subsidies, pension etc 

The IPPB app which is expected to be launched on same day will enable customers to pay for services of around 100 firms including phone recharges and bill, electricity bill, DTH service, college fees etc that are present on Bharat Bill payments system of National Payments Corporation of India.

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


3.1. Opinion | Atal Bihari Vajpayee: A titan of Indian politics
Livemint, 16 Aug, 2018

He moulded the modern Indian right and served as one of the country’s most consequential prime ministers

Politicians are thick upon the ground in India. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a rarer breed: a statesman. It was a stature he acquired despite himself at times. In a political life that spanned seven decades, he rose to become one of India’s most consequential prime ministers and a colossus of the Indian Right.

His political life had four distinct stages. In the 1930s, K. B. Hedgewar’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was still in many respects a fledgeling organization, digesting diverse influences—from Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the Hindu Mahasabha to, most importantly, V. D. Savarkar. Vajpayee joined the organization towards the end of the decade. Under Hedgewar’s successor, M. S. Gowalkar, the RSS made a tactical choice to stay aloof from the mass movement for independence. Vajpayee had other ideas. In 1942, he jumped into the Quit India movement and was briefly arrested for it. This ability to step over the line when it came to party orthodoxy would come to be one of his greatest political strengths.

When the Bharatiya Jana Sangh was formed in 1951, Vajpayee, along with Deendayal Upadhyaya and L. K. Advani, was sent by the RSS to build the party’s organizational strength. Over the next two decades, he would repeatedly display the other qualities that would elevate him: a canny political instinct and ruthless pragmatism. The former saw him progress from standing at power’s right hand—with both Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Upadhyaya—to the leadership of the Jana Sangh over two decades, picking up his first electoral victory in 1957 along the way. The latter was on display in his internecine struggle with Balraj Madhok for control of the party.

Vajpayee’s victory was a defining fork in the road for the Indian Right, just after the high noon of Nehruvianism. Madhok was steeped in ideological orthodoxy. Vajpayee, in this second stage of his political career, was far less doctrinaire while managing to retain RSS support. Would the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) exist as it does today if the Madhok faction had won? It is debatable. Vajpayee, on the other hand, was able to broaden the Jana Sangh’s appeal, in tandem with the change brought about in the RSS by Madhukar Dattatreya Deoras. Vajpayee was helped by Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, during which he did jail time, and the RSS successfully entered the political mainstream.

Vajpayee has been called the liberal mask over the hardline faction of the BJP. This is to give him too much and too little credit. His incendiary speech in Assam in 1983 during the state polls and his 1992 speech the day before the Babri Masjid’s demolition showed a politician willing to appeal to the public’s worst instincts. But equally, it is facile to call his retreat into the background during the 1980s and the early 1990s—the third stage of his career—while the BJP tacked hard to the right under Advani, or his public dismay after the demolition, a long con. Like much about him, these two aspects of his political personality present a complicated picture.

The fourth stage—three stints as prime minister, with the last, which ended in 2004, making him the first non-Congress prime minister to serve a full term—owed much to that reputation of ideological unorthodoxy, even leading to a spat with RSS chief K. Sudarshan. No other BJP leader at the time had the cross-party appeal to lead a ruling coalition as he did. Part of that appeal also came from his willingness to reach across party lines; he had been prominent among the opposition politicians who supported the P.V. Narasimha Rao government’s liberalization reforms behind the scenes, an act of great sagacity in the national interest.

He also had the knack of engineering situations, or stumbling into them, where the opposition was left with little choice but to back him to the hilt. The Pokhran nuclear tests were an instance of the former; it didn’t hurt that his administration’s diplomatic efforts in its wake were masterful. Kargil and the attack on Parliament were the latter; legitimate and important questions about intelligence and military shortcomings were left unasked because of the political optics of the situations.

When it came to economic policy, Vajpayee was a big picture man with the perspicacity to pick the right men to see to the details, and the wisdom to back them. He continued the economic reforms begun under Rao, pushing disinvestment, making the first moves towards the goods and services tax (GST), blessing the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, opening up the insurance sector and much more. And with his National Telecom Policy and focus on the country’s road and highway infrastructure, he laid the foundations for two critical elements of India’s growth since. Equally important was his administration’s success in building institutional strength; the rapport between the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India has rarely been stronger than it was during his time.

As prime minister, he stands with Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and now, Narendra Modi, in his ability to seize and shape the political discourse. In his ability to win allies and disarm rivals, he keeps company with just the first name on that list. No doubt about it: A giant has left the national stage.


3.2. Kerala has topped as the best-governed state and among smaller states Himachal Pradesh topped the list, followed by Goa
Public Affairs Centre, 22 Jul. 2018

Pinarayi Vijayan’s ruled Kerala stands as the best-governed state in the country followed by Tamil Nadu, according to the Public Affairs Index 2018 released by the think tank Public Affairs Centre (PAC). While Telangana, Karnataka and Gujarat are ranked third, fourth and fifth among the top five states delivering good governance, according to the report, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar ranked the lowest on the PAI, indicating higher social and economic inequalities in the states.

“Kerala has topped the Public Affairs Index (PAI) for 2018 as the best-governed state for the third consecutive year since 2016 among large states,” said Bengaluru-based PAC at an event in the city on Saturday evening to release its third annual PAI.

Released annually since 2016, the index examines governance performance in the states through a data-based framework, ranking them on social and economic development they are able to provide. Founded in 1994 by renowned Indian economist and scholar late Samuel Paul, the think tank works to mobilise a demand for better governance in the country.

Among smaller states (with population less than two crore), Himachal Pradesh topped the list, followed by Goa, Mizoram, Sikkim and Tripura which figured among the top five states with good governance. Nagaland, Manipur and Meghalaya were ranked at the bottom of the index among small states.

A total of 30 focus subjects and 100 indicators were measured to derive the PAI, relying solely upon government data. The PAC said it was not keen to access private data sources that may be interpreted as “biased”. This year’s PAI also included a separate index on the children of India, giving a measure of how child-friendly each of the states are.

Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and Mizoram topped the index on being the states to provide better living conditions for all children. The former chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Shantha Sinha, who was present on the occasion, delivered the Samuel Paul Memorial Lecture, drawing attention to children’s rights in the country.

“Children growing up in poverty cannot be blamed for their situation and it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that they are provided with opportunities for a better living,” Sinha said.


4.1. RBI industrial outlook survey no good news for manufacturing
Livemint, 6 Aug. 2018

RBI’s industrial outlook survey for the manufacturing sector indicates that business expectations have been falling for the past two quarters

Business Expectations Index for the quarter ahead fell from 115.8 for the March 2018 quarter to 114.1 for the June 2018 quarter. Graphic: Mint

The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) industrial outlook survey for the manufacturing sector indicates that business expectations have been falling for the past two quarters.

The chart shows that the Business Expectations Index, or BEI, for the quarter ahead fell from 115.8 for the March 2018 quarter to 114.1 for the June 2018 quarter.

The Business Expectations Index is a composite indicator calculated as a weighted (share of gross value added, or GVA, of different industry groups) net response of nine business indicators: (1) overall business situation; (2) production; (3) order books; (4) inventory of raw material; (5) inventory of finished goods; (6) profit margins; (7) employment; (8) exports, and (9) capacity utilization.

It gives a snapshot of the business outlook in every quarter. A reading above 100 indicates expansion while one below 100 signals contraction.

While survey respondents expected an improvement in production, capacity utilization and employment, they believed the cost of finance and raw materials would go up and they wouldn’t be able to raise selling prices.


4.2. Road construction firms to see 20% growth through 2020: Crisil
PTI, Jul. 24, 2018

New Delhi: Highways construction companies are set to clock a 20 per cent compound annual growth rate in revenue till 2020, rating agency Crisil said today.

The findings are based on the study of 66 companies, it said.

"These companies account for more than 80 per cent of the debt in over 300 companies that Crisil rates in this sector. The buoyancy in growth will be driven by the government focus and spending on road construction," the statement said.

Fiscal 2018 was particularly frenetic, with 17,000 km road projects, the highest ever in a year, being awarded by both the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and NHAI, it said.

Pace of construction, at 27 km per day, was twice that of fiscal 2014, it said, adding that over 90 per cent of these contracts were based on hybrid annuity (HAM) and EPC models.

Construction is expected to accelerate to 32 km per day by 2020 given NHAI's sharp focus on award of projects under the Bharatmala programme, it said, added that more than half of these are expected to be under HAM.

"We expect topline growth for these companies to sustain at 20 per cent in this fiscal and the next two, backed by strong order-books.

"Together, these companies are estimated to have an order book of Rs 1.3 lakh crore last fiscal, which, at over 3 times the revenues of these companies in fiscal 2018, provides high revenue visibility," Crisil Ratings Senior Director Sachin Gupta said.

Crisil's analysis shows HAM projects being awarded over the next two years will need about Rs 70,000 crore of funding through an optimal mix of debt and equity.

For this, players will have to raise an additional Rs 12,000 to 15,000 crore of equity to invest in new HAM projects, given the limited playing field and fast pace of project awards anticipated, the rating agency said.

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


5.1. Isro ropes in pvt firms, inks pact with a consortium to assemble satellites
Business Standard, Jul. 19, 2018

Chennai: The Indian Space Research Organisation's (Isro's) satellite centre, the Isro Satellite Centre (ISAC), has signed an agreement with a consortium led by Alpha Design Technologies Pvt Ltd, Bharat Electronics Limited and the Tatas to assemble satellites.

This will be the first set of agreements signed by Isro, which is trying to rope in private partners to overcome its own constraints. The space agency is encouraging private players to form a small consortium to undertake satellite and rocket manufacturing work so that it can remain focused on research and development.

After signing the agreement, Alpha Design Technologies chairman and managing director H S Shankar said that his company is the only organisation that has, under guidance from Isro, already assembled, integrated and tested the high-end 1.65 tonne IRNSS-1i successfully. The satellite was launched on April 12, 2018, and is functioning excellently in outer space.

The Alpha Design-led consortium consists of six small and medium-sized enterprises, including Newtech, Aidin, Aniera, DCX, Vinyas, and Exseed Speed.

Sources in the Isro said that the Alpha-led consortium, Tata, and BEL will work independently.

They are expected to build at least 7-9 satellites -- divided equally between Alpha, BEL and Tata -- per year. The agreement is for three years and is extendable for 2 more years.

The value of the satellites to be built was not shared by Isro or its new partners.

The satellites that are going to be built are between 1.5-3 tonnes and are meant for imaging, communication, and weather forecasting.

Sources said that all these satellites will be assembled at ISITE facilities -- separate enclosures for all the companies under ISAC/ISRO.

Earlier, Alpha Design had said that it had plans to build its own facilities in the next 3-5 years. It is also scouting for investors and planning for an initial public offering to mobilise funds to back the plan.

Industry representatives have said that for medium and big satellites, the present requirements projected by Isro are that 7-9 per year might be sufficient for the next 3 years.

However, this requirement is expected to increase to 12 per year. To address this, each of these organisations would require around 500 engineers/diploma holders/skilled technicians during the 3 years.

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


5.2. New airport projects may be awarded on a revenue sharing basis
Livemint, 14 Ago. 2018, Gireesh Chandra Prasad

As per the proposal, airport developers will compete to win contracts based on revenue per passenger to be shared with the authority that gives the contract

Profit sharing contracts are prone to disputes over costs and are no longer favoured in India. Photo: Mint.

New Delhi: The civil aviation ministry on Tuesday proposed a revenue-sharing model for awarding greenfield airport projects to developers that is considered simpler and less prone to disputes about gold-plating of expenses.

According to the proposed model concession agreement, which will be fine-tuned after feedback from industry, airport developers will compete to win contracts based on the amount of revenue per passenger to be shared with the authority that gives the contract, instead of the current norm of developers sharing a part of the profit from the venture.

Profit-sharing contracts are prone to disputes over costs and are no longer favoured in India. Already, the government has moved to auctions involving revenue sharing in sectors such as oil and gas, to replace profit-sharing contracts.

The ministry said in a statement that a reduction in controversies and litigations is likely to attract more investors and lenders to proposed greenfield airport projects such as those in Jewar (near Noida), Bhogapuram (near Visakhapatnam) and Pune. The exact number of greenfield airport projects that are envisaged is not available immediately, but civil aviation minister Suresh Prabhu, who briefed reporters on the new model concession agreement, said it would be announced soon.

“A perspective plan about how many greenfield airports India will need to be built will soon be brought out,” said Prabhu.

Minister of state for civil aviation Jayant Sinha described the new revenue model as revolutionary as it would facilitate the goal of stepping up building airport infrastructure to meet the goal of making air travel more accessible and affordable to people. India wants to achieve the target of one billion passengers a year in 15-20 years, nearly four times the 265 million recorded in 2016-17.

According to the new plan, the maximum charges that airports can levy from airlines—ultimately paid by the consumer—is capped at ₹400 and is partially linked to inflation. Airlines, of course, have the liberty to develop real estate and generate other revenue streams from the project to add to their profitability.

Civil aviation secretary R.N. Choubey said the new model discourages padding up of costs, as the idea is not to develop swanky airports but efficient, functional ones that will help meet the policy objective of one billion passengers a year.

“In this approach, there is no incentive for over-building, the cost for which is borne by the ultimate consumer. It is a big thing,” said Choubey.

He said the contracts would also have provisions to “enable developers to handle (business) shocks”.

Experts welcomed the move, but expressed caution saying implementation is the key. “The intent behind the new model concession agreement is definitely positive. There has to be safeguards built into it to ensure that investors who aggressively bid do not leave the project halfway through when economic headwinds change,” said Jagannarayan Padmanabhan, director at Crisil Infrastructure Advisory.



- AGRICULTURE, FISHING & RURAL DEVELOPMENT 


6.1. Flipkart Supermart to take on Amazon, BigBasket in grocery space
Livemint, 9 Aug. 2018, Anirban Sen

Flipkart has launched Flipkart Supermart in Bengaluru and plans to enter 5-6 other major cities by 2018 end, in its endeavour to rapidly expand the online grocery business

Bengaluru: India’s largest online retailer Flipkart Pvt. Ltd plans to rapidly expand its recently launched grocery business, throwing down the gauntlet to entities such as online grocery market leader BigBasket and arch-rival Amazon India Pvt. Ltd, as large online retailers look to bet big on a sector that is expected to rake in hundreds of crores of business in next few years.

To start with, Flipkart has launched its grocery offering called Flipkart Supermart in Bengaluru and plans to expand it to five to six other major cities by the end of the year. The company’s foray into the grocery business comes a little over two years after the e-commerce giant shut down its grocery app Nearby, which failed to take off.

“Grocery is the largest retail category but it’s not a solved problem from an e-commerce perspective,” Flipkart grocery head Manish Kumar said. “We have done three main things to solve this. First, grocery is a high-repeat category so we will offer everyday discounts. Second, we have a strong proposition of delivering quality. We will display expiry dates on each product and guarantee fresh products to customers. Third, through preferred delivery slots for customers, we have tried to solve for convenience from a customer experience point of view,” he said.

As part of its re-entry into the online grocery business, Flipkart will also sell staples and consumables under its own label, Flipkart Supermart Select. Flipkart is not launching a separate app for its grocery play, unlike arch-rival Amazon which sells consumer products through its Prime Now app.

Mint first reported in February 2017 that Flipkart chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy was betting big on groceries, hoping that sales of everyday household items would keep shoppers coming back to the company’s platform.

To lead the grocery initiative, Krishnamurthy had in December 2016 hired two old Flipkart hands, Kumar and Nitin Rajput, who had left the company in 2015 to launch their own startup. The online retailer has also built out a separate and extensive supply chain for the grocery business.

“Grocery is a category where you need a dedicated supply chain with separate fulfilment centres and a last-mile logistics network. Grocery requires dedicated handling of products and multiple product checks. Our offering is differentiated because we’ve built a different shopping experience on the same platform. The Supermart store is very similar to how customers shop in actual aisles. We also have a dedicated supply chain that other horizontal players may not have,” Kumar said.

So far, online grocery sales have taken off slowly. Market research firm RedSeer Consulting Pvt. Ltd estimated it to be barely $1 billion in 2017. Online retail grew 23% to $18 billion last year, up from $14.5 billion in gross merchandise value in 2016. Online grocery sales is seen by e-commerce firms as the next big battleground.


6.2. Amazon invests another Rs 2,700 crore ($400 million) in India business
Livemint, 13 Aug. 2018, Anirban Sen

This brings its total investment in India to $4 billion in its five years of its operation, even as it continues to battle against Flipkart

Bengaluru: Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has invested an additional ₹2,700 crore ($386 million) in its Indian unit, bringing its total investment in India to roughly $4 billion in the five years that it has operated in the country, even as it continues to battle local rival and market leader Flipkart.

Amazon, which has committed to invest at least $5 billion in India and also separately allocated an additional $500 million to build out its food retail business in India, simultaneously pumped in about ₹100 crore ($14 million) into the business (Amazon Retail India Pvt. Ltd).

Amazon Seller Services, the marketplace arm of Amazon India, received the funds earlier this month, according to regulatory documents filed with the Registrar of Companies that were sourced from Paper.VC. So far, Amazon has been spending all its cash on building massive warehouses, a large logistics unit, marketing, discounts and increasing product assortment.

In June 2016, Amazon had said it would invest an additional $3 billion in India after the company exhausted its earlier investment pledge of $2 billion made in 2014. Amazon is currently the No. 2 player in India’s online retail market.

The latest investment from Amazon does not come as a surprise, given that the online retailer is going all-out in its attempts to overtake Flipkart, which has stubbornly held on to its lead under chief executive officer Kalyan Krishnamurthy.

Both Amazon and Flipkart are expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars towards expansion over the next few years. For both companies, sales growth is a much bigger priority than cutting losses and analysts say that they are nowhere near profitability.

On 22 May, Mint reported that Flipkart is likely to burn through as much as $2 billion in cash over the next 18 months, with growth being a clear priority for India’s largest online retailer after its $16-billion takeover by Walmart in May. Flipkart, which owns fashion retailers Myntra and Jabong and the mobile payment app PhonePe, currently has a burn rate of $70-80 million per month. Since it started out in 2007, and prior to its takeover by Walmart, Flipkart has raised over $6 billion in funds from a wide range of the world’s biggest investors such as Tiger Global Management and Japan’s SoftBank.

In recent interviews with Mint, Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal has repeatedly indicated that the online retailer will spare no expense and invest as much as necessary to conquer India. For Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, India is the company’s most important international market and winning the market share battle in India is its topmost priority, after Amazon lost out to Alibaba in China.

That commitment towards investing in India clearly shows in its regulatory filings over the past few years.

Amazon’s authorized capital was just ₹1,500 crore in July 2014, when Bezos made the $2-billion commitment. Amazon’s authorized capital currently is well over 10 times that amount.

For Amazon, it will have to keep up its aggressive pace of investments in India in the near term, given that it is now up against Walmart, which boasts of equally deep pockets and views Flipkart as a long-term investment.


7.1. India earns Rs 18,000 cr ($2,7 bn) per year from export of basmati rice
PTI, Jul. 17, 2018

New Delhi: India has earned more than Rs 18,000 crore foreign exchange per year from export of basmati rice, especially from the variety 1121 developed by the country's top agri-institute ICAR, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said today.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has developed many new varieties and technologies which have helped transform the food importing nation to a food exporting country, he said.

The institute is playing an important role in fulfilling the government's vision of doubling farmers' income by 2022, he added.

"Instead of boasting about the past achievements, the ICAR should focus on addressing the present and future challenges," the minister said while addressing the 90th foundation day ceremony of the ICAR.

Much of the ICAR research so far was on raising farm output to reduce the country's dependence on imports but going forward the institute should concentrate on raising crop yields, increasing nutrition level, developing climate resilient crop varieties besides attracting youth in farm sector, he said.

The efforts should be towards improving the farming and farmers' income, he said.

Highlighting measures taken to boost farmers' income, the minister said the government had recently raised MSP of kharif crops that is 50 per cent higher than the cost of production.

Echoing the views, Minister of State for Agriculture Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, "We have become self-sufficient in most crops except one oilseeds/edibles oils. One big challenge before us is reducing import of edible oils." 

Over Rs 70,000 crore worth of edible oil is imported every year. "It is not the time to sit quiet. We need to move ahead and address this challenge," he said.

ICAR Director General Trilochan Mohapatra said the institute has released 189 varieties in last six month. Processable varieties in tomato (H391) and onion (HR6) have been released, which will help boost farmers income.

He said that innovation and support of agri-scientists are required for achieving the government's vision of doubling farmers' income.

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


7.2. China clears 14 Indian rice companies for export amid trade war with US
Business Standard, Jul. 25, 2018

New Delhi: China has agreed to import rice from 14 of the 19 registered rice exporters from India, while the remaining five— mostly of basmati rice sellers — have been asked to improve storage and isolation facilities before applying afresh.

China allows import of only basmati rice from India, but with this clearance, even non-basmati rice can be exported. The clearance comes amid rising tension between the United States and China over trade tariff. China is looking for newer markets to boost its inventories. Export from India has been caught under wraps since it failed to clear Chinese food safety and quality norms.

China alleged India’s rice consignments contained ‘khapra’ (cabinet) beetle and were unfit for consumption, which Indian authorities and traders denied.

In an agreement signed on June 9, China agreed to import from India non-basmati rice as well. The shipments had to comply with the Chinese plant quarantine laws and regulations. India has to ensure that processing and storage houses of the rice to be exported to China is free from pests — Trogoderma granarium and Prostephanus truncatus — and live insects. The exported rice will have to be free of soil, seeds of weeds, paddy hull, loose bran and any of plant debris of rice.

Non-basmati rice exports from the country during April-February 2018 stood at $3.26 billion as against $2.53 billion in 2016-17. India wants to increase exports to China with a view to bridging the ballooning trade deficit, which has increased to $63.12 billion in 2017-18 from $51.08 billion in the previous fiscal.

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


8.1. Walmart looks to double wholesale presence in India, open 20 stores next three years
Livemint, Jul. 24, 2018

Lucknow: Walmart India plans to double its wholesale store presence in the next three years with 20 new stores in the country, said a senior company executive.

Walmart India, the wholly owned subsidiary of US-based retail giant Walmart Inc., had to go slow on its expansion plans for a year, primarily because of compliance and approval issues.

Walmart India currently operates 21 cash and carry stores across 19 cities.

It is expected to add two ‘best price cash and carry’ stores this year, eight in 2019 and 10 stores in 2020 across smaller towns such as Ghaziabad, Muradabad, Kanpur, Varanasi, Saharanpur, Aligarh and Gorakhpur. “In the run-up to 50 stores, we will be nearly doubling our offline presence. And as we accelerate, we will look to integrate more farmers and kirana stores,” said Krish Iyer, president and chief executive officer, Walmart India, on the sidelines of opening the company’s second fulfilment centre in Lucknow.

According to Iyer, Walmart India has already signed six memoranda of understanding, while three more are in the pipeline.

While its ‘best price cash and carry’ stores cater to consumer needs, the fulfilment centres act as warehouses for small and medium enterprises, kiranas and farmers.

It is also set to open a fulfilment centre, which is part of a pilot run, in Hyderabad.

“It is important to focus on a customer-centric approach while working on a new concept,” Iyer added.

In May, Walmart agreed to buy 77% in online retailer Flipkart for $16 billion.

The reporter was in Lucknow at the invitation of Walmart.

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


8.2. The handmade’s tale: Etsy comes to India
Livemint, 3 Aug. 2018, Sohini Dey

As the online marketplace for crafts and creative goods launches in India, managing director Himanshu Wardhan tells Lounge what sets Etsy apart

In 2005, an American company named iospace founded an e-commerce platform called Etsy in Brooklyn, New York. In a little over a decade, this marketplace for handcrafted goods by artists and creative entrepreneurs has transformed into a global force. With two million sellers and 34.7 million buyers across the world, Etsy generated $3.25 billion (around ₹ 22,300 crore) in 2017. This year, the platform has launched its operations in India to tap into the country’s vast potential for creative entrepreneurs and sellers. Himanshu Wardhan, managing director for Etsy India, spoke to Lounge on the brand’s plans for the country and what sets the Indian operations apart. 

Edited excerpts:

What makes this a good time for Etsy to launch operations in India?
We have always had a large number of sellers and buyers from India. Many sellers from here have been pretty active recently, which came to the global team’s notice. The e-commerce market in India is also pretty strong and we decided to set up a small team in the country and start focusing on building and mobilizing local creative communities. Most of it is based in Delhi, and a lot of team members operating in different parts of India.

India has a diverse community of creative entrepreneurs and artisans. How are you reaching these groups?
We are focusing on three categories of sellers. The first group is made up of creative professionals, boutique owners and small entrepreneurs, who are active and selling on social media and digital platforms. The second category comprises people who are passionate about their craft and want to supplement their income, like homemakers and art students. Indian craftspersons comprise the third category. Some of them are digitally enabled—the newer generation, for instance—but some are not.

How do you assist craftspersons who aren’t digitally enabled?
India is the only market where we engage in offline acquisitions and seller enablement. When we reach out to sellers, a lot of them don’t know about the platform. So we help them come on board and optimize their e-shop with quality listings. Our content specialists help them put together great stories for their profiles and products. We have also been receiving a lot of queries on sellers on these issues, and we offer it at no cost to them.
Since we have not done this anywhere else, the global team is also watching these operations. What we do here can potentially be applicable to other markets.

Do you also have any plans to support the existing sellers from India?
The goal is not just to get a large number of sellers or build up a certain number of listings, but it’s also about how we get high quality and diversified products, how we expose the sellers and what is the platform that we give them. In May, we exhibited a few Indian sellers in New York during an international seller showcase. There are a lot of such opportunities we would create for Indian sellers now that we are here.

What are some of the categories in which Indian sellers perform well?
The beauty of the platform is that there’s no one product that can represent it. While there are sellers making customized beer glasses, and tablets that connect to typewriters in the US, there are also sellers like Vijay Joshi, a Phad painter from the Bhilwara district of Rajasthan, and Comfymommy, a maternity wear brand from Lucknow. It’s difficult to make comparisons, but one category that could be important for India is craft supplies. A lot of our sellers and buyers from across the world are looking for raw material for their craft. And Indian sellers have a lot of fabrics, gems and jewellery to offer, which can have a significant influence on different buyer segments.

Are there any areas that require more awareness creation in India?
The e-commerce segment in India is about mass merchandise, discounts and a few resellers selling a large number of products. We have a strict handmade policy, that is one has to either make the products with their own hands or tools, or you have designed it and are involved in the conceptual process. One of the biggest awareness that we are engaged in is differentiating Etsy and telling resellers that this may not be the right space for them. This is a platform for creative individuals who are passionate about something and looking for a platform to sell or display their work.

Will customers in India also benefit from this launch?
Right now, our focus is on sellers. But the opportunity here is impossible to ignore. People are getting online and the online market is building up. As we go build our sellers base from India, we would be looking at various ways in which we can also have localization cues for Indian buyers. But we will do that over a period of time, as we start to see a certain scale building from here.

What are your goals and vision for the Indian market?
For us, one of the important things is to make sure that we maintain the quality of sellers and listings. We are striving to reach out to every potential seller in India. My vision is that if my mom knits sweaters at home, she should be able to sell it on Etsy. There are so many people making things, over years and generations, who don’t know there’s a platform to sell what they make. It’s not just about money, it’s about engaging with your product, and having the pleasure of somebody else using and appreciating it. We have about 650,000 listings from India and the number is growing.

And what do you like shopping for from Etsy?
My searches are often about home decor. I wanted a yellow typewriter, and found one from an Italian seller. I bought something from a seller named Beast Craft recently, and then discovered it was a brand from Hauz Khas, Delhi. One of my favourite things though is an item I didn’t buy. When my daughter was born in 2017, someone gifted her a toy from a seller in France with her name stitched on to it. It came in a crumbled paper package with a French stamp on it. There was a card with a personalized note from the seller. It wasn’t just about the toy but the entire experience of receiving and unwrapping the product.



9.1. Tata Trusts plans to support 1,000 innovations in tech sector
PTI, Aug. 03, 2018

New Delhi: Tata Trusts, through its Foundation for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (FISE), plans to support around 1,000 innovations in the tech sector which can solve social problems, a company official said.

Tata Trusts is working with some leading organisations to find and build a pipeline of such projects which need incubation support. 

"Our plan is to support 1,000 innovations. Currently, we already have 30-odd innovations incubated and our plan is to increase the number 8 to 10 fold by 2020," Ganesh Neelam, Associate Director, Tata Trusts, told PTI.

Tata Trusts is trying to create an ecosystem for such projects. 

It provides the support they need, which includes risk coverage by the startups, he added.

"The numbers which we are planning are fairly huge because we want to build an overall ecosystem for innovators to actually come and then work on technology which are really capable of solving social problems," he added.

"We are going ahead and talking with lots of partners and trying to see as how we can build all that pipeline," Neelam said.

The Department of Science and Technology, Lockheed Martin and Tata Trusts today announced the winners of India Innovation Growth Programme 2018.

The winners were chosen from among 3,000 applicants who proposed innovations to create large scale social impact and bring industrial transformation in India.

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


9.2. IndianOil to invest over ₹20,000 cr in city gas biz
BusinessLine, 13 Aug, 2018

Indian Oil Corporation Ltd is going to invest over ₹20,000 crore in the city gas distribution business over the coming five-eight years.

Addressing a press conference after the company’s first-quarter results, IndianOil Chairman Sanjiv Singh said, “We are going to invest at least ₹20,000 crore for the city gas distribution business in the projects we have won during the ninth round of bids.”

The Petroleum & Natural Gas Regulatory Board had called for bids to develop city gas distribution infrastructure in 86 geographical areas. IndianOil has bagged rights to develop seven areas on its own and nine in joint venture with Adani Gas.

Singh said that natural gas is the cooking fuel of the future and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) or cooking gas can be used as a feedstock for refineries when its demand tapers.

Iran sanctions

Commenting on the government’s stand crude imports from Iran following the US sanctions on Islamic nation, Singh said, “There are no updates that I can share with you. The window is still open till November 4. Now, we are moving towards a time that if we are not allowed to pay beyond that then probably we are reducing our credit period, whatever we can beyond 60 days. Let’s see. Today we are fine with that.”

Crude oil importers and refiners such as IndianOil are affected by the US sanctions levied on Iran. “If I am foregoing my 60 days credit benefit, it comes at a cost. It affects our profitability,” he added.


10.1. Nestle India market cap crosses Rs 1 trillion; stock rises 50% from Feb low
Business Standard, Jul. 18, 2018

Mumbai: Nestle India on Tuesday became the third listed fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) company to join the elite club of firms that have seen their market capitalisation (market cap) soar past the Rs 1 trillion mark.
With Rs 1.01 trillion market cap, Nestle India stands at 28th position in overall market-cap ranking at 11:23 am; the BSE data shows. The stock is trading at its all-time high level of Rs 10,450, up 2.4% in otherwise subdued market. The S&P BSE Sensex was trading 0.12% or 45 points higher at 36,369 levels.

Hindustan Unilever (HUL) is the country’s most valued FMCG Company with a market cap of Rs 3.67 trillion, while ITC have market cap of Rs 3.32 trillion, data shows.

Thus far in the calendar year 2018, Nestle India has outperformed the market by surging 33%, as compared to 7% rise in the Sensex. The stock rallied 50% from its February 9, 2018 low of Rs 6,959 against 7% rise in the benchmark index.

Nestle India had reported a better than expected 38% year on year (YoY) growth in net profit at Rs 4.24 billion in March 2018 quarter (Q1CY18). The company expects timely monsoon will bring demand stability and spur growth this year, while the fast-growing e-commerce channel will provide good opportunities in the future.

Nestlé India is a market leader in instant noodles and baby food products and No.2 player in the instant coffee and chocolates segment.

Analyst at JP Morgan remain optimistic about Nestlé’s long-term growth potential, given low penetration levels and the dominance of unorganized players in the Indian processed foods industry, and welcome management’s renewed focus on volume/innovation.

“We expect the revenue/earnings growth trajectory to improve over CY18, supported by healthy volume growth and margin expansion,” the brokerage firm said in result update with ‘Overweight’ rating on the stock with target price of Rs 10,500.

ICICI Securities also remains positive on the company’s future prospects given its thrust on creating a balanced portfolio through new launches and planned entry in new categories, aggressive communication strategies, expanding the reach and lower indirect taxes for many items under GST regime. Rapid urbanization and increasing participation of women in decision making is a huge opportunity for the company given the nature of its product portfolio.

“We remain positive on growth prospects as the company is aggressively launching new products and variants in the existing brands which would perk up the growth, going forward. We expect earnings growth at a CAGR of 25% in CY17-19E led by strong sales growth,” the brokerage firm said in recent note with target price of Rs 11,450.

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


10.2. We will make chocolates using Italian tech: Hatsun’s Chandramogan
BusinessLine, 20 Jul. 2018, R. Balajit

With a milk processing capacity of about 45 lakh litres a day and with plans to further expand the capacities to strengthen its markets, Hatsun Agro Product is looking at the next phase of growth. The ₹4,300-crore company, with liquid milk brand Arokya, a wide range of dairy products under Hatsun brand, and Arun and Ibaco ice-creams, tided over 2017-18 though the overall market conditions had turned tough for the dairy sector. RG Chandramogan, Chairman and Managing Director, shares with BusinessLine some insights on the developments. Excerpts:

It has been a tough year for the dairy sector overall, how has it been for Hatsun Agro?
In 2017-18, we invested heavily in projects, and piled up debt of over ₹1,200 crore as of March-end. But the recent rights issue, which was oversubscribed, strengthened our balance-sheet and reduced debt. Our debt equity is close to 1:1.

We have invested in wind mills and in a packaging film unit which have started giving results. There are some more projects in the pipeline which will start delivering results in four-five months. For instance, there is a 2-MW solar power project and a new dairy unit coming up at Dharapuram, near Palani, in southern Tamil Nadu.

Where does that put Hatsun Agro in the overall scenario?
As of now, we have a milk handling capacity of about 45 lakh litres per day, most of our capex in the South is done, at least for the next 18 months, except for some balancing equipment. But beyond that, in ice-cream, curd and milk we have adequate capacities, including the unit coming up at Dharapuram.

On the expansion planned in Maharashtra…
We have decided to set up a ₹100-crore, greenfield dairy unit in Solapur. Land acquisition will be finalised in less than a month. It will have a daily production capacity of about 2 lakh litres of milk and 1 lakh litres of curd. This will enable us to fully cater to the demand which we are now meeting from our units in north Karnataka and Telangana.

Are there any product diversifications and new lines that you are looking at?
Linked to our ice-creams business, we have decided to enter the premium brands of chocolates using our exclusive chain of Ibaco ice-cream outlets. We have invested about ₹18 crore in a chocolate-making unit using Italian technology. Production can go up to 125,000 pieces a day. Display and chilling equipment are being set up in 145 Ibaco outlets and the product will be placed fully by mid-August. This is a new category of premium chocolates targeting the gifting segment.
This complements our ice-cream cake range, which accounts for about 25 per cent, or about ₹25 crore, of business in this segment.

What has been the overall impact of the milk glut?
It is due to the oversupply situation that we were hesitant to chase new geographies last year for milk. This would have been a loss-making proposition, and, as mentioned, we ourselves were loaded with debt and heavy interest. Hatsun Agro focussed on branded products where we have better control on costs. In commodities, margins are not in our control. But there has to be an element of commodity business and that will range from 3 per cent to 8 per cent.

Farmers’ income cannot be increased by simply increasing output. We have to ensure their operations are efficient, cost-effective and products are globally competitive. Hatsun Agro works with Tamil Nadu Agriculture University where it has established a chair for solutions in dairy farming.

A glut when not managed properly will be followed by shortage as dairy farmers who have suffered will cut back. The next three-four months will be crucial for the sector as the government has lately stepped in to support co-operatives.



- INDUSTRY, MANUFACTURE 


11.1. RIL net inches closer to ₹10,000-cr mark
BusinessLine, 27 Jul. 2018.

Inching towards the ₹10,000-crore mark, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) posted a consolidated net profit of ₹9,459 crore for the first quarter ended June 30, boosted by higher realisations from the refining and petrochemical businesses. The conglomerate, controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, had recorded a net profit of ₹8,021 crore, excluding exceptional items, in the comparable year-ago quarter.

For the April-June quarter of FY18, the oil-to-telecom company’s net profit stood at ₹9,108 crore, including a ₹1,087-crore profit from a stake divestment in Gulf Africa Petroleum Corp. While net profit rose 17.9 per cent, excluding exceptional items, it posted a meagre 3.85 per cent rise including the exceptional item.

“Our petrochemicals business generated record EBITDA with strong volumes and an upswing in polyester chain margins. Refining business performance remained steady despite the seasonal weakness in cracks. Continuing strength in the global demand for oil products and the implementation of more stringent environmental norms for marine fuels augur well for our refining business,” said Ambani, RIL’s CMD.

In the quarter under review, RIL’s consolidated revenue rose 56.5 per cent to ₹1.42 lakh crore from the ₹90,537 crore posted in the year-ago period, as revenue from operations jumped 46.98 per cent to ₹1.33 lakh crore.

“RIL’s consumer businesses — RJio and Reliance Retail — now contribute about 21 per cent of the company’s total revenue. RJio now has about 250 million users, while retail expanded to about 800 stores in this quarter itself,” said RIL’s Joint CFO V Srikanth.

On a standalone basis, net profit rose 7.6 per cent to ₹8,820 crore (from ₹8,196 crore) on operational revenue of ₹95,472 crore (₹70,434 crore). The company's revenue from the refining and marketing business during the first quarter rose 42.9 per cent to ₹95,646 crore (₹66,945 crore). The gross refining margins — earnings from turning a barrel of crude oil into refined products — fell to $10.5 per barrel from $11.9 a year ago, impacted by higher crude prices.

RJio net rises 20%
RJio, the company’s wholly-owned wireless subsidiary, posted a 19.9 per cent rise in net profit at ₹612 crore for the June quarter, compared with ₹510 crore recorded during the sequential quarter ended March. The earnings rose on a growth in subscriber additions and higher data usage.

The comparable figures were not available as the telecom operator had started commercial operations in June last year.

“We doubled our customer base and most user metrics in the last 12 months; 215 million customers within 22 months of start is a record that no technology company has been able to achieve anywhere in the world,” Ambani said.

During the quarter, RJio’s average revenue per user stood at ₹134.5 per month, while its subscriber net addition stood at 28.7 million.


11.2. Benelli to set up assembly unit near Hyderabad; will make it a hub in phases
BusinessLine, 6 Aug. 2018, V. Rishi Kumar

Benelli’s new facility will assemble 10,000 units per annum initially. As the volumes grow, the company will set up a full-fledged manufacturing unit near Hyderabad

Benelli, the Italian global brand in super bikes, has signed up with the Hyderabad-based Mahavir Group to set up an assembly unit near Hyderabad.

It plans to roll out the first set of motorcycles from the new plant in October, and more models in 2019.

The company, which was founded in 1911 in Italy, and a part of the QJ Group of China since 2005, has identified India as a strategic market with a production line based on CKD units, and plans to gradually step it up as a manufacturing base.

Benelli and Adishwar Auto Ride India-Mahavir Group, entered into a strategic partnership to assemble and market Benelli range of motorcycles.

George Wang, Director, Benelli, said: “Our partnership with the Telangana government and Adishwar Auto reassures all of our long-term goal and manufacturing of ‘Make in India’ super bikes. India has been the largest producer of two-wheelers in the world and we have witnessed a growing demand for Benelli bikes across various categories. Currently, we have a 21 per cent market share in the super bike segment in India and our aim is to surpass it to over 30 per cent by 2021.”

As one of the oldest motorcycle manufacturing company, Benelli plans to consolidate its Indian presence with the launch of new models starting with two models this year and follow this up with more across different segments.

Assuring the Benelli management of all necessary help to set up their facility in the State, KT Rama Rao, Telangana’s IT and Industries Minister, said: “Our vision of making Telangana a hub for manufacturing is coming true with companies like Benelli entering into partnership with us and giving us commitment on employment generation and setting up a world class facility in the years to come.”

Vikas Jhabak, Managing Director of Mahavir, said: “The facility would be developed to assemble 10,000 units per annum initially. As the volumes grow, we will set up a full-fledged manufacturing unit near Hyderabad.”


12.1. Automobile industry planning ₹ 58,000 crore capex in 2 years
Livemint, 6 Aug. 2018, Arushi Kotecha

The ₹ 58,000 crore capex plan of India’s automobile industry is a 30% jump from the previous two comparative fiscal years, says Crisil

Mumbai: Auto makers in India are set to spend up to ₹58,000 crore in capital expenditure (capex) over the next two years—the highest in a decade—underscoring healthy demand prospects in the local market and impending safety and emission norms.

The figure will mark a 30% jump from the previous two comparative fiscal years, ratings agency Crisil said in a June report. The ratings agency studied investment plans at 18 auto makers, who comprise about 90% of total industry volume. The auto makers are ramping up investments on new products and capacity to tap growing demand. They also need to make their vehicles compliant with new safety and emission norms which will come into force over the next two to three years.

India’s automobile industry is one of the most capital-intensive sectors with a big appetite for re-investment in capex and research and development at regular intervals, according to a January report by BNP Paribas India. While other industries such as retail, and oil and gas have an average investment cycle of about two decades, the auto industry has one of the shortest at about four years, it said. To make matters worse, operating profit margins in the auto sector exceed only those of airlines and telecom, the report added, highlighting intense competition among firms.

Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd’s managing director Pawan Goenka said on Tuesday that it is “becoming more and more challenging” for local auto makers to launch products profitably as investments must grow to comply with more regulatory norms while product life cycles concurrently become shorter.

Starting this fiscal, Mahindra intends to spend a record ₹15,000 crore until 2020-21, including ₹10,000 crore on capital expenditure.

The usual practice was to spend ₹ 10,000 crore every three years.

The higher figure signals a robust demand and investment cycle, said V. S. Parthasarathy, chief financial officer of the Mahindra Group, in response to queries from Mint.

Most of Mahindra’s capex would go towards product and technology development, apart from capacity expansion as the sport-utility vehicle and tractor maker prepares to fight rising competition. It will include spending on luxury car brand Automobili Pininfarina, the off-roader Roxor being developed for the US, new tractors, and compliance with Bharat Stage VI emission norms in India, Goenka told reporters in May.

Meanwhile, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, the largest passenger vehicle maker, intends to spend ₹5,000 crore this fiscal year, nearly 50% more than last year’s ₹3,400 crore.

Bulk of the figure of ₹4,000 crore will go towards product development and capacity expansion, Kenichi Ayukawa, managing director and chief executive at the local unit of Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corp., told reporters in April.

Crisil estimates 70% of the ₹ 58,000 crore to be spent by car and SUV makers as companies try to outdo each other in the fight for market share.

“New model launches and investment in product development, including electric vehicles, will also be necessitated due to intense competition,” said Anuj Sethi, senior director at Crisil.

However, going forward, capex in the passenger vehicle market will be driven more by capacity addition as the top two companies in the passenger vehicle segment—Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai Motor India Ltd—are operating at close to optimal levels and are even resorting to reducing exports to meet robust demand locally, according to Crisil.


12.2. Government may give incentives to textiles sector to boost domestic manufacturing
PTI, Aug. 06, 2018

New Delhi: The government is likely to hike import duty on about 300 textile products to boost domestic manufacturing and create employment opportunities, sources said. 

Foreign direct investment norms for the sector may also be relaxed.

Products on which imports duties are expected to increase includes some fabrics, garments and man-made fibres. The duties could be enhanced to 20 per cent from the current level of about 5-10 per cent. 

According to government sources, the Finance Ministry may soon issue a notification in this regard. 

If the government decides to notify the duty hikes this week, then it would have to be first tabled in Parliament. 

Increase in duties would give an edge to domestic manufacturers as the imported products are relatively cheaper. Increase in manufacturing activity will help create jobs in the sector, which employs about 10.5 crore people. 

In July, the government doubled import duty on over 50 textile products -- including jackets, suits and carpets -- to 20 per cent, a move that is aimed at promoting domestic manufacturing. 

Through a notification, the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Custom (CBIC) had hiked import duties as well as raised the ad-valorem rate of duty for certain items. 

The imported products which have become expensive include woven fabrics, dresses, trousers, suits and baby garments. 

According to trade experts, India would not be able to give any direct exports incentive to the textile sector, so there is a need to support the segment to encourage domestic manufacturing. 

Imports of textile yarn, fabric, made-up articles grew by 8.58 per cent to USD 168.64 million in June. 

However, exports of cotton yarn/fabrics/made-ups, handloom products grew by 24 per cent to USD 986.2 million. Man-made yarn/fabrics/made-ups exports grew 8.45 pc to USD 403.4 million. Exports of all textile readymade garments dipped by 12.3 per cent to USD 13.5 billion.

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


13.1. Titan targets₹40,000 crore from jewellery business by FY23
Livemint, 23 Jul. 2018, Deepti Govind

Titan’s total revenue grew 20.44% in 2017-18 to ₹15,656 crore, of which jewellery sales fetched ₹13,036 crore

Bengaluru: Watches and accessories maker Titan Co. Ltd expects its jewellery division to fetch ₹40,000 crore out of an overall ₹50,000 crore revenue by 2022-23, its annual report noted.

Titan’s total revenue grew 20.44% in 2017-18 to ₹15,656 crore, of which jewellery sales fetched ₹13,036 crore. The company’s profit after tax soared 52.62% to ₹1,163 crore during the period.

The company has set several smaller goals for its jewellery division over the next five years to reach its 2023 target. These include strengthening the contribution from the wedding segment to 50% (currently 35%) and increasing the revenue from new products to 45% by 2022-23 (currently 31%).

Titan’s flagship jewellery brand Tanishq is among the leaders in the market. But it does not have a significant presence in the wedding jewellery segment, something the company is looking to change.

Last year, Titan launched a sub-brand under Tanishq called Rivaah, solely targeting the wedding segment. It also created prominent wedding zones at many of its retail stores, with the aim of drawing customers and to communicate that Tanishq has a large wedding jewellery portfolio.

Titan also expects the high-value diamond jewellery business to fetch half of its overall jewellery sales by 2022-23, up from the current 30%.

In 2017-18, Titan’s jewellery division recorded its best-ever performance. Both revenue growth and same-store-sales growth in the jewellery business grew 20% in 2017-18, despite the year ending on a sour note for most domestic jewellers.

In February, India’s second-largest state-run lender Punjab National Bank (PNB) said it had been cheated of about $2 billion by two jewellery groups, one controlled by Nirav Modi and the other by Mehul Choksi. The scandal sparked a collapse in the share prices of several jewellers.

However, Titan proved to be an exception. In the aftermath of the scandal, analysts not only expected Titan to ride out the crisis but even said it stood to gain from it. And in June, Titan’s jewellery business head C.K. Venkataraman told Mint the company had already begun to see an uptick in new customers, especially among the high-net worth individuals (HNIs) segment, besides an increase in the average bill size of first-time buyers.

However, the road ahead could be bumpy. On 4 July, in a stock exchange filing, Titan spoke of the soft patch the jewellery industry is going through. Gold imports declined during the first five months of the year, led by a drop in demand for bullion and to some extent because of weak consumer sentiment, Titan said in that filing.


13.2. Auto parts maker Sansera files draft prospectus for IPO valued at $200 million
Livemint, 13 Aug. 2018, Swaraj Singh Dhanjal

Sansera had 15 manufacturing facilities, with 14 of these facilities situated in India and one in Sweden, as of 31 May

Mumbai: Auto parts maker Sansera Engineering Ltd on Monday filed the draft red herring prospectus for its initial public offering (IPO), joining a long list of companies headed for stock markets. The IPO size is expected to be around ₹1,400-₹1,500 crore, a person aware of the company’s plans said on condition of anonymity. Mint had reported in June that Bengaluru-based Sansera had hired investment banks to start work on its IPO. The company is backed by US-based private investment group Rohatyn Group.

The IPO is a pure offer for sale that will see existing shareholders sell 17.24 million shares, with Rohatyn Group looking to sell over 13 million shares. The PE firm currently holds a 55.23% stake in the company. This stake was originally acquired by Citi Venture Capital International (CVCI), the emerging markets private equity arm of US bank Citigroup, for ₹340 crore ($56 million) in July 2013. In December 2013, Rohatyn Group acquired the CVCI business from Citigroup. Post the IPO, its stake will come down to 29%.

Investment banks ICICI Securities, Nomura, Credit Suisse and IIFL Holdings are advising Sansera on the share sale.

Sansera manufactures and supplies a wide range of precision forged and machined components for engine, transmission and other systems for two-wheelers, passenger vehicles and light and heavy commercial vehicles. It also supplies components to the aerospace sector and for off-road vehicles as well as for other segments including tractors, generator sets, stationary engines and other non-automotive applications.

As of 31 May, Sansera had 15 manufacturing facilities, with 14 of these facilities situated in India in locations such as Bengaluru, Manesar, Pune, Pantnagar and Tumkur. Sansera has one manufacturing facility in Trollhattan, Sweden.

In 2017-18, the company reported a revenue of ₹1,184.4 crore, against ₹1,045.5 crore the previous year. During the period, the company recorded a profit of ₹99.7 crore, against a profit of ₹64.4 crore in the previous financial year. Sansera joins firms such as Dodla Dairy Ltd and Nihilent Ltd that have filed their draft IPO prospectus in the last one week.

Dodla Dairy is an integrated dairy company based in south India with operations across Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The company also has international operations in Uganda and Kenya.

Dodla Dairy is looking to raise ₹150 crore in primary capital through its IPO, to be used for repayment of debt. Dodla Dairy is backed by TPG Growth managed Rise Fund, an impact investment fund.

Nihilent is a global business consulting and IT solutions integration company. The IPO of Nihilent comprises a fresh issue of ₹250 crore and an offer for sale.

The firm proposes to utilize the IPO proceeds for funding inorganic growth, replacement and upgradation of its corporate office, relocating its branch office and setting up a testing centre in Chennai and setting up a user experience laboratory and a media laboratory. Other firms that have filed their draft IPO documents this month include ASK Investment Managers Ltd and Shyam Metalics and Energy Ltd.


14.1. Future Group’s Cover Story brand eyes ₹100 crore in sales this year
Livemint, 26 Jul. 2018, Sauma Tewari

The women’s western wear brand, launched in April 2016, targets consumers aged 22-40 years

New Delhi: Cover Story, the fast fashion brand owned by Kishore Biyani’s Future Style Lab, is aiming to generate ₹100 crore in sales in the ongoing financial year.

With average sales per store of ₹25 lakh a year, the brand reported retail sales of ₹51 crore in FY18.

The women’s western wear brand, launched in April 2016, targets consumers aged 22-40 years and differentiates itself from rivals H&M and Zara by designing clothes that suit an Indian woman’s body type.

“We are looking to break even at the Ebitda level at the end of this fiscal year. We are growing at more than 100%, witnessing 12-30% like-for-like growth in our stores, indicating an increasing consumer base—consumers who are coming back to our stores,” said Manjula Tiwari, chief executive of Future Style Labs.

The company plans to open six new exclusive brand outlets (EBOs) this year in addition to the 50 shop-in-shop stores in multi-brand outlets such as Central and Shoppers Stop and 20 EBOs that the products are currently sold through.

Cover Story has strategically opened its outlets across top malls in the country, often next to those of H&M, Vero Moda and Zara. The idea is to attract shoppers who prefer buying these international brands.

Designed in London by Future Style Lab, the brand currently offers clothes and a limited collection of shoes and bags, which it plans to expand by April. The company also plans to sell jewellery and sunglasses. “Accessories are our core focus currently and since the branded jewellery market is underserved in India, we want to give a wide variety to our customers,” said Tiwari.

Apart from brick-and-mortar stores, Cover Story also sells through e-commerce websites such as Myntra, Jabong, Koovs and the brand’s own website. “Currently 7-8% of our overall sales are coming from e-commerce platforms and we expect it to reach 20% of our overall revenue in the next five years,” she added.

Cover Story currently makes its products in India, China and Sri Lanka. It’s also looking to source products from Turkey and Morocco. Tight control over supply chain and inventory, along with product decisions based on consumer data, are spurring the brand’s growth. “Other brands are struggling to manage their inventory and that is where we score,” Tiwari said. “Our sales are more contained and happen twice a year (at the end of summer and winter). We do not go crazy with discounts. The average discount we offer is 35%,” she said.

Cover Story’s pricing is a sweet spot between Zara and H&M, pushing customers to buy more products frequently. Priced between ₹790 and ₹4,000, the average product price stands at ₹1,700. Typically, the average cart size at a Cover Story store is two to three products, amounting to ₹3,500.

Market researcher Technopak estimates women’s casual wear market size to touch ₹8,894 crore in 2019.

Ankur Bisen, senior vice-president of retail and consumer products at Technopak, said that almost all fast fashion brands are growing rapidly in India—Zara has clocked over ₹1,000 crore in sales, H&M India over ₹500 crore and Koovs ₹100 crore.

These brands will, however, face socio-economic as well as cultural challenges beyond the top 20 cities, he said.

“It would be a challenge for them to penetrate the smaller towns of the country. While a young college-goer can wear a skirt in Mumbai, I doubt the same holds true for a young girl in a small town,” he added.

The brand advertises on digital media and social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, where fashion-conscious consumers often look for styling tips. It also does in-mall promotions and direct consumer connect initiative with fashion blogger events. The brand also works with the stylists of top actors such as Priyanka Chopra and Anushka Sharma, where they often sport looks created from Cover Story products.


14.2. Three’s Company: Rathore, Zegna and Reliance strike a partnership
Livemint, 3 Aug. 2018, Sohini Dey

Designer Raghavendra Rathore launches a collaboration with Reliance Brands Ltd and Italian luxury label Ermenegildo Zegna

Raghavendra Rathore is on a high. The Jodhpur-based designer, who studied at Parsons School of Design, New York, and worked at Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karan before launching his eponymous label in 1994, is known for his crisp bandhgalas and bespoke menswear. Now his label is in the spotlight as the recipient of a joint investment by Italian menswear label Ermenegildo Zegna and Reliance Brands Ltd (RBL).

This is the first-of-its-kind venture for a luxury label in the country, promising new avenues for Rathore. “With this new opportunity, we are recalibrating and optimizing the business plan,” the designer says over email. “The unique access to a vertical like Zegna and infrastructure support from RBL can bring many opportunities that never existed.”

Darshan Mehta, president and CEO, RBL, says such a partnership has been a long time in the making. “Given the right ecosystem of investment, there’s a lot of value to be created in nurturing to scale Indian design talent,” Mehta says over the phone. “We have been on the lookout for designers who combine a unique design lens with clever packaging. When a friend suggested Rathore’s name, I said I’d love to meet him.” The meeting took Mehta to Rathore’s home in Jodhpur in late 2017, and the two got along well.

It was also Mehta who brought Rathore and Zegna together. The Italian brand has a long history of investing in Asia. Zegna was one of the first luxury brands to enter China in 1991 and has been in India for over a decade. When Mehta mentioned the negotiations with Rathore during a meeting, Gildo Zegna, CEO of Ermenegildo Zegna, offered to come on board and the three met again, along with team members and families. “Meeting Raghavendra and his wife, I saw that we shared many characteristics, including the same vision, creativity, integrity and authenticity,” Zegna says on email. “We also share a penchant for excellence, value hard work and approach life and business with a positive energy.”

Zegna and RBL’s role in the partnership is strategic, with Rathore and his team primarily in charge. “I can envision us helping deliberate strategic issues such as scale, timing and investments. Should Rathore seek inputs in other areas of the business, our support would be immediately forthcoming.” However, Zegna emphasizes that all operational and management decisions will be undertaken by Rathore himself.

Rathore is both careful and optimistic with his success. “A balanced approach, minor tinkering to the vision and most importantly, a superb customer experience, both nationally and internationally, will be my aim.”


15.1. Haier India eyes double-digit growth this calendar year
BusinessLine, 30 Jul. 2018, Meenakshi Verma Ambwanit.

Haier India said it is on track to feature among the top five consumer appliance brands in the country and expects to close this year with net revenues of about ₹3,600 crore. The Chinese consumer appliances and electronics company has seen a double digit growth, especially for its premium products, in the first half of this year.

Growth trends

Eric Braganza, President, Haier Appliances India, said: “We are witnessing strong growth and demand for premium products such as bottom-mounted refrigerators, side-by-side refrigerators and front-load washing machines. In terms of value, we have grown by 55 per cent in the first half of this year.”

He said that looking at these growth trends, the company expects to close this year with ₹3,500 -3,600 crore in terms of net revenues and is targeting 55-60 per cent growth over 2017.

“Factors such as good quality products, strong distribution footprint, and strategic marketing and advertising have enabled us to grow at a much faster pace than the industry growth rates,” Braganza added.

Manufacturing capability

Last year, the company also significantly enhanced its manufacturing capability at its facility in Pune. Besides refrigerators, the company now makes washing machines, LED TVs, air-conditioners and water heaters in India. “Currently we are using nearly 75-80 per cent of our manufacturing capacity in Pune and by next year we believe we will fully utilise this capacity,” he said.

The company aims to touch the $1-billion mark by 2020 in revenues and expects to be among the top three consumer appliances brands in the country.

Positioned as a mid-priced brand, Haier India is stepping up its focus on appliances business. While LED TV panels segment contribute about 20 per cent to our turnover, we are putting a bigger thrust behind appliances business. We believe the appliance business will be the key growth driver for us,” Braganza added.


15.2. Breaking Ground: India’s first ceramics triennale
Livemint, 3 Aug, 2018, Rahul Kumar

As the country gears up for this big event in Jaipur, a ceramist ponders why it has taken so long for the art to receive its due

Clay is possibly the most enticing media. While it offers endless possibilities, acceptance of ceramic art has been slow, specifically in the context of Indian contemporary art. However, in the past decade, things have changed dramatically. Galleries have held significant exhibits of ceramic art, museums have included ceramic works in their collections, and publications have focused on the art form in their discourse. The first Indian Ceramics Triennale, scheduled to be launched on 31 August at Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK), Jaipur, is a milestone in more ways than one.

“From a historical perspective, there has been a major turn in the field of ceramics worldwide. In a country like India, where ceramics has always been considered an artisanal craft, the triennale will increase visibility and allow it to be appreciated as an art form in its own right,” says Pooja Sood, director general, JKK.

“Breaking Ground”, the theme for the first edition of the triennale is very apt. It promises to showcase works of 35 Indian and 12 international artists, with a fresh perspective on the possibilities of the medium. “In the 21st century, ceramics have taken on a renewed urgency and relevance in international contemporary artistic practice. The triennale will highlight the finest practitioners of experimental ceramics working today, those who are expanding our conceptions of an ancient medium claiming its place in the future,” says Peter Nagy, curatorial adviser for the triennale.


As a ceramist, I can say that there is no escaping getting your hands dirty and learning the science of the practice. This has probably led to a heads-down approach of the practitioners, spending hours on technical processes such as preparing clay, working on the wheel, firing, mixing glazes and so on. It is, therefore, natural for materiality to take over. Ceramists must be well aware of a wide spectrum of disciplines that are part of the making process and have knowledge of basic chemistry pertaining to preparation of clay and glazes, nuances of firing, and using the right consistency of clay. Conceptual depth and expression take a back-seat in the initial years of training. For, say, a painter, the how-to is a smaller spread in the learning curve as they do not need to delve into the making of paint or canvas weaving. It is noteworthy that there are few institutions imparting education on the discipline. And the two most significant ones are orientated towards vessel-making in the initial phase of training—Delhi Blue Pottery in Delhi and Golden Bridge Pottery in Puducherry. Limited know-how and access to equipment due to inadequate demand further accentuates the need for clay artists to focus on techniques. A 4,000-year-old tradition of clay adds to the burden of contextualizing the contemporaneousness of it.

Gallery Espace, a leading contemporary art gallery in Delhi, recently concluded a group show of ceramics. “There are so many workshops teaching clay work and publications writing about this art form, but people were still surprised to see the works at our show titled Earth Memory,” says Renu Modi, founder and director of the gallery. The show was well-received, although sales were slow. “It is our job to educate people about the art form. The non-predictability makes it nothing but magical for the creator. As for fragility, even canvas and paper works require great care,” she adds.

For Kanika Anand, exhibition coordinator of the first edition of the triennale, elevation of a practice based on its medium raised questions of relevance of the event in context of the larger fabric of exhibition-making. “When I was approached two years back to join the team, I questioned the need for medium specificity for the exhibit. But after discussions, I realized the importance of a platform in order to explore a deeper understanding of clay. Sociability and presentation are important to interpret a work,” she explains. The triennale will therefore help to not only show clay as material but also move beyond the fabric with which the works are made. “The first edition is forward looking. It is not negating the tradition, rather, the endeavour is to look ahead at the possibilities,” adds Anand.

Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work as a collective called Thukral and Tagra. A participant at the triennale, their practice is primarily focused on painting. “The process of making something from scratch excites us. Making works out of clay is cathartic and gratifying. We are attracted to its simplicity,” they say. When asked if they will continue to work in clay in future, they say, “We have been interested in terracotta. But this is a long-term project, relaxed with no deadline. The work will be an outcome of slow inquiry”. A humble pot requires craftsmanship and skills par excellence. It may be the most exquisite object of beauty or may be an antiquity with historical significance. But does it deserve to sit on a pedestal at a contemporary art gallery, if it does not have a conceptual expression? In my opinion, which is informed as a ceramic art practitioner, collector and writer, the perception that clay as a medium has not got its due is misconceived. It is true that there are only a handful of galleries that like to show this art form. But that is less because it is fragile, and more since only a few ceramic artists make works that fit into the realm of contemporary art. It may therefore be critical to introspect and move ahead from the how-to and techniques to what is being produced with the medium.

There is a lot that needs to be seen on what unfolds in the art world, but clay seems to be pushing its way forward, making elbow room in the repertoire of contemporary Indian art. Embracing traditional techniques, layered with contemporary expressions, and a futuristic vision, the triennial is going to be a must-see for art enthusiasts.

The Indian Ceramics Triennale is on from 31 August-18 November at Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur. The author is a participant at the event.



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16.1. We’ve made some course corrections in our strategy: Infy
BusinessLine, 30 Jul. 2018, K Giriprakash and Venkatesh Ganesh

Infosys is slowly returning to normalcy after going through a rather turbulent phase during the last few years. Analysts, however, say it will take some time before it starts performing to its potential. In an interview with BusinessLine, the company’s Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao UB shares the management’s vision for the future.

How do you analyse the performance of Infosys, two quarters after the new CEO took over?

From a client’s perspective, a lot of things have matured. It is reflected in slightly better growth for the industry. Last few years, there was a focus on cost takeout on one side of the business and we were not ready to invest in new areas at the same pace. Now that is changing. In the last year and beginning of this year, projects are maturing and moving from pilot to mainstream. The industry itself will grow faster and there is enough runway for it to grow further (currently $155 billion) in the next 5-10 years.

Do you think the industry itself has changed over the past few years?

Overall, these are interesting times in the industry with a lot of disruptions, new business and operating models. It is a great opportunity but the Indian industry needs to reinvent itself. The next few years will be much more radical than the past. So, re-skilling is a big thing for the industry with new technologies and services that will drive the future. We have changed training methodologies and provided options such as allowing an employee to access it anytime, anywhere, online or offline.

Some analysts have said that Infosys is just getting its act together when it should actually be accelerating...

We have still some engines which are not firing. Issues were there with our consulting business. Now that is improving and it will take some more time to do so. Digital is firing well with 28 per cent of our revenues coming from that segment. In the last two quarters, we have articulated what digital means to all our stakeholders.

After Salil Parekh took over as CEO, he unveiled a new strategy for the company. Was that done to make a clean break from the past?

See, the strategy is evolutionary. I would not call it a radically different strategy but a continuation of what we do. Some course corrections were made and tweaks done to identify the path for the next 2-3 years. There was a perception created that we were not doing much work on digital. If you see the 28 per cent revenues coming from digital, it did not happen overnight. In the new thinking, we decided that Panaya and Skava (two companies which were acquired during Sikka’s time) were not strategic for us. It is not that they are bad products. We decided that we do not need to own those products to drive our digital push. We intend to sell licences of Panaya and Skava. Even in the last quarter, we did so. On the other hand, we have said that Finacle and Nia continue to be strategic for us. It is a subtle shift in the strategic direction and not a radical one.

So, when Panaya was acquired, was there less visibility about how it might eventually pan out for the company?

There was a lot more expectations on leveraging Panaya software for our enterprise clients. But with the migration to cloud, there was a slowdown where people were focussing on newer tech. What we expected in the beginning and the roadmap for the future was not in alignment. It is more about strategic thinking. We don’t have to own it. We can continue to licence it. Even if our competition is using it, it should not make too much of a difference. Skava, on the other hand, helped us in our digital footprint. It was used in mobility and space and now in the last three years it has morphed into a full-fledged e-commerce platform and competes with the likes of Hybris (a subsidiary of SAP) and others.

It was right at that time of acquisition but now there are other strategic priorities. There was nothing wrong with the product or the strategy at that time. But now the realisation is that there are other strategic priorities where we need to focus on and which are much more in line with our DNA. So we can continue to leverage them in a different form rather than from an ownership perspective.

Instead of selling the companies at a discount, wouldn’t it have been better to keep them? Are there any bidders for Panaya?

Finally, it is the market which determines the value. We felt that instead of making continuous investments and there has to be x amount of management bandwidth we have to devote to and therefore, it was better to not own it. There have been some conversations with certain people regarding its sale and we will announce it when they get finalised.

One can see that the gap between the leader of the pack and Infosys is growing wider. What do you attribute that to?

Five or six years back, there were two leaders and then the rest of us were fairly well behind. Since then, I think we did remarkably well. About two, three years back, we were number one or two growing at 12-13 per cent. But with the beginning of the year, our competitor has grown dramatically. It is only in the recent past, the gap has widened. It is a cycle and they have executed their strategy well. So, we have to focus on our strengths and grow from there.

You have been with the company for a long time. How did you feel when the company went through a lot of turbulence?

I joined the company when there were less than 50 people, which were about 32 years ago. I don’t think I would have even dreamed of the growth the company ended up having and the position it has attained. I am really proud of being part of an iconic brand and being part of this journey.
What we have experienced during the last few years is the evolution of a company which is transiting to the next stage. We are moving to a new set of leadership and it takes time to settle down.
It is the resilience of the organisation that it has managed to withstand all the noise and distractions.

Something which could have been avoided?

I would rather attribute it to learning. It is a growing organisation and you learn...and hopefully, we will be growing to be a hundred-year-old company. We have just completed one-third of the journey.
Hopefully, we won’t make the same mistakes again. Today, we have the ability to take more risks, some will work and some won’t. I think the big takeaway is that the organisation has been resilient and one should give credit to those who built this company to such an extent that it has been able to withstand the shocks and distractions and still has been able to come out of it. We have hardly had any client attritions during those years.


16.2. Shifting focus, digital technology help BFSI vertical grow: TCS official
BusinessLine, 17 Jul. 2018

Easing tax regulations, shifting focus from regulatory regime and digital technology are the key drivers for the TCS’ impressive performance in Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector, said K Krithivasan, BFSI group head, Tata Consultancy Services, here on Tuesday.

“There is a shift from compliance to growth mindset,” said Krithivasan, adding that regulatory and compliance pressures and internal focus on cost optimisation were hitherto taking banks’ focus from growth.

TCS recorded a net profit of ₹7,340 crore, at a growth rate of 6.3 per cent from previous quarter and a revenue growth of 6.8 per cent on quarterly basis to ₹34,261 crore with BFSI sector contributing around 40 per cent of the total revenue. The sector recorded a growth of 4.1 per cent on a yearly basis and 3.7 per cent for June quarter majorly from the North-American region.

“Over 2.7 lakh employees are digitally trained and we are in the process of training the rest of the employees,” said Ravi Viswanathan, Chief Marketing Officer, TCS.

TCS, which has 4 lakh employees, saw its digital revenue grew by 44.8 per cent on a yearly basis contributing up to 25 per cent of the total revenue.

“We took the position that we will invest in creating digital skills, which we call it organic growth strategy” Viswanathan said, adding that customers are seeing the results of ‘Business 4.0’, a thought leadership framework launched by TCS in the second quarter to leverage on digital technologies to help customers.

Commenting that Chennai has been the bedrock for all operations of TCS, Viswanathan said, “We have made investments in our Digital Labs in Chennai, Siruseri campus across all verticals like Banking, Retail, etc.”

He also added that the company is recognised as one of the third largest brand in IT services and fastest growing brand valued over $10 billion.

Suresh Raman, Head, TCS Chennai operations, said the Chennai region that comprises 20 per cent of the work force of the company focusses on providing BFSI, retail and telecom services and contributes about 20 per cent of the company’s revenue.


17.1. Opinion: Digitally empowering women in rural India
Livemint, 7 Aug. 2018, Aditi Bhowmich

Evidence from randomized evaluations shows how mobile technology can transform the lives of rural Indian women

The pink 2017-18 Economic Survey got the country talking about how gender equality should be as much of a policy priority as improving ease of doing business in India. Let’s take a look at a low-hanging fruit in this challenge: the digital gender divide. Bridging the gender gap in mobile ownership and digital literacy in both urban and rural India may increase the agency of women and help dismantle social norms that have been holding them back for decades. In fact, addressing the gender divide in digital literacy is perhaps necessary to ensure inequality of opportunity across gender does not widen in an India where the digital economy is expected to multiply by five times by 2023.

There is a pressing policy question: what are the tangible benefits of closing the gender gap in digital literacy and mobile usage across urban and rural India?

Insights can be found in the results of a randomized evaluation on mobile-enabled cash transfers by researchers affiliated to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In the aftermath of a drought in Niger, female members of randomly selected households in 96 villages received an unconditional cash transfer. The researchers divided these households into three groups to measure the impact of three different methods of cash disbursement. One delivery channel distributed cash manually through envelopes. The second delivery channel distributed cash through an m-transfer system wherein households received an m-money (phone-based money transfer app) enabled mobile phone. A third channel distributed the cash manually but households were also given an m-money-enabled mobile phone. Since the division of households into the three different groups was randomized, the variation between the three groups at the end of the study can be attributed to the causal impact of the channel of distribution.

Results show that households which received transfers via mobile phones saw a 10% improvement in diet diversity, a one-third increase in children’s meal consumption per day, and an increase in the cultivation of marginal crops that are primarily grown by women. The paper explains that the impact was a result of improved household bargaining power of the women beneficiaries. The mobile-transfer beneficiaries were more likely to obtain the transfer on their own as opposed to relying on their husbands, and more likely to travel to weekly markets and be involved in selling household grain than the manual cash transfer recipients. The key insight from this evaluation is that when women adopted mobile phone services to directly receive cash transfers, it increased their agency in household decision-making. Prioritizing digital literacy for women by combining mobile technology with the array of existing welfare programmes targeted at women can potentially lead to similar empowerment of women in rural India.

Further evidence of the promise of digital inclusion for women can be found in another evaluation that took place in Kenya. The M-Pesa mobile money service has gained much traction in development circles in the past year, and understandably so. M-Pesa is a service that allows users to store monetary value on their phones and transfer to others via text message. An evaluation of the long-term impact of M-Pesa by researchers Tavneet Suri and William Jack suggests that access to M-Pesa has uplifted 2% of Kenya’s households out of poverty. The results are most compelling for female beneficiaries. Impact is driven by change in financial behaviour of these women, particularly saving behaviour, that has translated into their altering occupational choices by graduating from subsistence agriculture and multiple part-time jobs to business ownership. This could be a result of direct access to remittances through M-Pesa, and therefore, increased agency. This could also be because these women may have not been primary earning members in their households, and were constrained before they had access to mobile money. Vodafone India launched the M-Pesa platform in India in 2013 and has collaborated with the government and development sector to enable direct transfer of benefits in 10 states. Given the promise of the M-Pesa platform for female empowerment, especially across urban and rural contexts, targeting digital inclusion for female beneficiaries in rural India through the app could stimulate substantial empowerment for them.

In a recent article, researchers Rohini Pande and Simone Schaner proposed the adoption of mobile phone-enabled check-ins for a conditional welfare programme. They present the hypothetical example of a scholarship for girls that is received only by those who can verify their attendance at school via phoned-in check-ins and informational calls. Integrating benefits targeted to the poorest women with mobile phones in this manner could be a promising way to plug leakages and make welfare programmes more effective.

Digital inclusion can empower women not only through improving their individual agency, but also by dismantling hostile norms surrounding gender. Descriptive analysis of data indicates how mobile phones are correlated with different perceptions and behaviours around gender. A study on mobile phone ownership and usage by women in India, using 2004-2005 National Family Health Survey cross-sectional data, found that households where women had mobile phones reported lower tolerance for domestic violence and higher women’s autonomy in mobility and economic independence.

India’s changing digital landscape is offering tremendous scope for women’s empowerment, and evidence from rigorous research suggests how mobile phone usage can transform women’s household agency and workforce participation. This calls for a greater effort to close the gender gap in digital literacy, and more innovation in integrating mobile phone usage with social welfare programmes. Without digital literacy, one of the most vulnerable sections of society, women from poor households, may end up in a situation where they are left too far behind to ever catch up with “Digital India”. There has never been a more pertinent time to bridge the gender digital divide. Policymakers, heed this call.

Aditi Bhowmick is a research associate with J-PAL South Asia at IFMR.

NCW to train 60000 women across the country through its Digital Literacy Programme in collaboration with Facebook
Press Information Bureau, Aug. 13, 2018

New Delhi: The National Commission for Women in collaboration with the Facebook and Cyber Peace Foundation (a civil society organization based in Ranchi, Jharkhand involved in training related to all aspects of cyber security), initiated a ‘Digital Literacy Programme’ for college/university students. The programme seeks promoting digital literacy for women, raising awareness about cyber crimes, advising the users about the resources available to women, to prevent the problems and also how to handle such crimes. The ‘Digital Literacy Programme’ aims to train 60,000 women in Universities across major cities of India regarding safe use of internet, social media and email.

The above Information was given by Minister of Women and Child Development, Stm Maneka Sanjay Gandhi in reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, today.

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


17.2. Jodhpur, Jaipur are cleanest rail stations
Livemint, 13 Aug. 2018, Jyotika Sood

The survey, Swachh Rail, Swachh Bharat, declared Jodhpur the cleanest railway station in the A1 category, followed by Jaipur and Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh)

A majority of the top stations were in Rajasthan, which comes under the North Western Railway. iStockphoto.

Tourist destinations Jodhpur and Jaipur, both in Rajasthan, have clinched the top two spots in the railway station cleanliness survey conducted by the Quality Council of India (QCI) for Indian Railways. A majority of the top stations were in Rajasthan, which comes under North Western Railway.

The survey, Swachh Rail, Swachh Bharat, declared Jodhpur the cleanest railway station in the A1 category, followed by Jaipur and Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh). Among the category A stations, Marwar (Rajasthan) was adjudged the best, followed by Phulera (Rajasthan) and Warangal (Telangana).

The third party audit-cum-survey report studied 407 stations, including 75 A1- and 332 A-category stations. About 70% stations scored 700 or more out of 1,000. The stations were ranked on the basis of the survey and audit by the 160-member QCI-trained team. The railway stations were judged on the basis of cleanliness across the premises, including the main entrance, platforms, toilets, waiting rooms and parking facilities. The evaluation comprised direct observation of QCI assessors and passenger feedback. Besides, a 24x7 control room was set up and images were geo-tagged to monitor the progress.

The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan launched by PM Narendra Modi was the greatest tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, railway minister Piyush Goyal said at the launch of the QCI report. Sanitation coverage in the country has gone up from 38% to 83% during the National Democratic Alliance rule from 2014 to 2018 with the construction of seven crore toilets, he said.

“The cleanliness rankings of the stations will be an impetus for improvement for the ones that did not make it to the top of the rankings this year,” said Goyal. There has been significant improvement in cleanliness of stations, according to the survey, he said.

The cleanliness survey of railway stations was started in 2016 by then railway minister Suresh Prabhu. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation had interviewed railway passengers on various parameters related to cleanliness before tabling the report. Subsequently, the Railways decided to make it an annual event to identify gaps in the system and improve cleanliness standards at railway stations.


18.1. Sun Pharma’s cancer injection from Halol plant gets USFDA nod
Livemint, Jul. 18, 2018, Teena Thacker

Sun Pharma’s Halol plant had been under USFDA scanner since Sep 2014 and the quality cloud over it was lifted in June

New Delhi: The country’s largest drug maker, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, has received its first approval in five years for a product manufactured at its Halol, Gujarat, plant from the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA).

Infugem, which is used for the treatment of cancer and is manufactured at its Halol facility, received the USFDA approval on Wednesday, the company said.

The Halol plant had been under USFDA scanner since September 2014 and the quality cloud over it was lifted only last month. The resolution of the issue paved the way for Sun Pharma to resume selling to the US market from this facility, which accounts for 35-40% of the revenue for the company.

“This is the first USFDA approval for the product from Sun Pharma’s Halol facility post receipt of the Establishment Inspection Report (EIR) in June 2018,” Sun Pharma said.

The USFDA approval is for Infugem injection (gemcitabine in 0.9% sodium chloride injection) 10 mg/mL, for intravenous use in a ready-to-administer bag. The product will add to the drug firm’s expanding oncology portfolio of novel products. It had an addressable market size of about $35 million for the 12 months ended March 2018, the company said.

“The technology used to formulate Infugem eliminates the risks associated with compounding, an extra step in the administration of cytotoxic infusion products, providing improved safety for healthcare professionals and cancer patients,” said Abhay Gandhi, Sun Pharma’s North America chief executive officer.

Infugem uses a proprietary technology that allows cytotoxic oncology products to be premixed in a sterile environment and supplied to the prescribers in ready-to-administer infusion bags.

According to the pharma firm, the product provides greater safety by preventing problems of “over or under dosing”. It also prevents “the risk of contamination that can lead to infections”, Sun Pharma said.

In December 2015, the company’s Halol plant was served a warning letter, following an inspection that revealed quality issues. Since then, no new products manufactured at the facility have been approved.


18.2. Aurobindo’s Apotex deal marks ‘Enter Europe’ plan of Indian pharma companies
BusinessLine, 17 Jul. 2018, G. Naga Sridhart

Europe now blips prominently on the radar of some Indian pharma companies.

A case in point is the latest acquisition of Canadian drug-maker Apotex’s businesses in five key European markets by the Hyderabad-based Aurobindo Pharma.

Last week, it announced the deal to acquire Apotex’s business in Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium for €74 million.

While analysts forecast margins to increase about 10 per cent over three years due to increased market access, the acquisition is also seen as EPS — accretive over the next one year.

European presence

The present headwinds in the US market in the form of escalation in pricing pressures and tough regulatory stance could make margins slim to Indian generic players in the long term.

While the lion’s share of US generics still goes from India and is expected to be so in the near future, it may be a matter of time before European markets increase their share significantly in total revenues.

In the year ended March 31, 2018, Aurobindo posted 9 per cent increase in revenues at ₹16,500 crore driven by healthy growth in European markets.

Europe Formulations revenues clocked ₹4,354 crore, an increase of 32.9 per cent over the last year.

On a constant currency basis, EU revenues grew by 29 per cent.

For the fourth quarter, Europe Formulations revenues clocked ₹1,152 crore, registering a growth of 48 per cent YoY.

Going by the last three acquisitions of the Hyderabad-based Aurobindo in Europe, it appears that greater market access and new technology/product platforms have been the drivers for acquisitions.

Lower generic penetration in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France offer growth potential.

In 2017, it acquired Portugal’s Generis Farmaceutica SA from Magnum Capital Partners for €135 million (around ₹969 crore).

In 2014, it acquired Actavis’s commercial operations in seven western European countries. Dr Reddy’s Laboratories too, has been further expanding its presence in Europe. It is now expecting to increase sales in Germany (with the easing of the regulatory issues it faced earlier) and Romania.

Last year, it augmented European operations with the launch of a slew of generics in France in the area of oncology and anti-infectives, including antimycotics. Its hospital portfolio is now present in Italy and Spain too.

The company recently said it was working on generating higher revenues from these countries, and to increase market presence in Europe.


19.1. IKEA all set to open shop in India on Thursday
BusinessLine, 9 Aug. 2018, V. Rishi Kumar

As IKEA, the Swedish home furnishing multi-national opens its first store in Hyderabad on August 9, its pauses to re-strategise its India plans to step up investments while also looking at developing smaller format IKEA stores.

The MNC, which had outlined an investment plan of Rs 10,500 crore when it secured FIPB permission for 100 per cent FDI, had mentioned about setting up 25 stores.

Having invested over Rs 4,500 crore in India thus far, including Rs 1,000 crore in Hyderabad centre, and towards acquisition of land parcels in Navi Mumbai, Bengaluru, Gurugram/NCR and towards other investments, it is also considering setting up smaller format stores in metros and non-metro locations. The number is likely to go past 40 stores.

This change in thinking comes after the progress it has made while setting up Hyderabad store and also taking up the construction of the Mumbai store, which is likely to be ready by summer of 2019, and from the market insights.

Jasper Brodin, IKEA Global Chief Executive Officer, said, “Set up 75 years ago, IKEA has come a long way in commissioning its first store in India. India has been very good for IKEA and we have learnt a lot from India over the past three decades from when we have been sourcing.”

“Biggest learning for us is to serve thinnest wallets and the need to make it accessible and affordable to people. The focus therefore has been on making products affordable,” Brodin said.

“We have a long-term commitment to India, which is an important market for us. We will offer inspiring, affordable and convenient home furnishing to our customers,” he said.

Ramesh Abhishek, Union Secretary DIPP, said “IKEA sourcing has gone up past Euro 350 million mark and its expansion in India offers Indian MSMEs an opportunity to expand their business. This store alone has provided 2,500 jobs both directly and indirectly and if their plans are anything to go by, they will provide jobs to about 50,000 people, directly and indirectly.”

“Indian economy is on a rapid growth path and poised to become a $10 trillion economy by 2030. With sustained efforts to improve the ease of doing business, it attracted $222 billion FDI in the last four years,” Abhishek said.

IKEA store here employs 950 people directly and 1,500 indirectly in services and expects to host close to 7 million visitors each year. The company plans to recruit more than 15,000 people in India directly as it opens stores.

Adding to the convenience of the buyers, IKEA is set to offer e-commerce in the country in 2019.

The store, spread over 13 acres, is four lakh sq.ft. and packs more than 7,500 items, of which about 1,000 items are priced below Rs 200. IKEA plans to further step up sourcing from India.


19.2. 17 security guard agencies to train over 300.000 guards under the govt scheme 
PTI, Aug. 06, 2018

New Delhi: As many as 17 security guard agencies have committed to training over 3 lakh security persons under a government scheme, the ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship (MSDE) said. 

Top officials of security services providers such as SIS, G4S, Peregrine, Checkmate, NISA, SMS Security and Orion have inked memoranda of undertanding with the Management and Entrepreneurship & Professional Skills Council (MEPSC) for conducting the training under the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) scheme, the ministry said. 

"With increase in businesses, retail outlets and other public places, the Indian private security services industry is expected to grow at a fast pace. One of the consistent endeavour of my ministry is to prepare the youth industry ready through RPL and other short-term skilling programmes," Petroleum and Skills development minister Dharmendra Pradhan said.

RPL is a platform to provide recognition to the informal learning or learning through work to get equal acceptance as the formal levels of education.The RPL certification would be at par with the certifications following various skill training in the country.

The ministry is committed to taking this sector to the next level and looks forward to collaborations from private players to bring in market relevant best practices, Pradhan said.

According to the statement, private security industry in India employs 8.5 million people of which 2.2 million people are employed by the police services only. 

Industry reports and surveys depict incremental demand of manpower in the security sector by 2022 will be over 12 million.

"Over 1.30 Lakh students have been trained and a significant 75 per cent certified under Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) under the Security Sector Skill Council. With this MoU in place, industry committed to train and certify 3.17 Lakh security personnel under RPL in security sector," the statement said.


20.1. The Coolest Lab in town
Mumbai mirror, Jul. 1 2018, Tariq Engineer

The CUBE lab at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mankhurd is attempting to upend how Biology is taught, and learned, across the country.

At first glance, the CUBE lab could easily be mistaken for a large kitchen. There are cabinets along one wall, bottles standing on tables in the centre of the room and a pressure cooker sitting on a gas burner next to a sink. But the illusion is broken once you spot the catfish swimming in a tank by the window, or notice that some of the bottles on the table contain fruit flies.

CUBE stands for Collaborative Undergraduate Biology Education and is the brainchild of Dr Arunan MC and Dr Nagarjuna G, two science professors at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. The lab is basic by design — doing science shouldn’t require fancy equipment. In addition to the catfish and fruit flies, there are snails and worms and tiny crustaceans - 15 creatures in total, all living and breathing. Students in the lab are free to design experiments focused on any of these organisms but there is a condition. “Anything that they start should be curiousity driven and not something imported from somewhere else,” Arunan says.

Learning by doing
CUBE opened its doors in 2012 and the concept behind the lab is both simple and revolutionary: there are no theory classes. Biology is learned by doing and the professors advise and learn alongside their students. The slogan for the lab, which Arunan says comes from a 2010 study on education done in the US, is displayed on the wall: “Education should not be something we teachers do to our students; it must be something we do along with our students.” In other words, the teacher isn’t there to dictate, but to nudge students towards, and advise them on, larger questions. Nagarjuna structured the lab to grow according to the principles of network theory and therefore there is no advertising or promoting the lab. Today, the CUBE community numbers roughly 2,000, with about 40 teachers and the rest, students. They represent about 40 hubs, spread out from Jaipur to Guwahati and Delhi to Cochin, with a hub representing an active group of students doing experiments.

Collaboration is key
At the heart of CUBE is collaborative learning. Nobody presumes to know everything and no matter the level of education or expertise, everyone is encouraged to ask questions because that’s how new ideas are born. Among the examples cited by Arunan and others was the mistaken identity of Daphnea. When CUBE began, one of the students brought some water from a pond which contained an organism that was thought to be Daphnea, a tiny crustacean. Experiments on Daphnea went on for two or three years until a new student asked a basic question: How do you know it is Daphnea? On further study, it turned out to be Moina, a close cousin. “We made a huge mistake thinking it was Daphnea,” Arunan says.
In the same vein, Arif Shaikh, who started at CUBE as a seventh standard student two-and-a-half years ago, came up with a new way of feeding Hydra, a small freshwater organism, that was much cheaper than the method the lab had been using. Today, Arif, who lives in Govandi is responsible for maintaining the lab and is there every day. “I am getting so much knowledge,” he says.

Fun for everyone
Jaykishan Advani, Project Scientific Assistant, who joined in 2012, says the culture of CUBE is question everything. “Here when anybody says something, people will argue it. Nobody will accept it as is,” Advani says. The CUBE community is both vertical and horizontal; vertical in the sense that school students to PhDs participate, and horizontal in the sense that there is no hierarchy. “The interaction is open. “It is both-sided, so you enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, then there is no meaning.”
On an overcast afternoon last week, two students from Ranchi were presenting their research on rotifers, which are microscopic organisms. The students were part of a 10-day workshop that included students from Ranchi, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai. But this wasn’t a one-way presentation. The presenters were peppered with questions from the group. In this manner, the students were forced to defend and explain their work, thereby deepening their own knowledge and that of their colleagues.

Ruchi Modgekar, a BSc student in Bio-Technology at Elphinstone College, was one of the mentors for the workshop. She visited the lab every day during her summer vacation. “I stay in Vasai but the travelling doesn’t matter because it is so interesting coming here,” Modgekar says. Her classmate, Harshita Bhanushali, another mentor, said it was exciting to learn something beyond your typical college syllabus. “In college, information stops at some level. Here, you keep on discovering things. There is no limit to what you can learn.”
Shivam Mishra, a BSc student from Ranchi studying microbiology, said these presentations, called Causeries, aren’t just about learning either. “I am getting more confident standing up and speaking in English in front of everyone. It helps in overall development as well.”

Leveraging technology
CUBE would not be possible without technology. In the beginning, research was shared over email but today students have migrated to Whatsapp and Facebook. There is also a website that has been created for the project, where data is archived and kept.
The social media groups are active 24/7, according to Modgekar, “Whatever we do, we post it in the group,” she says. The groups also serve as a means of instant feedback and correction. “If I say something very silly, but I think it is something smart, a PhD student will quickly tell me,” Modgekar says.
That’s really the crux of it – everyone is in it together. “We want to create this kind of social culture - a culture of sharing, seeking help and feedback,” Nagarjuna says. “And if you do that, I think we can do science like we play cricket - in every street.”


20.2. KHELO INDIA launches unique programme to nurture sporting talent
Press Information Bureau, Jul. 23, 2018

734 youngsters shortlisted for complete scholarship under the KHELO INDIA TALENT DEVELOPMENT Scheme

New Delhi: Following the successful conduct of the Khelo India School Games, Sports Authority of India took another significant step towards the development of sports earlier today, cleared 734 players for a scholarship programme under Khelo India Talent IdentificationDevelopment scheme. The Minister of Youth Affairs & Sports Col. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore said that “transformational changes have been introduced into Indiansports. Catch them young is no longer a slogan but is visible in our action. We are developing a sports system that connects local potential to global podiums, that encourages every Indian to have sports as a part of their lives for entertain ment, education or excellence.” 

The salient points of the meeting are as following:

A talent identification committee was formed comprising Arjuna Awardees and DronacharyaAwardees to shortlist and propose the names of the beneficiaries to the High Powered Committee, which cleared the above numbers after due diligence. The scholarship programme is designed to take care of their expenses including training, development, boarding and lodging and tournament exposure apart from offering them out of pocket expense allowance.

Salient features of the High Powered Committee meeting are as follows:

* The talent spotting and age verification of the selected players has been driven by the scientific and trusted method through TW3.

* An annual stipend of Rs. 1.2 lakhs will be given to the players on a quarterly basis to meet their out of pocket expenses, treating injuries and even smaller but very important elements like local travel for themselves and their parents/ family members 
Support and skill trainings at KHELO INDIA accredited Academies. For the first time ever, in order to create a strong ecosystem for nurturing the talent, various private, State and Sports Authority of India academies have been accredited. The High Powered Committee accredited 21 non-SAI academies as well. The list of accredited academies is available on the SAI website. 
The plan is to develop more such academies so that young athletes can get access to the best training without having to travel long distances. The accredited academies will look after the training, boarding and tournament expenses of the athletes. 
It was also decided that the academies will be divided into three categories. To encourage excellence, there will be gap analysis which will offer these academies opportunities for upgradation. At the same time there will be a strong review mechanism for academies on a periodical basis. Academies that do not maintain desired standards and fulfill the performance criteria, may be delisted. 
The High Powered Committee also decided that a strong performance management system would be in place and performance be rewarded. If athletes are not fulfilling this criterion and coming up to the requisite standards, they may be weeded out from the academies. 
It was also decided that athletes must report injury immediately so that timely rehabilitation can be offered. The high-powered committee also decided to put into place a robust performance monitoring system to get the best out of everyone involved in the system. 

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



INDIA AND THE WORLD


21.1. BRICS stand up for multilateral trading system under WTO
Livemint, 26 Jul. 2018, Asit Ranjan Mishra

BRICS leaders said the multilateral trading system is facing “unprecedented challenges” and urged countries to keep the world economy open

New Delhi: Leaders of the five BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—on Thursday exhorted countries to abide by the rules and commitments of the multilateral trading system under the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the wake of unilateral tariff hikes imposed by US President Donald Trump, which has kick-started a trade war.

In their joint declaration at the 10th BRICS Summit at Johannesburg, leaders of the five countries said the multilateral trading system is facing “unprecedented challenges” and urged countries to keep the world economy open so that the benefits of globalization can be shared by all countries and people. The International Monetary Fund has estimated the ongoing trade war could cost the world $430 billion by 2020.

With the US blocking appointment of new appellate body members to the highest adjudicating body at the WTO, BRICS countries raised concerns holding that the impasse could paralyse the dispute settlement system and undermine the rights and obligations of member countries. “We recall that the WTO Dispute Settlement System is a cornerstone of the multilateral trading system and is designed to enhance security and predictability in international trade. We, therefore, urge all members to engage constructively to address this challenge as a matter of priority,” the leaders held.

In an oblique reference to Trump’s threat to attack Iran, BRICS nations cautioned that no country should enhance its security at the expense of the security of others. “Faced with international challenges requiring our cooperative efforts, we reiterate our commitment to shaping a more fair, just and representative multipolar international order to the shared benefit of humanity, in which the general prohibition of the use of force is fully upheld and which excludes the imposition of unilateral coercive measures outside the framework of the UN Charter,” they maintained.

Briefing media, T.S. Tirumurthy, secretary (economic relations) at the ministry of external affairs said Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his interventions highlighted the importance of reforming multilateralism including the United Nations Security Council and proposed a global portable social security network to enable easy movement of skilled professionals across the globe.

In his plenary speech, Modi called for greater collaboration among BRICS economies on the fourth industrial revolution as it could be the biggest disrupter going forward. The fourth industrial revolution is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

“In this regard, we must share best practices and policies. Keeping in mind the technical changes happening now and anticipated in the future for BRICS countries and for the entire world, I would like to suggest that our ministers must discuss this in detail and consult with experts,” Modi said.


21.2. Can the multilateral trading system be saved?
Livemint, 26 Jul. 2018, Montek Singh Ahluwalia

Bilateral trade deals cannot create an environment conducive to trade expansion in a world where much of trade consists of global value chains that stretch across several countries

US President Donald Trump has imposed unilateral tariff increases on some of the US’s major trading partners and there are threats of more increases to come. Retaliatory tariffs have also been announced. World Trade Organization (WTO) director general Roberto Azevedo recently said: “Whether or not you call it a trade war, certainly the first shots have been fired.” He went on to say that this is the time for any one concerned about the world trading system to speak up.

A little bit of history
Trump is not the first US president to doubt the effectiveness of the WTO in protecting US interests. The US and other industrialized countries have long felt that with the changing contours of global trade and economic integration, the only way trade can be seen as fair is if it comes with deeper integration on issues such as consumer safety standards, labour standards, intellectual property standards, etc. Developing countries have strongly opposed these “behind the borders” measures.

Since the consensus rule on which the WTO works made it impossible for the industrialized countries to make progress in this area within the WTO, they turned to plurilateral arrangements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with East Asia and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe.

Multilateralism was replaced by plurilateralism, but with the WTO dispute settlement mechanism still available to settle disputes within the new arrangements. 

The US effectively used its leadership capacity to mobilize a group of “likeminded countries”, covering 60% or so of world trade, to subscribe to higher standards, presenting larger developing economies, especially China, with a fait accompli. They could apply to join the new grouping with the new rules, or stay outside with correspondingly less market access.

Trump has abandoned this effort, which was a signature achievement of the Barack Obama administration. He has pulled out of TPP and is threatening to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). He has an instinctive preference for bilateral deals, presumably because he feels the muscle of the US can be used to bring other partners to heel.

Can bilateralism succeed?
The problem is that bilateral trade deals cannot create an environment conducive to trade expansion in a world where much of trade consists of global value chains that stretch across several countries. Each export or import includes many components imported from elsewhere. For trade based on global value chains to flourish, what is needed is a common set of rules for all countries participating in the value chain. This is best achieved by a multilateral agreement or, as a second best, a plurilateral agreement that is sufficiently inclusive.

Some of the protectionist sentiment in industrialized countries is driven by mistaken notions. The most common of these is that trade imbalances reflect unfair trade policies followed by others. In fact, they are the consequence of excess aggregate demand, which spills over into the balance of payments, and the solution lies in macro economic policy, not trade policy. There are unfair trade policies which need to be curbed, but mere existence of a trade deficit does not prove unfair trade policies.

A second misconception is that unemployment in some sectors justifies protectionist action. In fact, much of the unemployment in individual sectors in the US is the result of structural and technological changes which have altered competitiveness, generating more employment in sectors where the US is highly competitive (e.g. the high-tech sectors) while reducing it in others where it is no longer competitive. The loss of employment in individual sectors is a genuine problem, but the solution lies in migration, reskilling and regional restructuring, not restricting trade. Trade restrictions will only lower incomes and demands elsewhere in the world, which, in turn, will lower the demand for high-tech exports from the US, and, to that extent, reduce some of the new employment being created in the US economy.

There is also a more general apprehension that new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, will lead to the elimination of a large percentage of jobs that currently exist. The prospect of job losses as a result of technology change cannot be ruled out, but again the optimal response is not protection. All this is simple economics 101 and is being mentioned in the US policy debate but apparently to no effect. If the US politics pushes the administration to act against the country’s own long-term interest, there is not much that the rest of the world can do, except wait and hope that better sense, or better politicians, will prevail sooner rather than later.

An alternative explanation
The most optimistic view of the current situation is that we are seeing a tactical “good cop-bad cop” routine. Trump is the bad cop, acting like an unpredictable bully, willing to use the muscle of the US to hurt opponents through punitive tariffs, even if those actions will hurt the US in the longer run. Meanwhile, the “good cop” on his team (possibly US trade representative Robert Lighthizer) is supposed to negotiate solutions which do not destabilize trade, but just tweak the rules a little bit in the US favour.

What might those solutions be? The simplest is the resuscitation of the TPP by tweaking what has been agreed, which would enable Trump to claim he has won a much better deal than his predecessor did. He has enough credibility among the relevant voters to pull it off. Such tactics would rightly be resented by other TPP members, but they may be willing to be arm-twisted to bring the TPP back to life. This is especially so since recent developments in the region have greatly enhanced their concerns about Chinese intentions.

Another possibility is for plurilateral agreements, within the WTO, so as to address one of the concerns which the US has often expressed— that its intellectual property is being “stolen”. Japan and Europe have a shared interest in this area and it is quite conceivable that some kind of plurilateral agreement could be evolved which would provide greater protection.

Finally, the US has often complained of exchange rate manipulation as a form of unfair trade. Exchange rate manipulation is recognized as a problem in the articles of both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the WTO, but the arrangements to handle it inspire little confidence. The IMF is specifically mandated to identify cases of currency manipulation, but it has not evolved a criteria that would provide a transparent basis for concluding that there is manipulation. In any case, it has no punitive powers to discourage such behaviour.

The WTO can legitimize trade retaliation against a country that is found to be engaging in currency manipulation. However, the finding of currency manipulation has to be determined by the IMF. There is obviously room here for clarifying procedures and streamlining them to facilitate “legitimate multilaterally sanctioned action” against unfair trade.

Implications for India

Can India respond to Azevedo’s call that countries that care about the system should speak up in its defence? One possibility is that we should use the G20 Summit, to be held in Argentina in November, to have a full discussion on the multilateral trading system at the Summit level.

The communique of the Hamburg Summit in 2017, which was attended by Trump, talked of “fighting protectionism including all unfair trade practices... (and recognizing)...the role of legitimate trade defence instruments in this regard”. It also mentioned the “crucial role of the rules-based international trading system”. These sentiments were repeated in the G7 communique issued in Quebec on 9 June, but Trump, having earlier agreed to the communique, resided from it when he heard the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, say in his press conference that Canada would be forced to retaliate against the recent US tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel. The G20 summit provides an opportunity for reaffirming these principles, with Trump on board.

The G20 could also initiate work to give a new thrust to identifying a core package of reforms that would reassure the industrialized countries that their concerns are not being ignored, while also responding to some of the concerns raised by developing countries. Perhaps an eminent persons group, set up by the summit, which reports back to the G20 Summit in Tokyo in 2019, might produce some concrete ideas of a grand bargain which could be taken up in the WTO.

The G20 at the summit level was extremely effective after the financial crisis in 2008 when it delivered results which were not forthcoming from the G20 finance ministers meet. If the world is indeed on the brink of trade wars, it is time for the G20 Summit to get into action again.

Reaching an agreement on trade will be more difficult than in the IMF and the World Bank. These institutions require only a decision of the boards, based on weighted voting. The US vote share allows it to veto anything it doesn’t want, but once the US is on board, anything the G20 collectively agrees on will sail through. This is not true of the WTO, where decisions are by consensus. However, a consensus among the G20, which account for 80% of world trade, would create a strong basis for action.

This is also the right time to reconsider the consensus rule and let decisions in the WTO be taken on the basis of a weighted majority vote, with the weights being the share of trade in goods and services. These shares can be recomputed every five years. A high enough qualifying majority, say 85%, should be good enough.

Finally, in a world where dark clouds are gathering over multilateral trade, India would do well to accelerate its integration into regional groups such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement which we have been negotiating for far too long.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia was the deputy chairman of the erstwhile Planning Commission. Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com.


22.1. Hindalco’s US arm buys Aleris for $2.58 billion
Livemint, 26 Jul. 2018, Tania Thomas

Post the Aleris acquisition, Hindalco-Novelis will become the world’s largest aluminium downstream player with a combined capacity of 4.7 million tonnes

Mumbai: Billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Hindalco Industries Ltd has agreed to buy US aluminium sheet maker Aleris Corp. at an enterprise value of $2.58 billion to create the world’s second-largest aluminium maker.

The acquisition will help Hindalco expand sales in the lucrative automotive and aerospace segments, and is the Indian aluminium maker’s second major overseas acquisition after the purchase of Novelis for $6 billion in 2007. On completion of the purchase of Ohio-based Aleris, Hindalco’s consolidated revenue will rise to about $21 billion.

“The acquisition of Aleris is a great strategic move by Hindalco-Novelis,” said Anjani K. Agrawal, partner and global steel leader, EY. “The timing seems opportune as capital investments by Aleris within the US will be leveraged in a more favourable trade policy environment.”

Agrawal was referring to the Trump administration’s decision to impose a blanket 10% tariff on aluminium imports.

Hindalco agreed to pay $775 million in cash for Aleris and absorb debt of $1.8 billion. The purchase will be fully debt-funded.

“The acquisition of Aleris is the next phase of our aluminium value added products growth strategy. This will solidify our position as the world’s No.1 aluminium value-added products player,” Birla, chairman of Hindalco, said on Thursday. “Post this acquisition, we are well placed to serve our customers across geographies in automotive and now the high-end aerospace segments.”

Aleris has long-term supply contracts with plane makers Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier. The acquisition will also give Hindalco access to the aluminium supply market for the building and construction segments.


Mint first reported about Hindalco’s interest in Aleris in September.

The acquisition adds debt of around $2.6 billion to Hindalco’s book, taking its total debt to around $6 billion. However, the company expects to halve debt to about $3 billion in the next two years as investments in Aleris start to generate returns.

In the past five years, Birla has realigned his businesses to reduce debt, unlock value and improve returns to investors. Birla’s UltraTech Cement Ltd has moved aggressively to acquire local cement makers anticipating a demand pick-up led by the government’s thrust on infrastructure development. While the merger of group companies AB Nuvo and Grasim and demerger of Aditya Birla Finance was aimed at unlocking value for investors, the move to merge the group’s telecom unit, Idea Cellular Ltd, with Vodafone India Ltd is aimed at taking on Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. On Thursday, the Vodafone-Idea merger got the final approval from the government.

Hindalco agreed to pay $775 mn in cash for Aleris and absorb debt of $1.8 billion. The purchase will be fully debt-funded
The company said the acquisition of Aleris will be through Hindalco’s US subsidiary Novelis.

There is also an earn-out clause, which rewards both parties for performance beyond the base business plan during CY2018-20 for North America. Any excess revenue during this period will be split evenly between Novelis and Aleris, with the cap set at $50 million.

The deal is expected to close in 9-15 months, subject to regulatory approvals in the US, European Union and Asia.

Since last summer, Birla has been scouting for acquisition targets to shore up overseas sales of value-added products. US-based Aleris and Constellium, a Dutch maker of aluminium products, were reportedly on the radar. The owners of Aleris—Oaktree Capital Group and Apollo Global Management—were on the verge of selling the company to Zhongwang, China’s largest aluminium maker but the deal collapsed at the last minute because of national security concerns raised by American authorities.


22.2. Pharma exports to cross USD 19 bn in FY19: Pharmexcil
PTI, Aug. 13, 2018

Hyderabad: Pharmaceutical exports from the country are expected to cross USD 19 billion in worth during the current fiscal despite muted growth in the North American markets, according to Pharmexcil, a body under Union Commerce Ministry.

Pharma exports fetched USD 17.27 billion in the previous fiscal and this year it was expected to be between USD 19 billion and USD 20 billion, Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council (Pharmexcil), Director General Uday Bhaskar said.

During the first quarter of the current fiscal, pharma exports clocked an increase of 17.76 per cent to USD 4.6 billion against USD 3.9 billion during the corresponding quarter a year ago, he said.

"Last year we had 2.92 per cent growth in Pharma exports.

We are expecting that we may reach USD 19 billion to USD 20 billion in the year 2018-19. Old markets are getting revived and we are also entering into new markets," Bhaskar told PTI.

He said most of the issues with regards to the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA), which had impacted exports from India in the first five months of last fiscal, were getting resolved.

"Chinese market is also opening up. We are working on that. China has removed tariff on certain cancer drugs. All these create conducive atmosphere for Indian drug exporters," he said.

Bhaskar said Pharmexil had been advising drug manufacturers in the country to look for emerging markets to offset the US impact.

North America, the largest market for Indian Pharma exporters, witnessed a negative growth of 7.35 per cent to USD 5.35 billion in FY 18 against USD 5.77 billion in the previous year.
It constitutes over 30 per cent of Indian pharma exports followed by Africa and the European Union with 19.37 per cent and 15.92 per cent respectively.

However, during the first quarter ending June 30, exports to North America registered 17.67 per cent growth to USD 1.40 billion, Bhaskar added.

The Pharmexil was also taking a business delegation to China later this month to tap the potential of the Asias largest economy following some regulatory changes in the neighbouring country, he said.

"China made zero duty on anti-cancer drugs. They also simplified product registration procedures... there are some proactive steps by the Chinese Government," he said.

Pharma exports to China during the last fiscal registered a growth of over 37 per cent to USD 200 million against USD 145.5 million in 2016-17, according to Pharmexil statistics.

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


23.1. US upgrades India's status as trading partner on par with its Nato allies
Livemint, Aug. 01, 2018

New Delhi: The US has upgraded India’s status to a trading partner equal to its trusted North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) allies, opening the doors for India to import a range of state-of-the-art defence hardware and cutting edge technologies that it needs to propel its economic growth to the next level.

An announcement to this effect was made by US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross on Monday at the first Indo-Pacific Business Forum weeks ahead of the inaugural India-US “2+2” dialogue that will bring together Indian and US defence and foreign ministers in New Delhi on 6 September.

The move, which comes almost two years after India was designated a major defence partner of the US, will speed up the sale of high-tech defence and non-defence products that are otherwise subject to strict controls and licensing.

India is the only country in South Asia to be upgraded in this manner and is the third such country in Asia behind Japan and South Korea to be moved to the Strategic Trade Authorisation (STA)-1 category by the department of commerce, which includes US allies such as Britain, Australia, Canada, Poland and Norway.

Till recently, India was classified as an STA-2 country, which meant it had to seek clearances for various kinds of technology buys or imports.

The Indian foreign ministry welcomed the announcement.

“It is a logical culmination to India’s designation as a major defence partner of the US and a reaffirmation of India’s impeccable record as a responsible member of the concerned multilateral export control regimes,” Indian foreign ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar said in New Delhi.

“This step will further facilitate India-US trade and technology collaboration in defence and high technology areas. We look forward to the US side operationalising the decision at an early date,” Kumar said.

The US has granted STA-1 status to only 36 countries, most of whom are Nato or key non-Nato allies. The STA-1 status expands the scope of exports. It will enable American companies to export more high-technology items under a streamlined licence exception that does not require individual licences, subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). All licences needed for a project can be acquired with one go ahead from the US rather single licences for each significant technology sales.

“This (designation) was something that was in the works,” said Arun Singh, former Indian ambassador to the US. “It follows from the US designating India as a major defence partner. This is will help India access sophisticated US technology” in terms of defence hardware, Singh said.

“It shows that the push to accelerate strategic ties that started in the Obama presidency is being carried forward by the Trump administration and in that there is continuity despite some issues on the economic side,” he said.

“India has progressively strengthened its export controls. It is today a member of three of four export control regimes—the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement and on the nuclear side in conformity with Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) guidelines,” said Rakesh Sood, a former foreign ministry official dealing with nuclear and disarmament issues.

“With growing engagement through regular meetings of these groups, the comfort level of other countries about the robustness of Indian systems and practices has increased,” he said.

Ross said India had been granted “Strategic Trade Authorization status STA-1” which is a “very important status under our export control regime and acknowledges the US-India security and economic relationship.”

The move, which will reduce the number of licences needed for US exports to India, means India can get easy access to the latest defence technologies, according to the US department of commerce website.

Ross said the new status would provide India “greater supply chain efficiency, both for defence, and for other high-tech products,” the lack of which affected nearly $9.7 billion worth of goods India could have exported from the US over the last seven years.

In the past 15 years, the US has emerged as one of the major defence hardware suppliers to India with New Delhi buying almost $15 billion worth of armaments from the US.

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


24.1. India doubles import tax on over 300 textile products to 20%, may hit China
Livemint, 7 Aug. 2018, Rajendra Jhadav and Sudarshan Varadhan, Reuters

A hike in import duty is expected to provide relief to the domestic textile industry, which has been hit by a rise in imports of certain products

New Delhi: India doubled the import tax on more than 300 textile products to 20% on Tuesday as the world’s biggest producer of cotton tries to curb rising imports from China.

It was the second tax hike on textiles in as many months after an increase on other products including fibre and apparels last month.

The moves are expected to provide relief to the domestic textile industry, which has been hit by cheaper imports. India’s total textile imports jumped by 16% to a record $7 billion in the fiscal year to March 2018. Of this, about $3 billion were from China.

The government did not disclose details of the 328 textile products that will be subject to the duty increase announced on Tuesday.

Rising imports sent India’s trade deficit with China in textile products to a record high $1.54 billion in 2017/18, alarming industry officials as India had been until recently a net exporter of textile products to China.

Sanjay Jain, president of the Confederation of Indian Textile Industry, told Reuters he did not expect China to retaliate to the Indian duty increases as it still has a trade surplus with India.

He said India’s textile product imports could fall to $6 billion in 2018/19 as a result of the tax hike to 20%.

India’s imports of textile products from Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia also jumped in the last few years as they are not subject to any duty under free trade agreements (FTA) signed by India with these countries.

The 20% duty will not be applicable to products sourced from those countries due to the FTA, Jain said.

Industry officials say in the last few months Chinese fibre has been shipped to Bangladesh and processed and exported to India with zero duty.

“Rules of origin need to be implemented for textile products. Otherwise Chinese products will land from other countries,” said a Mumbai-based garment exporter, who declined to be named.

Jain said India’s textile and garment exports could rise 8% to $40 billion in 2018/19 due to a weak rupee and as the government is expected to introduce incentives to boost overseas sales.

India’s trade differences with the United States have also been rising since President Donald Trump took office.

India, the world’s biggest buyer of US almonds, in June decided to raise import duties on almonds and some other US imports by 20%, joining the European Union and China in retaliating against Trump’s tariff hikes on steel and aluminium. The increased tariff on US goods will be applicable from 18 September.


24.2. India watching China’s measures to ease drug-import norms
BusinessLine, 9 Aug. 2018, Amiti Sen

Keen to seize the opportunity to export pharmaceuticals to China, the Commerce Ministry is following up with Beijing the steps being taken to ease imports of pharmaceuticals from India after a recent meeting between the Chinese regulator and Indian industry on the issue.

“In June, pharmaceutical exporters from India had meetings with representatives from the China Food & Drugs Administration (CFDA) on the problems being faced by them in the Chinese market. China has now agreed to another visit by an Indian pharmaceutical delegation to Shanghai later this month. The Commerce Ministry is trying to follow up on the matter to expedite action on easing of regulations,” a government official told BusinessLine.

At the joint economic group meeting, chaired by the Trade Ministers of India and China, earlier this year in New Delhi, pharmaceuticals was one of the sectors, in addition to rice and IT, which were highlighted by India as the areas where China could increase its imports in order to address the growing trade deficit which has crossed $60 billion. Indian generic exporters have been finding it difficult to enter the Chinese market as the clearance process can taken up to five years and there are also problems related to commercialisation of a drug.

“In the June meeting, the CFDA showed its willingness to take steps to speed up clearances. It needs to be seen what steps have been taken to achieve that,” the official said. The Commerce Ministry is in touch with the CFDA on the issue, he added.

Meagre exports

Because of the non-tariff barriers, Indian companies exported pharmaceuticals worth just $27 million to China in 2017-18, which was less than 2 per cent of its total exports of drugs worth $17 billion. On the other hand, India annually imports intermediates and APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) from China worth $2 billion.

Anti-cancer drugs

China recently exempted 28 anti-cancer drugs from import duties, but India can take advantage only when the regulatory hurdles are removed.

“The pharmaceutical delegation visit to China later in August is to focus on anti-cancer drugs and antibiotics, among others. We certainly hope that changes are made in Chinese regulations so that exports can start soon. The Indian Embassy in Beijing is also keeping tab on the developments,” the official said.


25.1. After 12 years, Indra Nooyi steps down as Pepsi CEO
BusinessLine, 6 Aug. 2018

She transformed the beverage giant in line with health trend

Indra Nooyi is stepping down as CEO of PepsiCo Inc, the beverage major she served for 24 years, including 12 years at the helm. Perhaps the most famous India-born female CEO who made it to the top in corporate America, she will hand over the reins in October to Ramon Laguarta, president for global operations, strategy, public policy and government affairs and a 22-year Pepsi veteran. Nooyi will remain Chairman until early 2019.

In an interview to Bloomberg, Nooyi, 62, said, “I’ve had a wonderful time being CEO, but at some point you sit back and say, look, it’s a responsible move to effect an orderly transition and to have somebody else take over the leadership of this company. Being a CEO requires strong legs and I feel like I ran two legs of a relay race and I want somebody else with nice strong legs and sharp eyes to come and lead this company.”

Born in Chennai and educated at Madras Christian College, Nooyi, who earned an MBA from IIM-Calcutta and a second master’s degree at Yale, spearheaded PepsiCo’s transition from a pure-play beverage company to a food-and-beverage giant, a move she had initiated when she was the CFO.

Nooyi also drove the agenda to add healthier drinks and snacks to the Pepsi portfolio, conscious of the broader societal shift toward healthier foods. She characterised PepsiCo’s product range as ‘fun for you’ (Pepsi, Lays, Cheetos); ‘better for you’ (baked Lays, Diet Pepsi etc) and ‘good for you’ (Quaker Oats and Tropicana).

Nooyi leaves at a time when consumption of carbonated soft drinks in the US has dropped to its lowest level in over 30 years as consumers avoid sugary drinks, a Bloomberg report noted.

In a statement on PepsiCo’s India business, Nooyi said, “I’m especially proud of the great work we’ve done in India to transform our portfolio to include more nutritious products, working with and supporting thousands of Indian farmers, and providing an inclusive workplace…”

Under Nooyi’s leadership, PepsiCo’s revenue grew by more than 80 per cent as it added a new billion-dollar brand every other year. She was also chief architect of PepsiCo’s vision of Performance with Purpose.

The Ethisphere’s list

Ethics and integrity were important values she fostered in the company and under her leadership, PepsiCo consistently made it to Ethisphere's list of the World's Most Ethical Companies. Former PepsiCo India Chairman & CEO, D Shivakumar, says Indra always was customer-centric and would always reach out to people within and outside the organisation.

Nooyi was a frequent visitor to India, speaking at various fora and meeting top bureaucrats and ministers. She was one of the main speakers at AdAsia 2011, where the theme was dealing with uncertainty; her message — that volatility is the new normal, and business leaders must learn the skill of adaptability — holds true to this day.

Leaders, she said, had to operate in the present and yet be focussed on the future. ”Uncertain times require us to have a long-term horizon. It is companies with a clear long-term mission that will thrive. But at the same time, investors need great performance, here and now. So we have to work on two time-scales at once,” she said.

Nooyi also told the forum that in volatile times, we need to be ambitious. “We must make big changes to big things,” she had said. That is something she attempted to do all the time in her long career at PepsiCo Inc.

Published on August 06, 2018


25.2. Independence Day special: A to Z of Independent India
Livemint, 15 Ago 2918, Tunku Varadarajan

From America to Zulm, a guide to independent India on the nation’s 72nd Independence Day


Heaven forbid this list be considered exhaustive, or even objective. It is a very personal exercise in distillation, an attempt to gather together the ideas and themes—some uplifting, some most definitely not—that define independent India. To keep the contentiousness down to a minimum, and also to hush those who would quarrel over why their favourite personalities aren’t on this list, I’ve chosen to exclude people altogether.

A IS FOR AMERICA, the country India once so loved to hate and now, in many ways, so hates to love. In the last quarter-century, as India has abandoned its autarky—a disastrous foray into self-sufficiency that blighted the economy for a generation—it has grown closer to the global hegemon it once disparaged, and whose capitalism it postured to despise. We’re not yet Washington’s allies—a word whose flavour of commitment seems to give India the jeepers—but ever-closer “strategic partners.”

B IS FOR BOLLYWOOD, India’s fantastical alter ego, a place where dreams dictate outcomes and the imagination rules supreme. So many drab and sterile Indian lives would be unbearable without the escape that cinema offers. Meanwhile in Real India, the BJP peddles its own stern dream, a majoritarian credo that makes some in India quicken with religious pride and others quake with a fear of the future. The party has remade India in lightning-quick time, its zeal apparent for all to see in its adamant, nationalist blueprint.

C IS FOR THE COW, A gentle creature in whose name messianic activists think nothing of lynching men in broadest daylight. Has there been another animal anywhere in history that so completely embodies the politics of an entire race than the modern Indian cow? Cricket, too, offers a portrait of India. For decades, it was the one sphere in which the country competed successfully against the wider world. Today, it gives us a tableau of everything Indian: money, aspiration, competition, corruption—the game has it all. Sometimes, it even has class.

D IS FOR DIASPORA, those Indians who ventured abroad to make better lives for themselves in the years when the country was handicapped by its own regulatory policies. They live in the United Kingdom, the US, Canada and West Africa, and especially in the sheikhdoms of the Gulf, where the sturdiest of India’s sons and daughters go to make a living amid oil-addled people who treat them with contempt. The diaspora is India’s trump card abroad, frequently wealthy advocates for their land of origin. Back in India, the Dalitshave surged across the Manu-mandated boundaries of Indian society to remake Indian political discourse. Their leaders can be just as venal as the “better-born” politicians, but there is no doubt that the hundreds of millions of Indians from the lowest castes have more clout today than they’ve ever had in India’s infinite history.

E IS THE ECONOMY, India’s bane in the socialist years after independence. In 1991, destitution forced the government to ferry gold on planes to Western banks merely to keep India afloat. The reforms that followed transformed the country into a global powerhouse. The challenge remains scary: can India really add the million new jobs a month it needs just to keep pace with demographic growth? Key to India’s international success has been English, the language of her colonisers, to be sure, but today an economic asset for which we should be grateful. Hindi is all very well for those showboating U.N. speeches by our prime and foreign ministers, but as a language it keeps India unworldly and provincial. Indians know this all too well, as they clamour to send their children to English-medium schools. (No one understands the market better than an aspirational parent.)

F IS FOR FOREIGN POLICY, India’s most pretentious suit in its first free decades, in which the overweening pieties of the independence movement transformed themselves into non-alignment, a policy of global moral neutrality that ended up pushing India into the embrace of the Soviet Union. India is now rid of its “Sar pe lal topi Rusi, phir bhi dil hai Hindustani” mode of global relations, having acquired a hard-headedness that better suits the word’s current turbulence. Other Indian principles haven’t changed, however: the family is still the bedrock of Indian life, whether in politics, business or matrimonial choice (in the last of which the product Fair and Lovelycontinues to play a distinctly unlovely role).

G IS FOR THE GIRL CHILD, India’s national shame, a being into whose body and soul the country pours its neuroses. In a male-mad land, girls are frequently aborted; often killed at birth; and invariably under-resourced by their own families in comparison with boy-children. Girls get less food to eat, less parental attention and love, and often little access to decent schooling if it’s a choice between buying an education for a son or a daughter. An Indian boy imbibes misogyny with his mother’s milk—and from his father’s example. There are impressive exceptions, of course: If only Rajasthan would learn from Kerala, or Haryana from Manipur.

H IS FOR HINDUTVA, AN ideology by which a mostly gentle religion has been transformed into an evangelical political program which borrows many tactical moves from the extreme versions of the Islam it so despises. A casualty in all of this isn’t just the essence of Hinduism—tolerant, and non-monolithic—but also India’s history, which has come under sweeping revisionist pressure from ideologues who would question the benevolence of 17th-century Muslim rulers even as they rename roads and railway stations. (No account of modern India would be complete without a mention of homeopathy: What would Indian life be without those sweet little white balls wrapped in paper “pudiyas”?)

I IS FOR THE INDIAN National Congress, India’s steward—with only brief interruptions—until 2014, when it collapsed ignominiously in the face of a BJP electoral onslaught. It is fashionable, now, to pillory the Congress for its many mistakes—and yes, the party committed some howlers—but in the rush to denigrate the party of Nehru, critics are guilty of blindness to its very many merits.

J IS FOR JAPAN, with which India has forged a notable friendship in the last decade. The Japanese had tended to preach to India in the past—particularly on nuclear matters—but the emergence of the Chinese threat has led to a new appreciation in Tokyo of India’s worth. J is also for the Janata Party, a ragbag assemblage of opposition forces that gave many Indians their first taste of non-Congress rule. Its government collapsed in just under two years, being a marriage of misfits brought together by jugaad, the Great Indian Coping Skill (rather overrated, in this writer’s humble opinion).

K IS FOR KAL, THE HINDI word for both ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow,’ an emblem of India’s timelessness as well as its hopeless management of time. Hopeless management, alas, is also the only way to describe India’s handling of Kashmir, whose history as a part of independent India has been scarred by broken political promises, occasionally rigged elections, and, from the 1990s onward, a state of military siege that is unseemly to behold and a stain on Indian democracy. Blame must lie squarely with the Congress party, which “broke” the state so profoundly by its mishandling that it is now almost impossible to “fix.”

L IS FOR LATHI-CHARGE, India’s malevolently poetic contribution to the vocabulary of public order. Lathis, or long bamboo staves, are wielded with abandon by energized policemen on the backs, heads, buttocks and ankles of unruly crowds. The results are uneven, and like so much else done by the Indian police, scarcely conform to any broadly recognized corpus of human rights. A more palatable form of assault conducted in modern India has been the one in the cause of literacy, as the country has transformed itself from a place where only 12% could read and write in 1947 to 80% today. The results here, too, are uneven, with some states still mired in rates of illiteracy that should shame India, and with women being markedly less literate (on average) than men.

M IS FOR MUSLIMS, India’s largest religious minority and currently the largest group of political “step-children” in the country. The ruling party has made its distaste for Muslims abundantly clear, and has often had the support of a pliant and jingoistic media in its politics of Muslim-bashing. (Not every newspaper or TV channel is complicit, of course, and journalism in India continues to be practiced with immense bravery and integrity by those who don’t toe the government’s line.) M is also for Maoism, the first shoddy product exported by China to India, and whose practitioners wage war against the state in tracts of ungovernable rural hinterland.

N STANDS FOR INDIA’S NEIGHBOURS, who, collectively, are a source of a constant national migraine. They can be divided into good and bad, the former being Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka, the latter China and Pakistan. India has tended to mess up its relations with the good ones, behaving much too often in ways that are big brotherly. The bad neighbours are the ones with which India has fought wars in the past, and with which it could conceivably (some say almost certainly) fight again in the future. It doesn’t help India that China and Pakistan are locked in a strategic embrace; but there is a silver lining here for India: What will become of their relations as Pakistan falls deeper into China’s usurious debt?

O IS FOR OFFICIOUS officials, a category in which India has attained world class. One might argue that Indian officials picked up the habit of riding rough-shod over the public from the British administrators before them, but the ease in which Indian government treat civilians with contempt suggests an inherent skill that needed no colonial prompting to come to the fore. Alongside this hectoring is the expectation, of course, that all those dealing with officialdom must be obsequious.

P IS FOR POKHRAN, the mofussil speck-on-the-map in Rajasthan where India conducted its first nuclear test—pardon me, peaceful nuclear implosion—in 1974. That decision earned India global ire, but edged it into the ranks of nuclear-weapon states. And why not? After all, China, no friend of India, was nuclear-armed, too. The problem of course is that Pakistan—by begging, borrowing, and mostly stealing technology—responded with nuclear tests of its own, making India in vulnerable in perpetuity to Pakistani nuclear blackmail and brinkmanship. A nuclear option of another kind was foisted on India by its judiciary, when, in 1979, it introduced the concept of public interest litigation into Indian jurisprudence. This well-meaning idea, intended to increase access to justice by doing away with more onerous rules of standing, has largely misfired, turning India’s court’s into chaupaals and unleashing a cadre of litigious mischief-mongers.

Q IS FOR THE QUEUING, a practice which no amount of British rule was able to institute successfully in India. A gathering of Indians at a vending booth, or an office counter or bus stop, is a clamorous sight to behold, as people jostle, barge, wheedle and bully their way to the front. Any attempt to remonstrate (by a more docile queuer) is met with befuddlement or mirth, or sometimes even pity, as the recalcitrant non-queuers conclude that the decorous plaintiff will never be served if he holds fast to his belief in an orderly line.

R IS FOR THE BRITISH RAJ, which took from India as much as it gave, but which left India better equipped to cope with the vicissitudes of Independence than many other post-colonial nations. The railways (treated as a cliché now, but no less important for that), the rule of law, and an elite education system offered an infrastructural and intellectual spine to a newly independent nation, and (in spite of what the author Shashi Tharoor might say in his book damning Britain) many of India’s modern achievements have sprung from those British foundations. Mr. Tharoor, for his part, comes close to asserting that Britain did to India what Indians now do with staggering abandon to other Indians—which is rape. Sexual violence against women is a national epidemic and disgrace, with some recent incidents of exceptional violence vaulting India to international infamy.

S IS FOR SECULARISM, so often prefaced with the jeering word “pseudo-“ by its Hindutvavaadi detractors. A key ingredient in independent India’s modus vivendi, the s-word has come under attack as a concept that led to a “coddling” of India’s religious minorities (the Muslims, in particular). In truth, Indian secularism properly understood is a refreshingly permissive idea that makes room for all religions in the public sphere; unlike French laicity, it does not seek to banish religion from public view, or deprive it of civic dignity. S is also for servants, another great Indian institution, at least for those who have them—and one is hard put to think of any society where the privileged (whose definition is often entirely relative in India) rely so completely on those who must toil to serve them. Entire centuries have passed without Indians of particular classes ever having made their own tea, or their own beds, or cleaned their own bathrooms.

T IS FOR TWITTER, where the intolerant of India gather to harass, harangue and troll their political opponents; and also for television talk-shows, where bully-boy anchors—selected, it seems, from among the most incontinent blowhards in India—conduct shouted debates with energised partisans, the whole performance often resembling the barking of mongrels. The quality of debate is often not much better in India’s parliament, and the startling decline in the country of the persuasive arts reflects not just the plummeting standards of Indian education, but also the closing of the Indian mind.

U IS FOR THE UNITED Nations, the permanent membership of whose Security Council India craves. This elevation will not happen any time soon, what with Germany and Japan competing for the same status. India’s problem: China wields a veto and will never hand India a free gift of this kind—and India’s voting record is often not in consonance with the United States. That said, and even though size isn’t everything, it should become considerably harder to deny India permanent membership once it overtakes China as the most populous country on earth. That, and the small matter of its being the world’s biggest democracy, should make any continued exclusion aesthetically unacceptable.

V IS FOR VARANASI, the most sacred city of the Hindus, which today is a metaphor for a myriad battles—most obviously the one against environmental degradation. History-wars are also being fought here (is there a right for Aurangzeb’s mosque to coexist with an older temple?), as are conflicts over a rapidly eroding syncretic culture (or “tehzeeb”). Lost in all of this, in Varanasi and elsewhere, is a focus on India’s greatest need: vikas, or development. The word has come to form a part of the prime minister’s most ambitious slogan, but the idea behind the slogan seems to have fallen victim to an age-old Indian failing: no meaningful implementation.

W IS FOR WHATSAPP, which Indians use to chat with family and friends, send banal messages to gaggles of well-wishers and, increasingly, to stir mobs up into homicidal frenzy with rumours of cattle-theft or child-lifting. If there is no shortage of canards in India—spread to venomous effect on social media—there is an increasingly deadly scarcity of water. Environmentalists predict that entire Indian cities will run dry in a handful of years if drastic measures aren’t taken to conserve, store and channel water. Drought and the drying up of rivers threaten bitter conflict between the haves and the have-nots—whether it be adjacent states or neighbourhoods within cities—accompanied by mass-migrations of people in search of paani.

X IS FOR XENOMANIA, or an obsession with the foreign, which continues to afflict Indians to a notable extent. This isn’t always a bad thing, and at its most positive level can take the form of an eagerness to learn from those who live in other countries. India has lost some of its envy of foreign lands, the result of a freer economy and greater disposable income. Indians travel abroad as tourists and entrepreneurs, and virtually every senior bureaucrat in Delhi has a son or daughter resident in the United States. All of this makes it harder for politicians to rail against the Foreign Hand the way they used to, and for that we should give thanks.

Y IS FOR THE YESTERYEARS, which nostalgic Indians recall as a time of innocence when couples courted decorously, rap musicians didn’t exist, and item-numbers were absent from Hindi cinema. They forget that there was just one TV channel, that India had no fast bowlers, and that cheese was regarded as a “luxury item.” Today, India exports goods and ideas to the rest of the world, most colourfully yoga, the international propagation of which has become something of a political obsession with the national government. There isn’t an Indian Embassy abroad that hasn’t had a yoga-fest in pursuit of “soft power”, and the sight of paunchy bureaucrats being make to stretch in Indian offices is enough to make one offer a surya namaskar unprompted.

Z IS FOR Z-CATEGORY security, the protection from harm afforded to only the most exalted public figures in India. As for India’s hoi-polloi, they have little choice but to put with their daily dose of zulm, or oppression, which can range from minor (but soul-destroying) indignities at the hands of petty officialdom to outright torture in a police lock-up. India, alas, is no country for the unconnected.

Tunku Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

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