INDIA

The Government of India, the Government of Maharashtra, Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) today signed a loan agreement for a US$ 500 million Mumbai Urban Transport Project-III to improve the network capacity, service quality and safety of the suburban railway system in Mumbai.

The Project is expected to increase network capacity in the region with the reduction in journey time and fatal accidents of commuters. It is estimated that among primary beneficiaries of the project, 22 per cent are female passengers who will benefit from improved safety and quality of service.

The loan agreement was signed by Shri Sameer Kumar Khare, Additional Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, on behalf of the Government of India, Shri Sanjay Kumar, Chief Secretary on behalf of the Government of Maharashtra, Shri R. S. Khurana, Chief Managing Director on behalf of the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation and Shri Rajat Misra, Director General (Acting), Investment Operations on behalf of the AIIB.

Shri Khare said that this project will assist in improved mobility, service quality and safety of passengers of the sub urban railway system of Mumbai, by providing faster, more reliable, and higher quality transport services compared to road-based transport. There will be direct safety benefits to passengers and the public through introduction of trespass control measures.

With a population of 22.8 million (2011), Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is the most populous metropolitan region in India and is expected to reach 29.3 million by 2031 and 32.1 million by 2041. This population growth represents the core driver behind Mumbai’s urban expansion, compelling the state of Maharashtra to prioritize sound urban and infrastructure planning which balances economic activities, mobility as well as the optimization of environmental and social outcomes.

Around 86 per cent of Mumbai commuters rely on public transport. However, supply has not kept pace with rising travel demand. The Mumbai suburban railway network, which carries three quarters of all motorized travel (78 per cent of passenger km or eight million passengers per day) increasing at three per cent annually, suffers from some of the most severe overcrowding in the world. User experience is further compromised by low amenity of carriages, substandard stations and station access, and serious safety concerns. Between 2002-2012, there were more than 36,152 fatalities (on average, 9.9 fatalities per day) and 36,688 injuries on the Mumbai suburban railway network. A key reason for accidents and deaths is trespassing at or between stations as well as overcrowding of both stations and train cars.

AIIB Vice President D.J. Pandian said that this project represents another major step in supporting our member countries in their efforts to provide transport capacity while removing transport bottlenecks, and thus improving the daily commuting experience of millions of Mumbaikars. In line with our Transport Sector Strategy, the Mumbai Urban Transport Project-III will also help in reducing carbon emissions by shifting passengers away from higher-carbon road transport towards efficient and convenient rail-based mobility. In addition, female passengers will benefit from improved safety and quality of service.

The total estimated cost of the project is US$ 997 million, of which US$ 500 million will be financed by the AIIB, US$ 310 million by the Government of Maharashtra and US$ 187 million by Ministry of Railways. The US$ 500 million loan from the AIIB has a 5-year grace period and a maturity of 30 years.

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

2.1. Nutrition is India’s next big headache
Livemint, 25 Aug. 2020, Amir Ullah Khan, Saleema Razvi

Covid could leave behind a silent food crisis that will put the demographic dividend at risk. What can be done?
Food insecurity must be closely monitored in the months ahead. Data sets generated by the national sample survey should include questions on people’s food and nutritional distress

HYDERABAD : Several months into the pandemic, the long-term effects of covid-19 are only just beginning to surface. In at least a small subset of patients, symptoms persist for months, resulting in fatigue and even permanent damage to the lungs, heart or the brain. The long shadow of the pandemic may thus stay with us for many years to come. But it is in the realm of nutritional deficits—amplified substantially by the economic fallouts—where this shadow may be the most pronounced and have the most far-reaching effects. Hunger and malnourishment is tragic in any case, but in the long run, they also strike at the root of the demographic dividend that India has been banking on.

Even if the eventual covid death toll is low, the disease could still play havoc with India’s prospects if it triggers a rise in the share of the population that grows up without adequate nutrition, resulting in an inevitable spike in wasting and stunting. That eventuality would also damage the handsome gains that the country has made in the recent past fighting widespread malnutrition among children and women. The roughly 12 million new entrants into the workforce every year and the 26 million new babies need quality education and, more importantly, adequate food and nutrition to be productive and independent. Neglecting these two requirements will turn the dividend into a disaster. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Oxfam estimates that an additional 100 million Indians are vulnerable to food distress. Those particularly hard hit are women and women-headed households. Many of them will go hungry soon, if not already. The neo-poor, those who had earlier earned decent wages as taxi drivers and hotel workers, are now unable to buy wholesome food.

Surveys and estimates indicate that 30% of urban India has run out of all savings, which means that their food distress will only grow substantially in the months ahead. Rural India, covered by the PMKisan and MGNREGA, has fared relatively better. But with the relentless growth in infections, and the acceleration in the number of job losses, the food crisis striking the country is eerie and silent. In the patriarchal family structure that India has, children (and the girl child in particular) and women will bear the brunt of this calamity. At least 21 million women underwent pregnancy under the shadow of covid. The ripple effects could emerge in various horrifying ways in the future and needs to be addressed right away. The country’s stimulus package promised large amounts of money as loans that will take time to reach the poor, but hunger is an immediate problem as former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan also pointed out recently.

The current reality

Why did malnutrition and malnourishment go up even as the economy started growing at a steady pace after 1991 and at a fast clip after 2004? If per capita incomes were growing all around, and consumption levels were increasing dramatically, why would the average Indian not spend on food and nutrition? The paradox is even more baffling in urban areas. High malnutrition rates are common even in urban India, with nearly 25% stunted. India’s children consume large amounts of carbohydrates, very little protein and almost no fruits or vegetables. The uninformed nutrition debate remains a shouting match between animal versus plantbased food advocates, and what we end up with is a situation where less than 15% of children get eggs to eat and only the rich get to consume dairy products.

It is rare for parents to understand that a balanced diet for a child is at least as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed. The dietary quality of the India population is marked by a declining demand for fruits, vegetables and animal proteins, which are the main source of essential micronutrients in the diet. Disruptions in supply chains during covid also mean limited access to perishable foods particularly. This shortage in supply would automatically lead to households shifting to nutrient-poor diets.

Efforts made through public food distribution programs typically deliver non-perishable staples, oils, and pulses, which could only increase the inclination toward poor-quality diets. The International Food Policy Research Institute’s studies show that nutrient-rich non-staple foods are up to ten times more expensive than staple foods in most poor countries. With reduced incomes, households very quickly move to buying the cheapest calories to eat—the aim being to maintain quantity and not quality. As a result, anaemia, stunting, wasting and other nutritional deficiencies are bound to increase.

And in a country like India, which is already home to the world’s largest population of malnourished children, this effect is going to be even more pronounced. In the 2019 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 102 out of 117 qualifying countries. Even Bangladesh at 88 and Pakistan at 94 perform better than India.

How did India get left behind in this race? Why does India have the highest number of undernourished people in the world (almost 24% of the total)? A comparison among countries in the emerging world shows that China which was at the top at the turn of the century rapidly reduced the numbers of undernourished, while India’s numbers have simply plateaued (see Chart 1). One of the most worrying fallouts of 2020 may be the reversal of even this modest progress in maternal and child health.

The disruption of the cooked meal programme, in particular, could worsen the already existing under-nutrition in children. With schools closing, access to the mid-day meal scheme—a free nutritious meal for approximately 100 million children between the ages of 6-14 years—was also halted.

The Centre had earlier advised states to distribute dry rations to the beneficiaries of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), but national and local lockdowns have led to the closure of many manufacturing units which make the raw materials for the mid-day meal scheme.

Roots of a slide back

Ever since the nutrition crisis was highlighted by the HUNGaMA report and termed a national shame in 2012 by the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, India has seen significant improvements in the indicators. Over the last fifteen years, after the District Level Health Survey in 2004 showed that 53% of children in India’s worst-affected 100 districts were underweight, there has been a steady decline in these numbers.

The mid-day meal scheme, the national health mission, MGNREGA, the rise of women’s self-help groups and a decisive movement by the government toward setting up the POSHAN Abhiyan have all resulted in tangible improvements. Nutrition had finally gotten its due, with rigorous efforts from the government to reduce child mortality and improve nutritional interventions.

The wins have been fairly substantial. In the north-eastern states, where two-thirds of infant deaths occur, persistent communication and outreach have resulted in a significant increase in early initiation of breastfeeding. The percentage of stunted children under 5 came down from 48% in 2005-06 to 38.4% in 2015-16 (see Chart 2).

However, at the same time, there has been a rise in the national share of children who display symptoms of wasting—from 19.8% to 21%. A high increase in the incidence of wasting was noted in Punjab, Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Sikkim. Wasting refers to a process by which a debilitating disease causes muscle and fat tissue to “waste" away. Apart from India, only three countries in the world have wasting above 20%—Djibouti, Sri Lanka, and South Sudan.

Ways forward

Give this mixed progress report and the threat of a pandemic-induced slide back, there are at least some steps that India can take to protect and preserve its demographic dividend.

Firstly, we need to monitor food insecurity closely in the months ahead. Large datasets generated by the national sample survey (NSS) should include detailed questions on people’s food and nutritional distress. We should also carefully record antenatal visits, anganwadi worker outreach and the impact on women’s health. In a situation where we cannot supply mid-day meals, the anganwadi centers should ramp up the provision of dry food ration, and maybe even double or triple the quantity. Cash transfers have been known to have a positive impact on nutritional outcomes and that is what India has not used effectively until now in its pandemic support policy for the poor.

Secondly, the Integrated Disease Surveillance Program (IDSP) is our central disease monitoring network. Curiously, the IDSP’s weekly updates have disappeared after the twelfth week of 2020. The IDSP must continue to publish weekly updates to help keep a check on future disease outbreaks.

Thirdly, on the agriculture front, our godowns are stocked and overflowing with 77 million tonnes of food grains. If not now, when are we going to use this reserve?

Fourthly, immunisation, public health screening, family planning and other such programmes should be resumed fully with physical distancing and other safety protocols in place. The prevention of wasting in children can also be easily integrated into the mandate of the existing health infrastructure, especially in cities.

Finally, given the importance being given to the new National Education Policy (NEP), it is important to underline the fact that it fails to acknowledge the importance of school education in the healthy development of a child. We have 159 million children below 6 years of age and they are so much more vulnerable today that they were last year, with the prospect of high nutritional and learning deficits. We often ignore the strong correlation between educational outcomes and the level of nourishment.

Undernourished children have learning difficulties, are inattentive in class and, in today’s context, have lower immunity levels making them vulnerable to infections. The ICDS should have been underlined in the NEP and financed sufficiently to provide balanced diets, supplements and physical exercise for India’s children.

The economics behind the impact of undernutrition and malnutrition on the demographic dividend needs to be reiterated. Substantial economic returns from investing in interventions to improve the nutritional status are proof that poor nutrition is bound to cause economic losses, especially in India which is a young country. Under-nourished children score poorly on tests of attention, fluency and memory, which is important to consider given the strong linkages between cognitive skills and earnings and income in adulthood. A malnourished workforce, which is unable to work with full efficiency, will keep India’s productivity low and will severely hurt our long-term economic competitiveness.

Amir Ullah Khan is professor of development economics at the MCRHRDI and Saleema Razvi is a senior research economist at the Copenhagen Consensus Center

2.2. The gloomy reality of Gulf returnees
Livemint, 18 Aug. 2020, Nidheesh M.K.

Emigrants have been Kerala’s economic pillar. Now, many have returned and are desperately looking for local jobs
The ensuing social flux may have only just begun to unfold since Kerala’s emigration corridor has been fuelled, for decades, primarily by the desire to acquire 'status'

KOZHIKODE: One day in July, nearly four months after the cruise ship MS Caribbean Princess suspended operations at a port in Miami, Florida, its chef Arun Dev was in a showroom that was being erected in Kerala’s Malappuram. He was busy driving nails into the new wooden shelves.

By the time his 12-hour workday is over, Dev usually has a thick layer of dust all over his body—a sharp contrast to his cruise ship days. Despite longer hours, he earns far less—with a monthly income that hovers around 10% of the regular salary he used to clock while on-board the Caribbean Princess, which abruptly went out of action following the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Since then, Dev has been doing odd jobs back home in Kerala. Erstwhile foreign emigrants like him suddenly populate a broad spectrum of the blue-collar workforce in Kerala’s cities and towns. It’s an eerie reality for the locals. Many types of jobs that had been entirely taken over by migrant out-of-state workers—from street vendors to carpentry work—has a new crop of native faces. And the ensuing social flux may have only just begun to unfold, since Kerala’s emigration corridor has been fuelled, for decades, primarily by a drive to acquire “status".

Dev, for instance, finds his new line of work foreign and frustrating. But for many like him, such jobs have become part of a quest to survive. Even a minimum wage job is better than no job.

“I couldn’t adjust at first," said Dev, in Malayalam. “I used to earn nearly ₹1 lakh on-board the ship. In Kerala, for carpenter jobs, I’m getting ₹700-750 per day (that is the minimum wage, among the highest in India). It is not even a quarter of what I am used to. Still, my fate is better than many of my friends. They are jobless."

At the cusp of the first few phases of unlock back in May, Mint dove into how Kerala may be at the vanguard of change. A sea of people, who have lived in overseas locations for a while, especially in West Asia, were choosing to return home. This reverse globalisation—the story pointed out—could hit the economy of states like Kerala, which is bolstered annually by the remittances that millions of emigrants send back home.

Now that many are back, how has life been since the return? What kind of jobs do they manage to get? How have they dealt with the sweeping changes in their life and lifestyle? In interviews, many who have lost their jobs—some of whom were former employees in the world’s largest companies—spoke about the desperation of finding new work, and cash for immediate needs.

The impact on the economy and wider society is harder to quantify and may take months to unfold. Kerala’s 3.5 million-strong diaspora population, cultivated through a 50-year long emigration history, was among the strongest economic pillars that funded the state’s broad welfareist policies. Now, many of them are at the state’s doorsteps seeking help.

Bitter homecoming

For someone who is 35 years old, it is striking that Dev has never worked in Kerala. Until now, of course. He had gone to a Gulf country at a very early age with dreams of a better life.

The network that he managed to develop in the Gulf led him on to the cruise ship, which belonged to Carnival Corporation & plc, a British-American cruise operator, currently the world’s largest travel leisure company. He worked on a hefty salary and bonus. These days, hourly wage work is Dev’s only option.

Historically, Kerala has seen waves of return migration several times—from the Kuwait war to the Nitaqat movement, and even during the Arab Spring. But the current crisis, which rides on a lot more uncertainty than any other prior instance, is rupturing diaspora families. The first casualty for a Gulf worker who opts for a blue-collar job back in Kerala is his status symbol.

But Dev may be one of the luckier returnees. His friend, KB Bibosh, who was also a chef on the same ship, remains jobless despite trying to open a street-side food stall operated from inside a van.

For Bibosh, who used to specialise in Italian dishes like Ossobuco, making parottas for the neighbourhood was as big a status change as his friend turning into a carpenter. However, he had to shut down the new business within ten days due to the rise in virus cases. His neighbourhood was demarcated as a containment zone by the state.

“My father is an auto-rickshaw driver. My mother and my sister do not work. When I opened the roadside eatery, my mother asked me to rethink it. But I had no other option. Since it is also shut, I am now cutting my spending a lot. I had some savings, which is also fast evaporating," Bibosh said.

The deepening crisis

For those who have returned, each day is filled with several anxieties. Most of them want to go back to their overseas jobs since the wide gulf in income simply cannot be bridged. How long will families, who are used to a certain standard of living, adjust to a new, low-profile lifestyle?

And then there are the larger ripple effects beyond the families themselves. The Kerala government has estimated a fall of at least ₹10,000 crore in annual remittance flows. Local consumption is heavily reliant on these steady monetary flows. It could have an impact on everything from retail footfalls to the health of banks.

Dev and Bibosh, for instance, spoke about the pressure due to their monthly EMIs from housing loans. Both have opted for a moratorium on such loans, which is risky, as they will eventually have to meet additional interest expense.

Already, a diminished spending pattern has become a common factor within the families. “My brother’s wedding was downsized," said Dev. “I postponed some work on my house," said Bibosh. As they expect their salaries to be low or nil for a year or more, they see cutting back on spending as the only way to climb out of the crisis.

Such drastic changes in consumption patterns could affect a lot of people apart from the families themselves, said S. Irudaya Rajan, a migration expert at the Center for Development Studies. It is still too early to quantify the impact, he said.

“The situation is very fluid. Contrary to perception, not so many have returned as was expected… (And) we still do not know when the last man coming from the Gulf, who has lost his job, would arrive," he said.

According to the state government’s task force, of which Rajan is a part of, only about 254,000 expats have returned so far, out of some 500,000 who had originally registered for repatriation. The state estimates that some 50,000 of them may have returned after losing their jobs.

With the Gulf economies reopening at a faster rate than many Indian states, and with Kerala witnessing a resurgence in cases recently, the flow of returnees has reduced to a trickle over the last few weeks. On 9 August, after the crash landing of a repatriation flight which resulted in the death of 17 people, India has also suspended the operation of wide-bodied aircraft at the Calicut International Airport, a major destination for returnees.

Two things could happen next, said Rajan. Many who returned shall adjust without work; living primarily on their savings and hoping that they could return back abroad someday. Only the very poor, for their survival, will enter the job market, he said. “They are becoming delivery boys, drivers, daily wagers... something, just to pass the day."

The crisis has also brought up a lot of new issues that policy-makers had not addressed, or even thought about before. Many returned as if they were getting out of a building on fire, without getting their salary and other dues, said Rajan.

“In the rush, they did not collect what was due to them from the company. This is going to be the hardest part. We have a 50-year long migration pattern, but there is no mechanism to collect their wages. What if these people protest about it tomorrow?" asked Rajan.

The road ahead

Abdul Wahid Mayyeri, a Gulf migrant himself and secretary of the Oruma Kalpakanchery, a collective of around 4,000 expats in the UAE from a single village in Malappuram—Kalpakanchery panchayat—points to some innovative ongoing experiments. The collective was in the news recently for repatriating 183 migrants in a special chartered flight.

The collective is mapping the skill sets of all those who’ve returned and flexing their local contacts to land them jobs. “Many of them were blue-collar workers in the Gulf, so it will be hard to match their salaries back in Kerala. But our first priority is to get them jobs," said Wahid. “Only a thorough rehabilitation exercise can solve this crisis," he said.

On its part, the Kerala government has offered a hand-out of ₹5000 to returnees who have lost their job apart from and a clutch of other sops—free 5kg rice, loans and subsidies for starting their own ventures back home, and so on. A larger programme with further incentives and subsidies for the returnees, called ‘Dream Kerala’, is in the works.

“We have been getting a lot of calls for rehabilitation," said N. Harikrishnan, chief executive officer of NORKA Roots, the nodal agency for helping the diaspora population in the state. “These returnees are multi-generation. Their skill mapping is essential for comprehensive rehabilitation. We are focusing on a multilayer approach. One is financial assistance. Second is for livelihood assistance, and third for wage assistance," he said.

The state is also facing unlucky hurdles in its attempt to find all of them new jobs, he said. Issues with mobility, as the lockdown is still in place in many towns due to daily increases in the viral cases, is one such, he said.

Meanwhile, increasingly, things have returned to normal in many Gulf nations and beyond, boosting hopes of a return for many. On 12 August, the union government lifted the pandemic-induced curbs on visas for travel to the United Arab Emirates (UAE)., making it possible for Indian nationals holding any type of valid UAE visa to emigrate. Earlier, it was restricted only to certain kinds of visas.

Najeeb K from Kerala’s Kozhikode district could not have been happier. He was checking every other day for the last six months for this news. Returning to the state in February after a 13-year long stint as an office admin in a Dubai-based company, he had turned to buffalo rearing out of desperation. It came nowhere close to matching his former salary of around ₹1 lakh.

“Since returning to the Gulf had become a big question mark, I was thinking of doing this full-time," said Najeeb. “But if you ask me, honestly, I wish to return. I had a good job in the Gulf. I check with my UAE friends every day to see if there is any chance to return."

3. India’s descent into stepwells of growth
Livemint, 28 Aug. 2020, Kaushik Basu

Poor handling of the pandemic threatens to derail our competitive advantage in the global economy
India’s economy is well-positioned in IT and outsourcing; health and pharma; and higher education and research, which are sectors expected to be leading drivers of global growth

NEW YORK : India’s economy is in a downward spiral. The Economist Intelligence Unit just lowered the forecast for India’s growth in the coming year from -5.8% to -8.5%. This is not out of line with what other forecasters are predicting. India’s own credit rating agency, Icra, predicts a growth of -9.5%. For the first quarter of 2020-21, the State Bank of India is predicting a growth of -16.5%.

The low growth in 2020-21 is not in itself surprising. Thanks to covid-19, the whole world is slowing down. But there are two reasons for concern.

First, India is not just slowing down, it is dropping rank in all global charts. Consider the 42 major economies in the world for which The Economist provides data every week. Till six or seven years ago India was, for several years, among the three or four fastest-growing economies. For 2020, it has dropped to 35th among the 42 nations.

Second, while the pandemic has made the situation much worse, the slowdown cannot be put down entirely to covid-19. It began well before that. In fact, from 2016, India’s economy has moved as though it was walking down one of the many historic stepwells one sees all over India, with each year’s growth rate lower than the previous year’s (see Chart 1).

The number for 2020-21 is partly a forecast but there is now enough data and little doubt that India will break its own record of low growth since 1947, which happened in 1979-80, when India’s economy grew -5.2%. So the growth we are expecting in 2020 has no parallels outside of our colonial times.

That said, we need to ask why India has done relatively worse after the pandemic struck in March. After all, in terms of fundamental strengths, India’s economy is well-positioned in all the three sectors that could be expected to be the leading drivers of global growth in the post-pandemic world: information technology and outsourcing, health and pharmaceuticals, and higher education and research.

The world will come out of the pandemic much savvier in the use of digital technology. There are currently some anti-globalization sentiments, with some countries raising tariffs and closing boundaries for trade and talent, but this will not last. Nations that adopt closed economy strategies will either learn this does not work, or cease to be nations of significance. As soon as this happens, IT and outsourcing as a sector will grow in leaps and bounds.

Thanks to the lessons of the pandemic and, also, given our growing awareness of climate change, the components of growth are likely to change. I do not think long-run growth will drop but the constituents of growth are likely to change. Instead of buying more luxury cars, yachts and homes, we will buy better health, education, the arts and music. This, in turn, will boost the higher education and research sector.

India is extremely well poised in all these sectors and for that reason, I have been optimistic about India. One would have expected that, despite the country’s poor performance since 2016, international investors, especially the ones dislodged from China, would see these long-run strengths and come to India. But over the last few months, these hopes have receded.

Lockdown woes

Much of the problem lies with India’s disastrous management of the pandemic. When the lockdown was announced on 24 March, a lot of people got hope from this early action. Much has been written about this; one of the most noteworthy is the National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian. Within days, it became clear that no supporting policy action and relief measures that such a major, sudden lockdown needs had been readied.

While our cities, factories and transport, and therefore the economy, were totally locked down, it was evident that no plan had been made for the tens of millions of migrant workers who were suddenly left with the stark choice of remaining locked down and perishing or trudging hundreds of miles across the nation, just to go home.

Leaving aside the lack of empathy and compassion that this policy signalled, it achieved the very opposite of what a lockdown should do. Some 4 or 5% of India’s population were literally sent off like sprinklers across the nation. No matter how one cuts and splices the covid-19 data, it is clear that India’s ‘lockdown-and-scatter’ has caused the virus to spread and also hurt global confidence in India, which is fuelling the economic slowdown.

The fact that India has become the third-most infected nation in the world, and is expected to overtake Brazil and be second within a month, behind only the United States, is not the big worry. India is the world’s second-most populous country and there is no surprise that it will tend to have more absolute numbers of people testing positive for covid-19 and also dying of the virus.

It is important to normalize using the population as a base. So, we should look at the data on cases of covid-19 per one million population and number of deaths caused by this virus per one million population. The latter is referred to as the Crude Mortality Rate (CMR) and I personally like to place greater weight on this. In all nations, more so in some, there is a tendency to undercount these numbers. But it is more likely that we will undercount infection (which is often not even reported) than deaths.

In analyzing the pandemic across nations, it is important to keep one geographic pattern in mind. Till now, the virus has turned out to be much less serious in Asia and Africa than other parts of the world (see Chart 2). This is a matter for epidemiologists to study. It can be partly due to the age structure—Asia and Africa are much younger, or immunity acquired due to other diseases such as tuberculosis or malaria has been of some help.

It is also possible to argue that this is just a temporal difference. Asia and Africa are in the foothills of the peaks that Europe and America have scaled, and Asia and Africa are yet to climb it.

Whatever the explanation maybe for these huge continental differences, to compare a nation in Asia or Africa with the United States or some nation in Europe and to take credit for good management of the pandemic and saving lives is disingenuous and misleading. We have to do the comparison within ‘covid-homogeneous regions’.

Once we do this, it becomes clear that India’s performance is very poor, even correcting for population. Over the last few weeks, India has overtaken first Pakistan and now Afghanistan tobecome the nation with the highest CMR in South Asia. For every million population, there have been 43 coronavirus deaths in India. The number for Afghanistan is 36, Pakistan is 28, Bangladesh 24, Nepal 6, Sri Lanka 0.6.

And if we take all the 106 countries in Asia and Africa for which Worldometer collates coronavirus data, in terms of CMR, India gets a rank of 85. In other words, only 21 nations are doing worse.

Why did this happen? This strain of the coronavirus is new and no one fully understands its character and propensities. But it is now increasingly clear that India’s lockdown, which for a segment of the population was the exact opposite, has made the pandemic much worse than it need have been, causing more cases and more deaths.

Other numbers corroborate this. The total number of new cases every day has been rising in India since late March with no flattening of the curve. There are not too many countries in the world that have seen this kind of sustained increase for such a long time.

The contrast becomes clear just by looking at the graphs of daily new cases (3-day moving average) in three neighbouring countries: India, Bangladesh and Pakistan (see Chart 3). At the end of March, all three were roughly similar. After the severe and sudden lockdown in India, for some weeks, the three nations looked similar, with India looking slightly better than Bangladesh and Pakistan. But then, the flattening of the curve that was expected did not happen in the case of India.

The lockdown had clearly backfired.

Another data point that corroborates this hypothesis is one that shows how the virus has spread disproportionately in rural India after the lockdown. Of the total number of people who had coronavirus in April, 23% were in rural areas. This has now risen to 54%.

Economic virus

The lockdown froze a large part of the economy but our poor treatment of workers did exactly the opposite of what a lockdown does. What we are seeing now is the outcome of this lockdown-and-scatter approach. India is seeing one of the worst spreads of the virus. Economic growth has plummeted and unemployment has shot up. What the poor management of the virus, visible all over the world, has done is to shake up investor confidence and trust in our institutions.

This added speed to the growth slowdown which was already underway and has taken India further down the stepwell. One of the most important drivers of long-run growth is the investment rate—the share of the national income that is invested in machines, factories, infrastructure, human capital and research. India’s investment, or gross capital formation, as a percentage of GDP reached 38.1% in 2008 and was at 39% in 2011. Then, it started falling, slowly initially, and rapidly thereafter, now standing at 30.2%.

Investment depends on economic variables, like interest rates and bank lending parameters, but it also depends on social and political factors—like investor confidence and trust in institutions. The rise in divisive politics, heightened religious bigotry and the attendant increase in insecurity has clearly contributed to the economic slowdown.

The strong fundamentals that India had—especially in IT, pharma and higher education potential, it still has. We need corrective policies before the opportunity is lost altogether.

The damage done by the poor management of the pandemic cannot be fully reversed. But we can bring in professional talent to manage the pandemic and the economy here on, so that investors can see these are in the hands of people with expertise. Beyond this. the main task is political—to heal the wounds of division; for people to feel included and secure, and willing to invest in the future.

Starting 73 years ago, India made great progress in building a society that strove to be secular, democratic and have freedom of speech, which is the key for science and ideas to flourish. There were no parallels among the many countries which broke from the colonial yoke and became independent around the middle of the 20th century. India stood out.

After making this political investment, India was on an upward stepwell in terms of economic growth, with the growth rate picking up in 1994, again in 2003, and spectacularly from 2005.

It will be unfortunate if we choose to retreat now.

Kaushik Basu is professor of economics at Cornell University and former chief economist at the World Bank

4. Self-made billionaires now dominate India’s rich list, not dynasts
Livemint, 13 Sep. 2020, Tanay Sukumar, Sneha Alexander

The fast growth of new services sectors such as healthcare, technology and retail has created a new class of billionaires in India, a Mint analysis shows

As India suffered its biggest economic setback in decades due to the coronavirus pandemic, two of its best-known billionaires got richer. New deals lifted Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani to become twice as wealthy as they were in March, raising fears that a handful of billionaires may be cornering more and more of the country’s wealth.

Such fears may be overblown, a Mint analysis of billionaires’ wealth suggests. Over the past two decades, the clout of the richest billionaires has actually declined with an increase in the number of billionaires. Adani’s takeover of airports has generated legitimate concerns about monopoly and pricing power in a key infrastructure sector. But it is a bit far-fetched to say that Adani and Ambani control the levers of the Indian economy today.

Over 61% of the combined net worth of India’s billionaires in 2000 was concentrated in the hands of the three richest individuals. But by 2020, the share of these three—Ambani, Radhakishan Damani, and Shiv Nadar—had dropped to 20%. In fact, the share of the top five billionaires has steadily declined since the mid-2000s, and now stands at 26%.

Our analysis is based on data from the Forbes billionaires list released every March, and a database on billionaires compiled by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), and considers only dollar billionaires (those whose net worth exceeds $1 billion).

The analysis shows that the share of self-made billionaires in India has gone up over the past two decades even though the rise has been slower than in other parts of the world. A 2016 PIIE research paper by Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver had shown that self-made billionaires had been increasing in number across the world. The study classified wealth as “self-made" for those who had either founded a company or held a major position in a company that was not founded by any of their relatives.

Self-made billionaires had a combined net worth of $164.4 billion in March, accounting for over 50% of the total wealth of India’s 102 billionaires, an analysis of the latest Forbes list using the PIIE classification methodology shows.

The rise in the stature of self-made billionaires since the turn of the millennium suggests that India has succeeded to some extent in lowering the entry barriers for entrepreneurship and access to capital. However, even three decades after the economy was opened up, India still has a significantly lower proportion of self-made billionaires (59%) compared to the global figure (70%).

Which sectors are these new-age billionaires in? Technology is one. It’s created many self-made billionaires globally in recent years: they accounted for 12% of all billionaires in the US in 2015, Freund and Oliver found. In India, too, technology and other services-related sectors have seen a growth of newcomers to the ultra-rich list, most famously Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran and Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.

In terms of net worth, the share of traditional industrial sectors, such as manufacturing, construction, mining and energy, has come down in India’s billionaire wealth from 57% in 2010 to 33% now. This also reflects the decline of these sectors and of entrenched business families in these sectors over time. Over the past decade, construction barons such as G.M. Rao, Vinod Goenka and Rakesh Wadhawan have dropped out of the billionaire list as the sector lost momentum and accumulated a pile of non-performing assets. Such troubles also displaced one of India’s most famous dynasts, Anil Ambani, from the list.

Yet, industrial barons have not disappeared entirely. With 28 billionaires, the top spot is still held by the manufacturing sector in India. Healthcare accounted for 17 of India’s 102 billionaires this year. Globally, finance and technology contribute the most billionaires after manufacturing.

The churn in India’s rich list, and the rise of self-made billionaires over time shows that the club of wealth-creators in the country is considerably diverse and dynamic. This does not, however, mean thatinequality is not a concern. In 2019, Credit Suisse estimated in its annual report that 78% of India’s adult population had less than $10,000 in wealth, while just 1.8% had more than $100,000. But the new entrants to the billionaire club show that the opportunities for wealth creation are more diffused now than before.

A demographic analysis shows a typical Indian billionaire is a man past 60 years of age. Just 6% of Indian billionaires are women, compared to 12% globally. They include Savitri Jindal, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Smita Crisha Godrej.

Just 5% are below 45 years of age, and nearly three in four are senior citizens, the oldest being Lachhman Das Mittal of the Sonalika Group, aged 89 years. The story is starkly different in China, where 61% of the billionaires are between 45 and 60 years of age. Four of the 20 richest Chinese individuals are aged 40 years or less—no one in the Indian list is.

China’s billionaires, led by Jack Ma, are indeed “different", as a research report by investment bank UBS observed in 2018. Chinese billionaires are younger than elsewhere, “relentlessly innovative", and “forever seizing new opportunities to make their companies fast growing, powerful and flexible", the report said. It attributed their rise to rapid urbanization and their use of technology among other factors.

In India, the median age of self-made billionaires is 65, as against 69 for those with inherited wealth, shows the Forbes data. Among newcomers—billionaires who were not on the list five years ago—self-made ones have a median age of 62, seven years younger than those with inherited wealth.

In the post-covid era, the global, as well as the Indian, list of billionaires may undergo several changes. In March, when the pandemic was still in its early stages, Forbes recorded 58 fewer billionaires globally than a year ago. Among those who remained on the list, 51% had lost wealth. In India, the March 2020 list had four fewer billionaires than the 2019 list.

The question is, will India see more of young, self-made billionaires in the years to come?

5.1. India among top three emerging markets globally
Livemint, 18 Aug. 2020, Nikita Kwatra, Sneha Alexander

India’s rise in ranks is powered by the surge in financial flows to the country. It remains to be seen whether real economic activity picks up to justify that optimism

For the first time since covid-19 was declared a global pandemic in March, India found itself among the top three emerging markets in July, the latest update to Mint’s emerging markets tracker shows. After lingering near the bottom of the emerging market rankings for three months, India moved up three notches to the middle of the league tables in June. In July, it moved up two notches further to the third spot, just behind China and Brazil, driven by a booming stock market and an outperforming currency.

India’s average market capitalization increased 7.7% to $1.9 trillion in July from $1.7 trillion in June as foreign investors poured in $1.2 billion into local equities in July. The gush of foreign inflows, which continues in August also boosted the local currency at a time when other emerging market currencies depreciated against the dollar.

Graphic: Mint

Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker, launched in September last year, takes into account seven high-frequency indicators across ten large emerging markets to help us make sense of India’s relative position in the emerging markets league table. The seven indicators considered in the tracker encompass both real activity indicators, such as the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) and real GDP growth, and financial metrics, such as exchange rate movements and changes in stock market capitalization. The final rankings are based on a composite score that gives equal weightage to each indicator.

The improvement in India’s financial metrics come at a time when India’s real sector metrics have yet to recover fully. Corporate earnings in the June-ended quarter touched multi-year lows.

India’s Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for manufacturing slipped in July (46.0) after a rebound in June (47.2), showing the impact of localised lockdowns on manufacturing activity in the country. Even as India’s manufacturing contracted last month, other large emerging markets such as Brazil (58.2),

Turkey (56.9) and China (51.1) reported an expansion. India’s PMI reading was better than that of only two emerging markets considered in the tracker: Thailand (45.9) and Mexico (40.4).

After reporting a trade surplus in June, India’s trade balance slipped back to deficit in July as gold imports shot up. India’s export performance appears better than that of many other emerging markets so far but it is worth noting that export data for July is available only for India, and two other countries: China and Brazil. Both reported better exports than India did last month.

India’s GDP growth in the March ended quarter (3.1%) was higher than most peers and has helped India’s overall ranking. But it is likely that the June quarter will be far worse for India than some other countries, given the relatively higher stringency of lockdown in the country for most of the June quarter.

Meanwhile, retail inflation in India increased to 6.9% in July, way higher than Reserve Bank of India’s upper tolerance level of 6%, due to supply disruptions. At 6.9%, retail inflation was higher than all emerging market peers barring Turkey, where inflation is running at double digits.

The expectation of sharp contraction in India’s GDP along with rising inflation may have raised the spectre of stagflation but the weakness in domestic demand suggests that inflationary pressures may be transient.

The growth challenge is more significant. It remains to be seen how far the pick-up in real economic activity justifies the optimism shown by the financial markets. Even though mobility levels remain below pre-pandemic levels, they have been rising over the past few weeks, a 17 August report by Sonal Verma and Aurodeep Nandi of Nomura noted. Nonetheless, the recovery is uneven, and there is a risk of ‘reversal in momentum’ from a second wave of COVID-19 cases, the economists warned.

The pace of recovery in economic activity will depend to a large extent on India’s ability to contain the pandemic. As Mint’s State Economy Tracker for July showed, states which have been able to contain the pandemic better have also witnessed a sharper economic recovery.

5.2. Manufacturing is key to creating jobs in services
LIvemint, 13 Sep. 2020, Vivek Kaul

In the last 15 years, the share of manufacturing in the Indian economy has been stagnant at around 16%. Meanwhile, the share of services has edged towards 50%. This has led to experts arguing that services are more important for job creation. Is that true? Mint takes a look

What’s manufacturing sector’s overall share?

The share of manufacturing in the Indian economy has varied between 14.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) and 16.7% of the GDP, between FY05 and FY20. GDP is a measure of the economic size of a country. As the sector has just kept pace with the growing economy, it has not created as many jobs along the way. Of course, just manufacturing cannot create enough jobs for the 10-12 million individuals who enter the workforce every year in India. In stark contrast, between 2004-05 and 2019-20, the share of services in the economy has gradually increased from 43.5% of the GDP to 50.4%.

Is manufacturing not key to job creation?

“Manufacturing activity leads to the creation of large employment in several service sector areas," writes R.C. Bhargava, chairman of the carmaker Maruti Suzuki, in Getting Competitive—A Practitioner’s Guide for India. The problem is that these jobs are not recorded as manufacturing jobs, as the creation of a job is recorded in the sector it has been created in. For instance, let us say a factory comes up on the outskirts of a city. A lot of small eateries crop up around this factory and these eateries create jobs. These jobs will be recorded in the services sector, but they were created as a result of the factory setting up.

Agriculture, Fishing and Rural Development

6.1. Another milestone for farm sector: Now, Kharif acreage at lifetime high; bumper
harvest likely. After a bumper rabi harvest, the acreage of the Kharif crops has skyrocketed to a lifetime high in the current year.
IBEF, Sep. 03, 2020

With a favourable monsoon this year, the agriculture sector has drawn the silver linings on the dark clouds of India’s severe economic stress. After a bumper rabi harvest, the acreage of the Kharif crops has skyrocketed to a lifetime high in the current year. The area sown for Kharif crops surged 7.2 per cent in only a year to 108.2 million hectares by 28 August 2020, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. The area sown this Kharif season is higher by almost two million hectares, compared to the normal acreage for the Kharif season, which is 106.6 million hectares. On top of it, the sown area is likely to rise further by 2.5 to 3.5 per cent this year.

Good pre-monsoon rainfall; the normal onset of monsoon and its rapid advancement over the country; and overall satisfactory progress of rainfall during the monsoon season so far contributed to the increase in area sown during this Kharif season, CMIE added. The acreage under all major pulses like arhar, green gram, and black gram has also crossed the normal acreage for the season.

While the construction sector has halved in the first quarter and the manufacturing sector has nosedived amid the nationwide lockdown, the agriculture sector remained almost unaffected from the curse of the pandemic. The farm sector recorded a growth of 3.4 per cent against the overall GDP contraction of 23.9 per cent in Q1 FY21.

Meanwhile, the sharp expansion in acreage across most major crops and the strong revival in monsoon in August indicate a bumper harvest this season. However, continued heavy rains pose a threat to the Kharif crop. Rainfall at over 40 per cent above the long period average (LPA) was recorded during week-ended August 19 and week-ended 26 August, CMIE underlined. Also, the rising cases of coronavirus in rural areas also pose risk to the flourishing farm sector.

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

6.2. Food price flare-up has no real winners
Livemint, 20 Aug. 2020, Sayantan Bera

• As consumers bear the brunt of high food costs, growers see no benefit. How long will this strange dynamic last?

• Many lower income consumers are also not enrolled under the federal food security scheme. An estimate suggests that over 100 million eligible Indians are excluded

Ramesh Pangal calls it a season of miseries: Farmers running around with vegetables to find a buyer; leaving tomatoes to rot in the field; dumping white pumpkins by the roadside. Between April and July, as the covid-19 pandemic worsened across India, farmers in Haryana’s Bhiwani district, where Pangal lives, incurred heavy losses as most vegetables sold for less than ₹5 per kg.

Wholesale markets were open only intermittently and the cost of transporting produce to cities shot up. “Prices were so low that it did not even cover the cost of plucking and transport," said Pangal.

Strangely, at the consumer end of the food supply pipeline, prices have been soaring. Take Tilak Mahato, who migrated from Bihar a few years ago to settle down in Ludhiana, Punjab. He and his wife Sangeeta have slashed food expenses to the bare minimum. The greens are expensive and shrink when cooked, so soybean nuggets thrown in with pieces of potatoes in a spicy curry is the staple diet along with rotis (wheat flatbread). The last grand meal was an egg curry prepared a month back. Pulses are rare; fruits are a luxury.

Between April and July, as the covid-19 pandemic worsened across India, farmers in Haryana’s Bhiwani district, where Pangal lives, incurred heavy losses as most vegetables sold for less than ₹5 per kg

Mahato’s day job at a steel factory has been erratic. The factory was shut for three months; then, it resumed operations in June but Mahato gets to go to work only for 2-3 days in a week. With falling income and rising food costs, stress levels have gone up within the family.

“My children keep asking for milk but we cannot afford it anymore," Sangeeta said over the phone (even though farmers are selling cow milk at around ₹20 per litre, consumer prices have stayed firm at ₹45 per litre). To make matters worse, the family is not enrolled under the federal food security scheme—an estimate suggests that over 100 million eligible Indians are excluded—which would have entitled them to 20kg of grains every month (for a four-member household) at a subsidized rate and another 20 kg for free in the form of pandemic-specific assistance.

Headline consumer price inflation (CPI) shot up to 6.9% in July driven by higher food prices, which rose 9.6% year-on-year, stalling hopes of further interest rate cuts by India’s central bank.

While a divergence between farm gate and end consumer price has always existed in India’s food economy, the pandemic has widened the gap to chronic levels. The question is: How long will this last?

Protein inflation

According to Manik Kadam, a farmer from Parbhani district of Maharashtra, farmers stocked pigeon peas, a pulse variety, hoping for a better price. But even months after the harvest, wholesale rates are substantially lower than government announced crop support prices. “From vegetables to poultry, growers incurred heavy losses, but at the same time, consumers were paying a steep price," Kadam said, blaming the proverbial middlemen in the supply chain.

Testimonies of farmers like Kadam and Pangal show that the soaring retail food price of the past few months have resulted in almost no benefit to growers. The price crash at the farm level has in fact been sweeping, except perhaps for potatoes (and wheat, which is procured at minimum support prices). The tuber has witnessed an unusual spike since fewer farmers grew the crop last season following successive years of heavy losses. In the coming months, retail prices of vegetables are likely to spike further as excess rains in several states result in production losses.

A closer look at the CPI food basket shows that the increase in retail prices is on account of the rising price of cereals (7%), meat and fish (19%), pulses (16%), vegetables (11%) and edible oils (12%).

The high protein inflation, reflecting in higher prices of meat, eggs and pulses, at a time when the pandemic has led to a sharp fall in household incomes is indicative of continuing supply disruptions and intermediaries using the pandemic as an excuse to jack up consumer prices.

Food for thought

Despite India being in ‘unlock’ mode, supply chains are far from normal—frequent shutdown of local wholesale and retail markets are taking a toll on primary producers. Consumers, particularly from lower-income groups, are already struggling to put food on the plate.

A continuing rise in retail food prices—especially for nutritious items like fresh greens, pulses and eggs—is likely to force the poor to restrict their consumption to calorie-rich and subsidized cereals. A recent survey of over 25,000 rural households by the news portal Gaon Connection and the Delhi-based Centre for Study of Developing Societies showed that 38% of families were skipping a meal, while 46% have already slashed a few items from their diet.

A Mint ground report from Uttar Pradesh’s Bundelkhand region in May also found landless families surviving on a subsistence diet of salt and boiled rice.

Uncertain future

Wholesale food price inflation (WPI-food) numbers, which tracks producer prices, shows a significant gap between wholesale (4%) and retail food inflation (9.6%). Wholesale Inflation in cereals was just 0.8% in July; corresponding numbers for vegetables were 8%, largely driven by higher year-on-year prices of potatoes (69%). Wholesale prices of eggs, meat, fish and dairy (5%) grew at a slower clip compared to retail prices, while fruit prices witnessed a deflation in the wholesale market (-3%).

The gap between retail and wholesale prices shows the extent of disruption between the farm and consumer plates, but this could be a temporary phenomenon, said Himanshu, associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. “In July, there were localized lockdowns in (many) states. As the covid fatigue sets in, and as restrictions are lifted, supply disruptions could normalize in the next three months."

Himanshu added that rising inflation in cereals is largely due to higher public stockholdings. Central stocks of rice and wheat were at a record 94 million tonnes in July, more than double the requirement for the public distribution system and buffer stocks.

According to Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the wedge between retail and wholesale prices is usually due to intermediaries in the supply chain but “this time around, it could be due to genuine supply disruptions." Transport costs have increased due to rising fuel costs and coupled with excess rains and floods in parts of India, growers of perishables are more at risk. But on the brighter side, the export of rice and other horticulture produce has picked up over the past month, Joshi said.

He added that an upside risk to food inflation could emerge from any further rise in the incidence of covid-19 infections in rural India. “There are no production risks to the (ongoing) kharif season but since the pandemic’s spread is in uncertain territory, any inflation forecast will be unreliable. The synergies between parts of the supply chain could snap easily."

In Maharashtra’s Nashik district, a major hub of horticulture produce ranging from onions to pomegranates, rising number of covid-19 infections has impacted purchases in the wholesale markets due to fewer buyers, said a procurement officer of a Delhi-based retail chain. “There have been substantial losses to farmers due to excess rains and the produce which is arriving in the markets is of poor quality."

“A major part of the vegetable produce (in West Bengal) was destroyed by the Amphan cyclone even before harvests. But even then, we did not receive even half of what consumers are currently paying," said Hamidul, a farmer from South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, who lost over ₹200,000 on his mango harvest due to adverse weather.

The share of new covid infections in rural areas increased from 23% in April to 54% in August and any economic recovery will be contingent on the urban sector as rural India will not be able to sustain a recovery, Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economist at the State Bank of India told Mint in an interview this week.

“While we are talking about a bumper crop, the arrival at the mandis have been lower than last year, indicating supply disruptions. Farmers will also not get the desired prices. This is exactly what will happen if covid-19 cases continue to surge for another one or two months," Ghosh said.

A silver lining

The sole silver lining on the food inflation front is the robust kharif season cropping pattern on the back of ample rains. The annual south-west monsoon which irrigates more than half of India’s crop area has seen 4% excess rains so far compared to the 50-year-average.

Data from the agriculture ministry shows that till 14 August, planting of rain-fed kharif crops was 8.5% higher year-on-year—which is likely to result in a record harvest. The higher plantings are largely driven by the increased area under rice (14% higher y-o-y), the main crop for the season, and oilseeds (14.4%).

However, these kharif field crops contribute just about a third of the farm gross domestic product (GDP). The rest comes from the horticulture sector and livestock and dairying. Apart from perishables, supply disruptions are most severe in the livestock sector.

“We are selling chicken for ₹70-80 per kg, while the same is retailing in the national capital region for over ₹200 per kg," said Jagdeep Aulakh, a poultry farmer from Karnal, Haryana. According to Aulakh, poultry farmers could still survive as feed costs have also plunged (which, in turn, affected growers of coarse grains like maize in states like Bihar and West Bengal). But, he claims, traders are still making a killing.

“From rumour and fake news that chicken and vegetables spread covid-19 to difficulties in transporting the harvest, farmers have faced it all this season."

7. How farmer-led firms are vying for a fairer share of the consumer rupee
Livemint, 14 Sep. 2020, Sayantan Bera

In a volatile food price environment, hopes are being pinned on farmer-run companies. Can both the farmer and consumer benefit?

NEW DELHI : Ramprasad Arjunrao Nitnaware has let go of many opportunities in life. First was his childhood dream of becoming a doctor, then a chance to serve in the Indian Air Force, and, finally, the security of a government job. He now heads a farmer-run company. Despite donning the fancy hat of a chief executive officer, his salary is a fraction of what he could have earned as an officer in the Air Force or as an employee of the state government. But Nitnaware, born to a farmer who wanted his son to manage the family farm, has no regrets.

In rural Maharashtra’s Washim district, Nitnaware was instrumental in setting up a company owned by turmeric growers. The Rushiwat Farmer Producer Company Ltd (FPCL) now owns a seed and turmeric processing plant and a warehouse where the produce is sorted and graded. In 2019-20, the turnover of the company was an impressive ₹1.32 crore. And the 1270 farmer shareholders of the company not only received a premium price for the turmeric they grew, but also made a handsome profit from the production of certified seeds. Each farmer who owns ten equity shares also received a modest dividend of ₹1,500; the rest of the profit was reinvested in the company.

Over the past few months, Indian farmers have been living through a strange reality. With the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, prices of fruits and vegetables crashed in the wholesale markets, even as consumers began paying a hefty price. This disconnect—between what the farmer earns and what the consumer pays—has always existed. But covid has turned this gap into a chasm.

With agriculture likely to remain the only bright spot in the economy this year (recording a modest 3.4% growth in the first quarter of FY21), farmer-led companies like Rushiwat offer one mechanism to equitably share this rare domain of prosperity, at a time when it is most needed. The underlying model has a successful precedent in the Indian context: Amul milk cooperatives.

By aggregating and processing primary produce, farmer producer organizations (FPOs) can help bridge the gap between wholesale and retail food prices—for instance, tomato growers often sell at throwaway prices during the harvest season, while retail rates are 2-3 times higher. The price realization for farmers will improve if raw tomatoes are processed into puree. The critical requirements for this to work are: investing in a processing plant and market access, which small farmers can harness as part of an FPO.

Small and marginal farmers suffer due to a peculiar aspect of their business—they buy inputs like fertilizers, pesticides and seeds at retail prices, but sell their final produce at wholesale prices. They are so-called ‘price takers’ in both input and output markets. One way to overcome this lack of bargaining power—arising from their small size, fragmented holdings and limited production—is via aggregation by FPOs.

“It’s very satisfying when farmer members say my efforts have improved their lives," Nitnaware, who holds a master’s degree in agriculture, said over the phone. The future looks promising for his company, he said. Currently, the loose turmeric powder they sell fetches around ₹65 per kg—just a fourth of what consumers pay, but Nitnaware hopes member earnings will increase significantly once the company receives a license from India’s food safety regulator. The plan is to sell packaged turmeric powder with their own brand name.

The Rushiwat FPCL is among 7000 producer companies set up across India supported by non-profits, government agencies like the apex rural bank NABARD, and the Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC), a specialized agency of the agriculture ministry. The goal is to bring farmers together as a group to harness their collective bargaining power while purchasing inputs and to jointly market the harvest after primary processing—like selling turmeric powder instead of raw turmeric. When farmers add value to their produce, they also earn more.

Market connect

In late-February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched an ambitious project to form 10,000 FPOs over the next five years in a bid to improve farm-gate prices and help growers earn a higher share of the consumer rupee. FPOs will help farmers transform from being mere producers to an active participant in the market ecosystem, Modi said during the launch.

The immediacy of the FPO project, on which the government plans to spend ₹5,000 crore, arises from the harsh reality of covid-induced supply disruptions which have still not been entirely resolved.

The idea behind the FPO project is to set up examples across the country and transform it into a movement, said P.V.S. Surya Kumar, deputy managing director at NABARD, which has so far promoted over 4000 producer companies. “As farmers benefit from their association with FPOs, they will put in more equity capital… their success will depend on the enabling role played by people heading the FPOs and the collective ability of the group to understand markets," added Kumar.

According to Pravesh Sharma, former managing director of SFAC and currently CEO of the startup Kamatan Farm Tech, the idea behind FPOs took shape around 2009 while trying to fix three hurdles faced by farmers: access to capital, technology and markets. “Although the policy push for promoting FPOs has been episodic (they did not come in a go), there has been a steady accretion of interventions over the years."

These include credit guarantee and equity grant funds, classifying FPOs under the priority sector for bank loans, tax holidays and recent initiatives like agriculture market reforms and setting up of an agriculture infrastructure fund which farmer companies can leverage. “But banks are still not interested (to advance loans to FPOs)… and that is a key which can unlock the true potential of the idea," Sharma added.

Access to capital

The process of institution building—small farmers coming together in a large group as a business venture—isn’t an easy task. It took the Rushiwat FPCL five years to develop a sense of ownership among farmers. And it was lucky to have the support of NABARD which opened up a credit line from a public sector bank—starved of working capital, most FPOs are unable to expand business operations.

For instance, the Rowmari FPO in Assam’s Barpeta district, which works with mustard growers, set up an oil mill and now sells mustard oil with its own brand name called RL Gold. But banks are not willing to lend to the company of 215 shareholders. So, farmer members have to wait for months for mustard to be milled and oil to be sold for payments. Lack of working capital has restricted the FPO from procuring from more farmers and scaling up operations. For now, it buys mustard seeds from traders at a price higher than market rates and returns the money after selling oil—an informal loan with a hefty interest rate.

After knocking on banks’ doors for more than a year we stopped, said Adul Malek, CEO of the company. “We need about ₹90 lakh to expand operations to 3-4 villages but banks want a guarantor," Malek added.

A March 2020 study by Richa Govil (and others) at the Azim Premji University flagged how severe the capital constraints are. The median paid-up capital (equity contribution by farmer shareholders) of 6,926 ‘active’ FPOs was just ₹1.1 lakh, the study found, limiting the ability of FPOs to raise term loans and arrange working capital.

According to the research, even a small (200 member) or an early stage FPO needs between ₹20-60 lakh for smooth operations (for supplying inputs, purchasing crops, and post-processing and marketing of harvest). This is in addition to the costs of regulatory compliance like filing audited accounts and payments for the CEO and office staff.

So, to access capital and generate revenues, FPOs are taking recourse to informal loans from traders, borrowing from Non-Bank Finance Companies at 15-17% interest rates (with personal guarantees from the producer companies’ CEO in some cases) and even running petrol bunks to supply fuel for farm machinery used by farmers (in Erode, Tamil Nadu).

After six years of running an FPO with over 1000 members, we are unable to cater to even 10% of farmers in the areas we operate, said G. Ajeethan, managing director of a banana growers’ company in Trichy, Tamil Nadu. “After the pandemic struck, we sold bananas for a song. We need capital to expand operations, and cost-effective refrigerated cargo to transport our produce to cities. It is easier to crown a farmer with the title of a CEO than market their produce."

The research study by Govil also uncovered a worrying trend: among FPOs which were ten years and older, 46% were defunct and therefore struck off by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs for failure to commence business operations or non-payment of share capital by members. 38% of the FPOs which were between 5 to 10 years were inactive and therefore struck off.

“The process of promoting and nurturing an FPO takes at least three years, but often farmers find it difficult to run the institution as market linkages take years to develop. This is the reason why many FPOs go defunct after a few years," said Satya Ranjan Pradhan who is currently heading a vegetable growers’ company in Angul, Odisha. Pradhan was appointed and paid by a non-profit which promoted the FPO and after the project ran its course, the FPO is scouting for a new CEO.

Pradhan, however, remains sceptical if the FPO will be able to bear the costs of hiring a CEO (as mandated under the Companies Act) who needs to be paid at least ₹15,000 per month and an accountant.

Way forward

During a field trip to Madhya Pradesh in 2016, this writer had met several FPOs. Farmers were upbeat about their nascent association, but FPO managers faced a similar set of problems as they are facing today: the Mandla Tribal Farmer Producer Company used a ₹9 lakh equity grant support (from SFAC) and topped it with a bank loan to build a warehouse, and then mortgaged it to the bank to purchase a seed grading machine.

It still needed money to purchase inputs for its members and had to approach a women’s self-help group for a loan. Yet, Revati Tekam, a farmer member and President of the FPO, was proud of the institution despite grinding challenges. “We built this company with our blood and sweat to help each other," Tekam said, standing in front of a 500-tonne capacity warehouse.

In a recent strategy paper, SFAC put out a list of challenges faced by FPOs—their limited understanding of business and the need for incubation and hand-holding as well as constraints in raising equity capital. The agency also estimated that at best 30% of FPOs have viable operations while 20% are struggling; the rest comprise of companies in early stages: mobilizing farmers, collecting equity and preparing a business plan.

The guidelines of the new central scheme to promote 10,000 FPOs (between 2019-20 and 2023-24) addresses some of these hurdles. The government now plans to bear the management costs of running an FPO (for the first five years), including the cost of registration, plus a matching equity grant of ₹2000 per member (with a limit of ₹15 lakh per FPO) and an increased credit guarantee facility for loans up to ₹2 crore.

Since most FPOs are engaged in the low margin business of aggregation and trade of farm produce (and not value addition which requires high capital investment), it is imperative on the government’s part to advance loans with an interest subsidy component, said Yogesh Dwivedi who heads a state-level consortium of FPOs in Madhya Pradesh.

Apart from these, suggested Dwivedi, FPOs must also be tasked to do government procurement at support prices and have a regular quota fixed for the supply of inputs like fertilizer. This will help FPOs generate their own funds to expand operations. Only when farmers engage with an FPO multiple times in a year—while purchasing inputs and selling crops—would they value the efforts of building a company together, he said.

8. Stories of distress from small borrowers
Livemint, 17 Aug. 2020, Sayantan Bera

Across India, women borrowers are finding it tough to repay small loans. The next few months will be critical
Unless there is a sharp recovery, MFIs and banks (with micro-loan portfolios) will have to restructure or write off loans though the situation will not be clear until November

NEW DELHI : Sarama Koyal does not have a roof over her head. After the Amphan super cyclone ravaged her home in South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal in May, all she could afford was a black tarpaulin sheet. Despite this, what’s giving her sleepless nights is the repayment schedule of four micro-loans she took from banks and financial institutions. Over the past two years Koyal has borrowed ₹230,000; this includes a fresh loan from Bandhan Bank last month, to help repay a previous one from the same bank.

Her business of selling sarees is at a standstill thanks to covid-19 and local lockdowns; for months now Koyal’s husband who worked as a porter in the state capital Kolkata had had no work. For a household that barely earned ₹8,000 a month in good times, the twin blows of a cyclone and a pandemic has led to a tipping point.

“I am now repaying (weekly instalments) by selling the grains we grew on a small plot of land," Koyal said. The microfinance institutions (MFIs) made it amply clear to her that there would be no relief. We did not ask you for repayments for three months (April to June) but cannot wait any longer, she was told sternly, despite a central bank mandated moratorium in place till the end of August.

While Koyal has started repaying at least one of her four loans, Kamini Devi from Araria town of Bihar is yet to find a way out. Devi’s husband, Sridev Paswan, used to work in a plywood factory in Purnia, some 55km away. Following the lockdown, the factory was shut—it resumed operations in July but Paswan has no affordable means to commute to work. An autorickshaw ride costs ₹150 now compared to the ₹10 he used to pay earlier for a train ticket.

“They (field staff) keep coming every week. They tell us if you’re able to afford food, you can also repay your loans. I told them we don’t have enough to fill our stomach," Paswan said. The family has two loans—one of ₹80,000 from Bandhan Bank and another of ₹40,000 from HDFC Bank.

In a conversation with Mint, CEO and managing director of Bandhan Bank Chandra Sekhar Ghosh said that all customers were offered and explained the loan moratorium process—that a moratorium is not a waiver and will lead to a higher interest burden later. “We stopped collections on 23 March before the first lock down was announced... (in June), we went back to borrowers, explained what a moratorium means, and left it to their choice whether to defer or start repaying."

Mint spoke to several micro-finance borrowers from states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha to understand how they are coping with the pandemic-induced loss in incomes. Many have started repaying loans, but their financial situation is precarious. Most said lenders did not give them a choice to delay repayments beyond July.

The scale of the crisis, however, is not limited to the financial stress faced by individual families. In the coming months, it could spill over to India’s large microfinance sector; for now, the moratorium is masking ground realities.

A rise in delinquency will be an added burden for non-banking financial companies and banks exposed to micro-loans. The Reserve Bank of India has projected a spike in gross non-performing assets (NPAs), from 8.5% in March 2020 to 12.5% by March next year which could even escalate to 14.7% in a severely stressed scenario.

A payment crisis in micro-finance would make matters worse. As of March 2020, the micro-finance sector’s gross loan portfolio was an impressive ₹2.3 trillion, growing at 23% year-on-year. Most of the portfolio consisted of small unsecured loans to women borrowers—63 million customers and 110 million active loans with an average loan size of ₹34,000.

The key question is: what will be the extent of slippages due to a pandemic-induced recession? The write-offs were a healthy 1.6% in 2019-20, but will higher delinquencies lead to more NPAs?

Unless there is a sharp recovery in economic activity, MFIs and banks (with micro-loan portfolios) will have to restructure or write-off loans though the situation will not be clear until November, said an analyst with a mutual fund who tracks the sector closely and did not want to be identified.

There are several risks which can upend repayments, the analyst added. This include floods in parts of eastern India in Bihar and Assam, upcoming elections in states like Bihar and West Bengal (if local politicians discourage borrowers to repay or promise a waiver), and more importantly, the growing incidence of covid-19 infections in rural India which can lead to more localised lockdowns stalling economic activity.

And aggressive lenders who advance multiple loans, adjust previous loans against new ones, or provide large ticket sizes may see higher defaults.

Risk of slippage

Unlike conventional loans advanced by banks, micro-loans have their pluses too. “The industry is prone to socio-political risks in certain geographies and this is an occupational hazard which MFIs have internalized. But willful defaults are minimal in the industry since micro-loans are often the only source of credit for MFI clients," said Krishnan Sitaraman, senior director at Crisil Ratings.

“During the month of July, loan recovery revived to 60-80% (up from next to nil in April and May) but the spread and intensity of infections in rural India will be a key monitorable," he added.

According to Vijay Mahajan, founder and former head of Basix, a pioneering micro-finance and livelihood support organisation, the fact that rural economy and agriculture has been least affected by the pandemic will support the repayment capacity of MFI borrowers. “The lockdown in cities could affect a small portion of the urban portfolio of MFIs (45% of MFI clients are from urban areas) but I remain optimistic on the prospect of micro-entrepreneurs and micro-finance bouncing back," Mahajan said.

But the prognosis for rural India is not a singular narrative. While it is true that higher procurement of grains at support prices and increased spending under state run welfare schemes will support spending, small vegetable growers and dairy farmers have borne heavy losses due to volatility and crash in prices. These are the same (asset poor) families which MFIs lend to, who have seen their incomes shrink due to migrant workers returning home and remittances drying up.

For instance, a woman borrower and small vegetable grower from Rayagada district of Odisha who did not want to be named narrated her ordeal: “They (MFI field staff) came and sat outside my house late one evening and refused to leave till I paid the weekly installment." Her earnings nosedived due to a crash in vegetable prices but she was told: “If you are able to eat despite a lockdown, you can repay your loans too."

There are many such stories. Archana Gondane from Nagpur took loans from a local moneylender at an exorbitant 10% monthly interest to service a ₹40,000 micro-loan from Yes Bank. Rekha Bamne from Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh is yet to resume repayments after buyers from her small poultry farm stopped payments. Geeta Devi from Banka, Bihar, is also unable to repay as her remittance income crashed after three migrant sons returned home.

Preparing for the worst

First quarter (April to June) results of listed micro-finance lenders show a cautious approach towards asset quality. Bandhan Bank, with micro-loans comprising over 60% of its loan book of ₹74,000 crore, reported a 32% fall in net profit due to additional provisions (for loans that may turn NPA) of ₹750 crore to cover for covid-19 related risks. The bank reported a collection efficiency of 68% for micro-loans in June, compared to zero collections in April, and expects the ratio to reach 90% by September.

Over 70% of our customers are engaged in agriculture, food processing and retail and their businesses are not severely impacted, said Bandhan’s Chandra Shekhar Ghosh. “Currently, on any given day, about 20% of our branches are shut due to local restrictions but in places where we are functional, loan recoveries are at about 90%. Fresh lending is at 60% of normal levels."

Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, another listed micro-lender with a higher exposure in urban areas and a micro-loan book of over ₹11,000 crore, reported a 41% drop in net profit in its June quarter results. The bank reported a collection efficiency of 59% by end July (up from 16% in May) but had to make an additional Covid-19 provision of ₹129 crore, taking total provisions to ₹370 crore (2.6% of its loan book).

A critical factor for improved collection efficiency, the bank said in an earnings call on 1 August, will be the ability of customers to restart their livelihoods. It also observed that the gap in repayment numbers between urban and rural areas narrowed as “rural markets were also equally infected (due to spread of Covid-19), if not more as compared to the urban and the metro." The Bank did not respond to queries from Mint.

Living on hope

The industry faced a serious problem in the initial months but now some (loan) recoveries have started flowing in, said Alok Misra, CEO of the Microfinance Institutions Network (MFIN), an industry body.

“Around 90% of the liquidity for MFIs comes from repayments and any disruption affects the liquidity situation. Though some support has come from special schemes announced by the Reserve Bank of India, still there is acute stress. Not having enough liquidity is seriously affecting small and medium MFIs and some of them are already facing trouble in meeting operational expenses and debt repayments," he said.

Misra added that the MFI sector is not new to shocks (it weathered a payment crisis which hit Andhra Pradesh in 2010 and demonetization in 2016) and will likely be out of the woods in the next 6-7 months with suitable policy and liquidity support. “Micro-finance clients have time and again demonstrated their resilience."

Of course, MFIs resuming lending is an indicator of whether rural activity is bouncing back. “Our July advances were about 55% of normal lending… obviously no new customer is being targeted; we are focused on our existing customers," said Manoj Nambiar, managing director of Arohan Financial Services Ltd, a lender with operations in north-eastern, eastern and central India.

Nambiar, who is also the MFIN chairperson added: “the delinquency in the sector as of end March (2020) was just 3% (as a percentage of the total customers). By September the number will be at least in double digits. By next March we hope to come back to where we started the year."

Saraswati Pendam, 40, who ran a grocery store in rural Nagpur, Maharashtra, till the pandemic hit in March, is also waiting to get back to her pre-pandemic economic status. She took ₹90,000 in three loans. During the initial months of the covid lockdown, as households demanded groceries on credit, Pendam decided to shut the store and ended up using the grains and pulses for home consumption.

After the lockdown was lifted in July, she and her husband started a small kiosk selling cigarettes and betel leaves. That barely suffices for family expenses, let alone paying back the loans. But Pendam was asked to start repaying and explained that a moratorium will only add to her financial burden later.

How did she manage? “My son started to work on daily wages assisting a plumber since his college is shut. I am using his earnings to repay," Pendam said over the phone. A bigger worry for her is how to restart the grocery store. She needs to invest about ₹40,000 to restock the store but is afraid to take another loan.

9.1. Flipkart signs MoU with Assam government to promote local art, craft and handlooms
IBEF, Aug. 27, 2020

Assam’s Industries and Commerce Department and Flipkart signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote the state’s local arts, crafts, and handloom sectors by bringing them into the e-commerce fold.

As per the state government, this partnership with the Industries and Commerce Department under the ‘Flipkart Samarth’ programme will help in accessing national market for Assam’s artisans, weavers, and craftsmen, letting them to showcase their hallmark products on Flipkart’s marketplace.

The focus will be on generating opportunities to increase business and trade for these under-served segments of the society.

Mr Chandra Mohan Patowary, Minister of Industries and Commerce was present during signing of MoU.

“Assam is known for its rich, diverse and traditional heritage and is a strong example of how local culture can be preserved while keeping the development of the state as a priority. We are happy that the partnership with Flipkart will enable our local artisans and weavers to showcase their products to a wider audience," Mr Patowary said.

Mr Rajneesh Kumar, Flipkart Group Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, said, “Through this partnership, local artisans, weavers and handicraft makers will enjoy dedicated benefits under the Flipkart Samarth programme that will further boost their growth and aspirations."

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

9.2. Flipkart starts wholesale e-commerce service in India
IBEF, Sep. 03, 2020

Flipkart launched an online wholesale service for mom-and-pop stores and other small businesses, in order to better compete with Amazon and other players in e-commerce. "Flipkart Wholesale", also available as a smartphone app, currently sells apparel in the cities of Bengaluru, Gurugram and Delhi. It plans to expand to 20 more cities and also offer groceries by the end of the year, Flipkart said in a statement.

It also hopes to list more than 200,000 products in two months and have 50 brands and 250 local manufacturers in the next few days, the company added. Flipkart, majority-owned by Walmart Inc, bought the US retail giant's wholesale business in India in July.

Amazon.com Inc and other e-commerce players including online grocery upstart JioMart - backed by billionaire Mukesh Ambani - have been wooing India's mom-and-pop stores, considered the backbone of the economy. Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd has raised over $20 billion this year from global investors including Facebook and Alphabet's Google for its digital arm, which is expected to support JioMart. "Flipkart Wholesale" will face competition from similar services from Amazon and other firms including Tencent-backed start-up Udaan.

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

10. PhonePe to digitize 25 Million small merchants across 5500 talukas in India
IBEF, Sep. 01, 2020

PhonePe, India’s leading digital payments platform announced that it will enable digital payments for over 25 million small merchants across India in the next one year. The company will also onboard these kiranas on its PhonePe for Business app, offering them end-to-end control of the payment process including instant payment confirmations, receipts and reconciliations. It plans to reach 5,500 talukas via its merchant acquisition team that will lead to over 10,000 jobs being created in semi urban and rural areas.

PhonePe will provide multiple offerings to its merchant partners such as, a personalized store page on the PhonePe app allowing them to list their store timings, share their product catalogue and promote home delivery options, thereby reaching out to a much wider customer base.

Customers have the convenience of discovering local stores in their vicinity and connecting with the merchants using the call or chat feature to place their orders, and pay remotely via the stores tab on the PhonePe app. PhonePe is bringing these offerings to merchants in semi-urban and rural areas to help them digitize and grow their business.

Commenting on the announcement, Vivek Lohcheb, Vice President - Offline Business Development, PhonePe said, “Kiranas and merchants across small villages and towns are striving to progress and prosper. We are really excited to partner with them in this journey and take digital payments to the last mile of India across every village and town.”

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

INDUSTRY AND MANUFACTURE

11.1. Mahindra ties up with Israel's REE Automotive to develop commercial EVs
IBEF, Aug. 27, 2020

Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) entered in a partnership with Tel Aviv-based REE Automotive to explore production of electric commercial vehicles.

A memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed between the two companies to explore development and manufacturing of electric commercial vehicles for global markets, said M&M.

Under this collaboration, the company will use REE's revolutionary electric vehicle corner module and platform technology of integrating powertrain, suspension, and steering components in the arch of a vehicle wheel. Along with Mahindra's well-established vehicle design, engineering, sourcing capability and manufacturing assets, is set to be a win-win strategic partnership for both companies it added.

It is expected that the partnership will support REE's global customer need for up to 250,000 electric commercial vehicle units over a few years, including any volumes for Mahindra's domestic and international markets, it added.

"Our collaboration with REE has the potential to bring a disruptive approach to a new age of vehicles capitalising on our respective strengths," said M&M Executive Director (Auto and Farm Sectors) Mr Rajesh Jejurikar.

REE Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mr Daniel Barel said, “Mahindra's unique cost structure, design and engineering capabilities and volume flexibility will be key to the company's ability to address the majority of the commercial EV market with both large volume vehicles as well as more targeted mission-specific vehicles.”

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

11.2. Ester Filmtech to set up Rs 1,350 crore manufacturing plant in Telangana
IBEF, Aug. 18, 2020

Ester Filmtech intends to invest Rs 1,350 crore (US$ 191.52 million) to set up an advanced polyester film manufacturing facility in Telangana.

It is expected that the implementation of the first phase with an investment of Rs 500 crore (US$ 70.93 million) is scheduled to be completed by the third quarter of the calendar year 2022, the company said.

This project will generate direct employment for about 800 people. The end products will be used as packaging material and will help in strengthening the value chain of the flexible packaging industry.

The company also plans to export 30 to 40 per cent of its production, which will help establish Telangana's footprint on the global flexible packaging map.

Chairman Mr Arvind Singhania said, “The company chose Telangana as an investment destination due to its industry-friendly policies, growth-oriented approach and ease of doing business.”

Ester Industries is among the leading producers of polyester films, engineering plastics and speciality polymers in India. The company has manufacturing facilities at Khatima in Uttarakhand with a capacity of 67,000 tonnes per annum of polyester resin, 57,000 TPA of polyester film, 30,000 TPA of speciality polymers and 16,500 TPA of engineering plastics.

It exports about 30 per cent of its production of polyester films with sales and distribution network in more than 56 countries.

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

12.1. Indian Railways set to meet all its energy consumption needs of more than 33 billion units by 2030. Current annual requirement is about 21 billion units
IBEF, Aug. 28, 2020

In order to achieve its objective of becoming 100 per cent self-sustainable for all its power needs and also to contribute to national solar power goals, Indian Railways organized wide ranging discussions with key stake holders under the chairmanship of Minister of Railways and Commerce and Industry Mr Piyush Goyal.

It may be noted that Indian Railways is committed to utilize solar energy for meeting its traction power requirement and become a complete ‘Green mode of transportation’.

The primary areas of discussion in this meeting were as follows:

Innovative solutions for setting up solar projects along the railway track.
Possible power procurement routes for achieving 20 GW renewable energy target, set by the Indian Railways, to become the net zero carbon emitter by 2030.
Challenges in large scale deployment of solar energy projects by the Indian Railways.

The developers acknowledged the efforts of Indian Railways in leading the development of renewable energy in the country and expressed strong support to Indian Railways on the path of going green and achieving the net zero carbon emissions target by 2030.

This is in line with the recent directive of Hon’ble Prime Minister to solarise railway stations and utilize vacant railway land for Renewable Energy (RE) projects.

It will also contribute towards National Solar Mission, an initiative of the Government of India to promote solar power.

As a follow up, it has been decided by Ministry of Railways to provide solar power plants on vacant unused Railway land on mega scale. A pilot project of 1.7 MW capacity with direct connectivity to 25 KV traction system has been successfully operationalised in Bina. In addition, solar plant of 3 MW capacity has also been commissioned at Modern Coach Factory (MCF), Raebareli for non-traction applications. Further, 2 more projects – one at Diwana for 2 MW and another at Bhilai for 50 MW capacity for connectivity with State Transmission Utility (STU) and Central Transmission Utility (CTU) respectively are in progress.

The use of solar power will accelerate the Minister of Railways and Commerce and Industry, Mr Piyush Goyal’s mission to achieve conversion of Indian Railways to ‘Net Zero Carbon Emission Railway’. To achieve this, Indian Railways has developed a mega plan for installing solar plants of 20 GW capacity by utilizing its vacant land by 2030. With the ambitious plan of achieving 100 per cent electrification for Railways by the year 2023, Indian Railways energy consumption is set to become more than 33 billion units by 2030 from its current annual requirement of about 21 billion units.

Indian Railways has adopted a multi-pronged approach towards decarbonization which would be fulfilled by the solar projects being deployed, making it the first transport organization to be energy self-sufficient. This would help in making Indian Railways green as well as ‘Atma-Nirbhar’

In this regard, to begin with, bids for 3 GW solar projects on vacant Railway land parcels and land parcels along the railway track have already been invited by Railway Energy Management Company Ltd. (REMCL), a PSU of Indian Railways. These solar projects, besides supplying power to Railways at reduced tariff, will also protect the Railway land by construction of boundary wall along the track.

Minister of Railways and Commerce and Industry, Mr Piyush Goyal pointed out that Indian Railways is willing to extend all support to the developers for installing solar power plants on Railway’s vacant un-encroached land. Boundary wall along the track will be constructed and maintained by developers which will also help in preventing trespassing on tracks.

Adoption of modern indigenous technology to create an energy self-reliant Indian Railways will contribute towards meeting India’s renewable energy targets and Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), as committed by our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi.

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

12.2. Medha invests Rs 1,000 crore, sets up rail coach factory in Telangana
IBEF, Aug. 17, 2020

A Hyderabad-based diversified firm, Medha Servo Drives laid the foundation for setting up a rail coach factory in Telangana at an investment of Rs 1,000 crore (US$ 141.86 million).

The ground-breaking ceremony of the Medha Rail Coach Factory in Kondakal village in neighbouring Rangareddy district was attended by State Minister for IT and Industries Mr KT Rama Rao.

It is expected that the factory will generate 1,000 direct and 1,200 indirect jobs in the region.

"The facility will have a capacity of manufacturing coaches, locomotives, inter-city train sets, metro trains and monorail, among others. Production capacity is planned for 500 coaches of various types and 50 locomotives per year," Medha Servo said.

Medha Servo Drives Pvt. Ltd designs and manufactures various world-class high-tech electronics products for application on locomotives, train sets, coaches, railway stations and yards, making it the largest propulsion equipment supplier to the Indian Railways.

Mr Rama Rao said, “Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao-led governments pro-active approach and conducive policies have encouraged Medha Group to establish its world-class rail coach factory”.

The facility is expected to create an eco-system for rail coach manufacturing in the state.

This will be the largest private sector rail coach manufacturing unit in the country.

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

13. Government approves proposal to export made in India mobile phones worth $100 billion
IBEF, Sep. 08, 2020

The government has reportedly cleared a USD 100 billion proposal that allows manufacturers to export smartphones made in India to other parts of the world. Smartphone brands such as Samsung, Lava, Karbonn and contract manufactures Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron are cleared to export smartphones made in India.

A senior government official quoted that the empowered committee which includes Niti Aayog CEO, secretaries of economic affairs, expenditure, revenue, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has approved applications estimated to export around USD 100 billion worth mobile phones under the production linked incentive scheme (PLI) and all the applications will be placed before the cabinet probably this week.

The applicants include seven Indian and five overseas manufacturing companies, along with six applicants from the components manufacturing scheme.

According to the applications, Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron, and Samsung have submitted production estimates worth USD 50 billion each in the next five years

The government had launched the PLI scheme to boost the manufacturing of smartphones in India and several brands and suppliers showed interest by applying for the scheme and gain benefits worth Rs 41,000 crore.

Samsung is looking to manufacture mobile phones worth Rs 3.7 lakh crore in India over the next five years. Out of this, smartphones worth USD 30 billion, or Rs 2.2 lakh crore will be produced under the PLI scheme.

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

14.1. Koppala to get India's first toy manufacturing cluster
IBEF, Sep. 02, 2020

To boost the India’s toy manufacturing industry and be in line with Vocal for Local campaign, Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa announced the proposed toy cluster in Koppala in Karnataka.

This will be the India's first toy manufacturing cluster and is expected to attract over Rs 5,000 crore in investments. The proposed toy cluster will have connectivity to NH-63 and Belagavi Airport. It will be a 400-acre SEZ with top-class infra and will generate 40,000 jobs in five years.

The Karnataka government is trying to enhance its outreach to global investors to set up units in the South Indian state; and to make this easier for industries to consider Karnataka for its investments it has also amended the industrial, land and labour laws.

Karnataka is the third-largest market for toys in India (USD 159 million) 9.1 percent of the national market.

The state's toy industry has grown at a CAGR of 18 percent (2010-2017) and is expected to reach USD 310 million by 2023.

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

14.2. Amazon enters fitness space with Amazon Halo smart band
Livemint, 27 Aug. 2020, Prasid Banerjee

Unlike most fitness bands and smartwatches, the Amazon Halo doesn’t have a screen.

E-commerce giant Amazon entered the fitness space today, introducing a fitness band called Amazon Halo. The band uses the companies prowess with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, a voice assistant (of sorts) and physical sensors, which detect various aspects of a person’s health.

“We are using Amazon’s deep expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer customers a new way to discover, adopt and maintain personalized wellness habits," said Dr. Maulik Majumdar, Principal Medical Officer, Amazon Halo.

Unlike most fitness bands and smartwatches, the Amazon Halo doesn’t have a screen. That sets the company apart from the likes of Fitbit, Garmina and even Apple, who have gone after the fitness enthusiasts. Instead, the Halo is being promoted as a wellness product, meaning it will focus on overall health. It also doesn’t have GPS, WiFi or SIM support.

Instead, the Helo has a tiny LED indicator light, a button that turns off the two in-built microphones so you can speak to Alexa it, an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, and a heart rate monitor.

Unlike the Echo speakers, you won’t be speaking to Alexa through the microphones on this device. Amazon has added a “tone" feature, which, the company claims, can be used to determine “social and emotional well-being". The Halo also measures how you sleep, your body fat percentage and activity.

For activity, the Halo awards points to users. So you will earn more for running than you will for walking. “Medical guidelines advise that a sedentary lifestyle can negatively impact health, so Amazon Halo deducts one activity point for every hour over eight hours of sedentary time in a day, outside of sleep," the company said in a blog post. The Halo sets a baseline of 150 activity points every week.

There’s also the Amazon Halo Labs service, which is meant to help customers determine what improves their lifestyle “Customers can choose from labs created by Amazon Halo experts, as well as brands and personalities they already know," the post says.

Further, Amazon also said that health data from customers is encrypted in transit and in the cloud. It will also let customers download and delete their data whenever they want from the Halo app. Images of body scans will be automatically deleted from the cloud after they’re processed. The tone feature will analyse speech samples locally on the customer’s phone and they will be deleted after processing too. “Nobody, not even the customer, ever hears them," the company said.

The Halo isn’t just a band though, Amazon is selling it through a subscription-based service. In the United States (US), which is where the band is available right now, the Halo is available for early access right now at an introductory price of $64.99 for the band and six months membership to the subscription service. This will otherwise cost $99.99 and renew automatically for $3.99 per month after the first six months.

Not subscribing to the membership program will limit the band’s features to steps, sleep time and heart rate only. Amazon hasn’t yet said whether it plans to sell the band in India, but with a growing market for affordable fitness bands, it’s possible that an India launch will happen eventually.

15. India's apparel exports to register 40% growth in FY21: AEPC
IBEF, Sep. 04, 2020

Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) Chairman A. Sakthivel, quoted that the apparel exports from the India is likely to expand by about 40 per cent in the current financial year.

While addressing the 41st Annual General Meeting of the industry body, the Chairman said: "We are working with a target to achieve a 40 per cent increase in apparel exports this financial year with major focus on new medical textiles, which will take the total apparel exports from $15.4 billion in last fiscal to about $22 billion in 2020-21."

He also thanked Union Minister of Textiles, Smriti Zubin Irani for the initiatives taken to help this industry.

He urged the international buyers to do 'commerce with compassion' and honour their export orders.

Besides this, he facilitated the apparel into production of personal protective equipment (PPE) making India the second largest producer of medical textiles within a short period of time.

He further said the industry needs product diversification into Man Made Fibre (MMF) and plans to sign MoUs with several MMF manufacturers, including Reliance Industries Ltd, to improve the sector as MMF plays an important role in increasing India's textile exports to the global market.

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

SERVICES (EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE, IT, R&D, TOURISM, ETC.)

16.1. Saptagir partners with Jubliant Generics to manufacture 'Remdesivir'
IBEF, Sep. 15, 2020

Saptagir has formed a partnership with Jubliant Generics to manufacture 'Remdesivir at its Hyderabad WHO-GMP certified sterile drug product manufacturing plant, which acquired at an investment of â‚¹75 crore.

API and intermediates innovator Saptagir a part of the Rs 900 crore Saptagir Group while Jubliant Generics is a Jubilant Life Sciences company.

Fresh investments in a pharmaceutical plant certified by WHO-GMP offer Saptagir a good entry into a vertical pharmaceutical adjacent.

Saptagir Laboratories, based in Hyderabad, announced on Monday that it has signed an exclusive agreement with Jubilant Generics to develop intermediates and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient for intravenous drug 'Remdesivir' used in Covid-19 therapy.

The drug will be manufactured at its sterile pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, approved by Hyderabad WHO-GMP, acquired at an investment of Rs 75 crore.

API and intermediates Saptagir are a part of the Rs 900 Crore Saptagir Group, while Jubliant Generics is a Jubilant Life Sciences.

Miss Shilpa Reddy, Promoter and Managing Director, Saptagir Laboratories said that they are honoured to partner with Jubilant Generics and make available this life saving therapy to patients across countries to save millions of lives affected by the pandemic. She also added that this partnership is timely and in line with their strategic growth plans for the company.

Remdesivir is an antiviral experimental drug developed by Gilead Sciences, Inc., as a treatment course for Covid-19. Gilead signed a non-exclusive licence deal for sale to 127 countries with Jubilant Life Sciences. After this, Jubilant Life Sciences has entered into an exclusive agreement with Saptagir Laboratories to produce Remdesivir through its subsidiary Jubilant Generics.

According to Gilead Life Sciences, the demand for Remdesivir is forecasted to be $2.3 trillion for this year and the fiscal year based upon their understanding of the situation.

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

16.2. Dr Reddy' launches Remdesivir under brand name 'Redyx' for Covid-19
treatment in India
IBEF, Sep. 10, 2020

Dr Reddys Laboratories Ltd announced the launch of Remdesivir, meant for treatment of COVID-19 patients, under a brand name 'Redyx' in India. According to the drug maker, the launch is part of the licensing agreement with Gilead Sciences, Inc. that grants Dr Reddys the right to register, manufacture and sell Remdesivir, a potential treatment for Covid-19, in 127 countries including India.

Remdesivir is approved by Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) for restricted emergency use in India for the treatment of Covid-19 patients hospitalized with severe symptoms. "Dr Reddy's Redyx is available in strength of 100 mg vial," it said.

Chief Executive Officer of Branded Markets (India and Emerging Markets), Dr Reddys Laboratories, M V Ramana said, "We will continue our efforts to develop products that address significant unmet needs of patients. The launch of Redyx reaffirms our commitment to bringing in critical medicine for patients suffering from COVID-19 in India."

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

17. Apple begins assembling iPhone SE (2020) in India, to go on sale soon
IBEF, Aug. 26, 2020

Apple has started assembling its affordable second-generation iPhone SE (2020) in India that will reach authorised retail stores and online channels very soon, as per the company’s statement.

The company is targeting Android mid-segment users along with the aspirational iPhone seekers. It introduced the new iPhone SE to India, which is similar in looks with Apple iPhone 8 but with the power of iPhone 11, costs just Rs 42,500 (US$ 602.9).

"New iPhone SE packs our most powerful chip into our most popular size at our most affordable price and we're excited to be making it in India for our local customers," said Apple in a statement.

Apple supplier Wistron is responsible to assemble the new iPhone at its Bengaluru facility.

The Cupertino-based tech giant became the first US company to cross the US$ 2 trillion-mark last week and is currently assembling four high-selling iPhones in India: iPhone 11, iPhone XR, iPhone 7 and new iPhone SE.

According to Mr Navkendar Singh, Research Director, Client Devices and IPDS, IDC India, the new iPhone SE is finding good grip in the India market, mainly as it is a new iPhone from Apple at an attractive price point.

"Given its attractive price point and expected price aggression by brands and channels (online platforms) during the next few festive months, we should see the new iPhone SE to further find good traction in next few months," said Mr Singh.

There are not many options available for people who prefer a smaller pocket-sized phone as phones are getting bigger in size.

Apple started assembling iPhones in India in 2017. Currently, iPhone XR and iPhone 11 are being assembled by Foxconn at its Chennai plant and iPhone 7 and new iPhone SE by Wistron in Bengaluru.

Original iPhone SE and iPhone 6s were assembled by Wistron but those were discontinued in 2019.

According to Mr Prabhu Ram, Head- Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CMR, with the iPhone SE 2020, Apple has added a new chapter to its rather impressive India growth story.

"The iPhone SE 2020 has been doing exceptionally well, capturing 8 per cent market share of the total premium smartphones shipped during Q2 (second quarter)," said Mr Ram.

The new iPhone SE is considered as powerful and compact as it has a 4.7-inch Retina HD display, Touch ID, A13 Bionic chip that enables great battery life and the best single-camera system.

In June quarter the company grew two per cent, said Apple CEO Mr Tim Cook and the company witnessed a strong iPhone SE launch amid great customer response.

"The combination of the smaller form factor and an incredibly affordable price made the iPhone SE very popular. iPhone 11 is still the most popular smartphone, but iPhone SE definitely helped our results," Mr Cook said.

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

18. India test-fires hypersonic technology demonstrator vehicle; joins select group
IBEF, Sep. 08, 2020

India has successfully flight-tested the indigenously-developed hypersonic technology demonstration vehicle (HSTDV), joining a select group of countries having the capability to develop the next-generation hypersonic cruise missiles, officials said. The HSTDV, based on hypersonic propulsion technologies and developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), will help India develop futuristic space assets like long-range missile systems and aerial platforms, they said. The HSTDV is capable of powering missiles to attain a speed of around Mach 6 or six times the speed of sound, the officials said, adding only a very few countries like the US, Russia and China have such a capability.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh congratulated the DRDO over the successful test-flight of the HSTDV, calling it a "landmark achievement". "I congratulate DRDO on this landmark achievement towards realising PM's vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat. I spoke to the scientists associated with the project and congratulated them on this great achievement. India is proud of them," he tweeted. A DRDO official said that with the successful test flight of the HSTDV, India has demonstrated capabilities for highly complex technology that will serve as the building block for next-generation hypersonic vehicles in partnership with the domestic defence industry. The defence ministry said the parameters of launch and cruise vehicle, including the scramjet engine, were monitored by multiple tracking radars, electro-optical systems and telemetry stations. "The scramjet engine worked at high dynamic pressure and very high temperature. A ship was also deployed in the Bay of Bengal to monitor the performance during the cruise phase of hypersonic vehicle," the ministry said. With the successful test, it said many critical technologies such as aerodynamic configuration for hypersonic manoeuvres, use of scramjet propulsion for ignition and sustained combustion at hypersonic were proven and validated.

It said the hypersonic cruise vehicle was launched using a proven rocket motor, which took it to an altitude of 30 kilometres where the aerodynamic heat shields were separated. "The cruise vehicle separated from the launch vehicle and the air intake opened as planned. The hypersonic combustion sustained, and the cruise vehicle continued on its desired flight path at a velocity of six times the speed of sound," the ministry said. It said the critical events like fuel injection and auto ignition of scramjet demonstrated technological maturity and that the scramjet engine performed in a "textbook manner".

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

19.1. Cabinet approves establishment of new All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at Darbhanga, Bihar
Press Information Bureau, Sep. 16, 2020

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi has approved establishment of a new All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at Darbhanga, Bihar.This will be established under the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY).The Cabinet also approved creation of one post of Director in the basic pay of Rs 2,25,000/- (US$ 3,082.5) (fixed) plus NPA (however pay + NPA would not exceed Rs 2,37,500/-) (US$ 3,253.8) for the above AIIMS.

The total cost will be Rs.1264 crore (US$ 0.4 bn) and is likely to be completed within a period of 48 months from the date of the approval of Government of India.

Benefits to the common man/highlights

New AIIMS will add 100 UG (MBBS) seats and 60 B.Sc (Nursing) seats.
New AIIMS will have 15-20 Super Specialty Departments.
New AIIMS will add 750 hospital beds.
As per data of current functional AIIMS, it is expected that each new AIIMS will cater to around 2000 OPD patients per day and around 1000 IPD patients per month.
PG and DM/ M.Ch Super-specialty courses will also be started in due course.

Details of project:

Establishment of new AIIMS involves creation of Hospital, Teaching Block for medical & nursing courses, residential complex and allied facilities/services, broadly on the pattern of AIIMS, New Delhi and other six new AIIMS taken up under Phase-I of PMSSY. The objective is to establish the new AIIMS as Institution of National Importance for providing quality tertiary healthcare, medical education, nursing education and research in the Region.

The proposed institution shall have a hospital with capacity of 750 beds which will include Emergency / Trauma beds, ICU beds, AYUSH beds, Private beds and Specialty & Super Specialty beds. In addition, there will be a Medical College, AYUSH Block, Auditorium, Night Shelter, Guest House, Hostels and residential facilities. The establishment of the new AIIMS will create capital assets for which requisite specialized manpower will be created, based on the pattern of the six new AIIMS, for their operations and maintenance. The recurring cost on these Institutions shall be met through Grant-in-Aid to them from Plan Budget Head of PMSSY of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Impact:

Setting up of new AIIMS would not only transform health education and training but also address the shortfall of health care professionals in the region. The establishment of new AIIMS will serve the dual purpose of providing super specialty health care to the population while also help create a large pool of doctors and other health workers in this region that can be available for primary and secondary level institutions / facilities being created under National Health Mission (NHM). Construction of new AIIMS is fully funded by the Central Government. The Operations & Maintenance expenses on new AIIMS are also fully borne by the Central Government.

Employment Generation:

Setting up new AIIMS in the state will lead to employment generation for nearly 3000 persons in various faculty & non-faculty posts. Further, indirect employment generation will take place due to facilities and services like shopping centre, canteens, etc. coming in the vicinity of the new AIIMS.

The construction activity involved for creation of the physical infrastructure for the AIIMS Darbhanga is also expected to generate substantial employment during the construction phase as well.

This will fill the gaps in tertiary health-care infrastructure as well as facilities for quality medical education in the State and adjoining areas.The AIIMS would not only provide the much needed super specialty / tertiary health care at affordable costs, to the poor and needy, it would also make available trained medical manpower for the National Rural Health Mission / other Health Programmes of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.This institute will also create trained pool of teaching resources / faculty which can impart quality medical education.

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

19.2. Telemedicine market in India to reach USD 5.5 bn by 2025: EY-IPA study
IBEF, Sep. 09, 2020

According to an EY-IPA study, the domestic telemedicine market is expected to reach USD 5.5 billion by 2025 and Indian healthcare industry should shift from traditional method of doctor-patient interaction to digitally enabled remote consultations

Evolution of teleconsultation and e-pharmacy will be the new norm and around 15-20 per cent of the healthcare ecosystem is expected to shift to virtual care across triaging, consults, remote monitoring, home health, etc. The healthcare industry, driven by the increased digitisation will require a strong regulatory framework to protect the patient’s data privacy and prescription substitution.

The study stated that the telemedicine market in India will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31 per cent for the period 2020–25 and reach USD 5.5 billion.

There is a growth in virtual care such as tele–consult, telepathology, teleradiology and e–pharmacy in India due to the current pandemic situation. The teleconsultation and e-pharmacy will account for around 95 per cent of the telemedicine market by 2025 which amounts to USD 5.2 billion

As per the study, India's e-pharmacy market is projected to reach 10-12 per cent of the overall pharmaceutical sales in the next five years driven by strong regulations, increased funding and creation of digital infrastructure, it added.

Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) Secretary-General Sudarshan said that with the challenges due to the COVID-19, consumer behaviour and patterns are changing and the new norms of social distancing traditional ways of in-person doctor-patient interaction are being digitally enabled by remote consultations.

EY India Life Sciences - Partner & Leader Sriram Shrinivasan quoted that the current levels of adoption by the patients and doctors along with emerging technologies, India will experience a growth in the digital health ecosystem, however, it will also need a robust regulatory and governance framework that provides the right support for growth.

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

20.1. TCS becomes second Indian firm to cross Rs 9 lakh crore ($122,5 bn) market valuation
IBEF, Sep. 15, 2020

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) becomes the second leading Indian firm to achieve a market valuation of INR 9 trillion, after Reliance Industries. The market valuation of the company reached INR 9 trillion in in early trade helped by a rally in its share price.

The stock of the software services firms also reached its record high on the BSE — gained 2.91% to INR 2,442.80, while on the NSE, it achieved its lifetime high — jumped 2.76% to INR 2,439.80.

The company’s market valuation increased to INR 9,14,606.25 crore on the BSE in early trade, due to surge in its share price. In terms of market capitalisation, it is the second most-valuable domestic firm.

Reliance Industries Limited is the first Indian firm to have crossed the market valuation mark of INR 9 trillion.

In October last year, the country’s most valued firm achieved this milestone. Currently, its market valuation stands at INR 15,78,732.92 crore — the highest of any listed company in the country.

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

20.2 Mumbai adds highest data centre capacity in January-June: Report
IBEF, Sep. 01, 2020

Mumbai has witnessed highest data centre capacity addition in the first half of 2020, as it continues to be the preferred choice for large cloud players. The city also accounts for 62% of India’s total cloud capacity, followed by Pune and Chennai, showed a JLL India report.

Mumbai continues to command premium for enterprise demand driven by its infrastructural benefits, followed by Hyderabad and Chennai. Further, the city is expected to witness the highest capacity addition of nearly 360 MW during 2020-2025, followed by Chennai with a capacity addition of 134 MW.

India’s data centre capacity is expected to grow from 375 MW in the first half of 2020 to 1,078 MW by 2025, presenting a $4.9 billion investment opportunity, JLL India said.

“India’s data centre market will outperform over the next five years, supported by a combination of growing digital economy, increased investor interest and stable long-term returns. Growth in the sector will be further powered by colocation sites which, via, lower upfront costs, heightened data security, uninterrupted services and scalability will, further, influence investors to re-imagine the potential of India’s data centre space,” said Karan Singh Sodi, Regional Managing Director – Mumbai, JLL India .

India’s data centre industry has provided a boost to the digital economy during the first half of 2020. Daily data consumption rose from an average of 270 petabytes (PB) during pre-lockdown period to an average of 308 PB post lockdown period registering a 14% rise.

The dependence of several industries on digital infrastructure has partially helped mitigate the impact of the lockdown as IT/ITeS, Banking and Financial Services, e-commerce, capital markets, social media and education remained operational.

“Mumbai is expected to see highest capacity addition as it continues to be the preferred choice for large cloud players because of its infrastructure advantage. Chennai is also proving to be an attractive destination due to its advantages of submarine cable landing stations and low development costs.” says Dr Samantak Das, Chief Economist and Head of Research & REIS, JLL India

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.The world is in need of strong trade champions
Livemint, 20 Aug 2020

The WTO says that global trade has hit a record low. A recovery is likely to be L rather than U-shaped, alas. But covid alone is not to blame. Deglobalization trends must be fought too

World trade may not have done as badly under the current corona crunch as feared a few months ago. But the scenario is grim all the same. On Wednesday, the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO) said that its Goods Trade Barometer, which offers real-time data on merchandise sales across borders, had hit a low of 84.5. This was well under its baseline of 100, 18.6 points lower year-on-year, and also “the lowest on record in data going back to 2007", as the WTO put it, “on par with the nadir of the 2008-09 financial crisis". The WTO also said that the latest number was largely consistent with its statistics issued in June, which estimated an 18.5% drop in the second quarter of 2020, as compared to the same period a year earlier. Back in April, the organization had forecast that world trade in goods would contract by 13-32% this calendar year. Now it seems that the actual shrinkage will be nearer the lower end of that range.

Thankfully, there are signs of an uptick in some sectors. While component indices of the barometer such as automotive products, air freight and container shipping remain depressed, export orders point to a nascent recovery. Other indices such as electronic components and agricultural raw materials recorded only modest declines. Yet, optimism on trade remains at a premium for reasons that go beyond the covid pandemic. Unless action is taken, global commerce may yet recede behind thick domestic walls and leave us all worse off.

All portents suggest an L-shaped rather than V-shaped recovery in trade. The international movement of goods and people will likely stay restricted until a way out of the current crisis is found. More strikingly, too many countries appear to have turned their backs on the idea of free trade, with “beggar-thy-neighbour" mercantilist instincts awakened by nationalist rhetoric in large parts of the world. Notably, the US, once a stout supporter of globalization, has moved away from its economic rationale.

Having long argued that a planet free of business barriers would serve everyone’s interest, it has turned trade relations into a matter of give-and-take, with its own import tariffs either used as bargaining chips for market access or shaped by considerations that end up picking specific winners and losers within the US. This has been visible in its tit-for-tat tariff war with China, the overall cost of which would have exceeded any benefits it may have got. No less damaging has been its neglect of the WTO, which has more or less been in limbo, its dispute resolution mechanism especially.

So, how does the world extricate itself from this morass? Since adherence to the rules of a multilateral trading system is critical to the smooth flow of stuff across borders, a rescue of the WTO would have to be accorded priority. A bigger challenge would be to reverse the trend of nations trying to boost exports while curtailing imports. This is misguided. Trade policies should be win-win. If the existing trade architecture needs to be tweaked to fix anomalies, then talks should begin. Above all, we need vocal champions of trade that understand and articulate the perils of a split-up world. The last major era of drawbridges being drawn up led to tensions playing a catalytic role in an outbreak of hostilities. Economic integration after World War II was meant to act as a guarantor of global peace and stability. Let’s not forget that lesson.

22. The silver lining in India’s export performance
Livemint, 24 Aug. 2020, howindialives.com

The recovery of India’s foreign trade from the pandemic is patchy. But it’s better in exports than in imports

On 15 Aug, standing on the Red Fort ramparts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterated his government’s economic vision of self-sufficiency, adding that India would aim to become the supplier to the world. A day earlier, India had reported its latest trade numbers, and for the second successive month, India’s goods exports were within touching distance of their pre-covid levels. In June 2020, India’s exports trailed their June 2019 numbers by 12%. In July 2020, the gap to July 2019 was 10%.

On the face of it, these are not bad numbers for a segment that tumbled 60% in April and is trying to claw back lost ground. But two caveats are called for. One, India’s exports have had a difficult time in recent years. In 2019-20, the year against which current performance is being benchmarked, India’s exports fell 5%, shows data from India’s central bank.

Two, India has swung to extremes during the pandemic. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on 25 countries for which recent monthly exports numbers are available shows India suffered the second-largest monthly drop in April, the worst month of the pandemic. Subsequently, it was ranked third in monthly increase in May and seventh in June. In other words, India’s exports are recovering, but they are doing so on a low base, and fundamental issues on how to become more competitive globally remain.

Becoming more competitive is a long-term task. In the near term, the objective would be to at least revert to the old normal, and the recent trade data suggests reasons for hope. After the sharp plunge in April, recovery in exports has been stronger than in imports.

More encouragingly, the exports recovery in May, June, and July appears to be broad based. The ministry of commerce breaks up trade data across 98 product categories. We have segregated this into three buckets based on year-on-year changes: positive growth, moderate drop (up to 20%) and severe drop (higher than 20%).

The number of categories in the first two buckets has increased consistently: 10 in April, 36 in May, 67 in June and 80 in July. In 14 of these categories, exports have increased for three successive months. Prominent among them were pharmaceuticals ($1.6 billion in July), iron and steel ($1.3 billion), cereals ($813 million), and aluminium ($445 million).

In comparison, the rebound in imports is not only relatively muted, but also less broad based. Against 81 of 98 categories for exports (75% of total in value terms), only 35 categories in imports (40% of total in value terms) were present in the top two buckets in June.

This variance in recovery between exports and imports can also be seen at the very top. Of the top 10 export categories by value in March-June 2019, 5 categories grew on a year-on-year basis in July 2020. For imports, that ratio was 1 in 10 categories.

A deceleration in goods imports at a time exports are rising faster suggests that domestic demand in the country is recovering much more slowly compared to other countries. In July, there’s been positive growth in exports to north-east Asia (including China and South Korea) and Asean countries (including Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam). By comparison, exports to North America, European Union and West Asia have shrunk.

Even though India has been aiming to reduce its import dependence on China, the dependence on our northern neighbour has only grown since the pandemic began. China is the leading importer to India, accounting for 13.8% of India’s imports in 2019-20. It was followed by the US, with 7.5% share. During the pandemic, as India’s imports shrunk, China’s monthly share has ranged between 16-21%.

These are unusual months, and the months ahead will show where these numbers stabilize. Longer term, the government has been vocal on viewing foreign trade strategically. It wants India to be stronger in exports and reduce its dependence on imports. In recent weeks, there’s been executive action to discourage specific items of defence machinery from all countries and certain products sourced majorly from China.

It is prudent to exercise caution in such import bans. Weak imports in some categories can also impact exports, as some imports serve as intermediates for exports. A case in point is gems and jewellery, a leading foreign trade item for India and a big source of employment in the country. Indian companies import uncut gems and process it into jewellery for export. At present, both imports and exports here are severely curtailed.

Success on the trade front is ultimately a function of competitiveness, and India has much work to do on that front.

howindialives.com is a search engine for public data

23. What internet means to an island economy
Livemint, 24 Aug. 2020, Deborshi Chaki

The Andamans just became one of the last Indian territories to get high-speed net. Will new businesses come up?
While the internet in itself will not solve persistent developmental challenges, it does offer a pathway to amplify economic transformations which are already underway

MUMBAI : On 10 August, when the Prime Minister inaugurated India’s first 5G-ready undersea optical fibre cable network between the Andamans and Chennai, life came full circle for Sunil Gupta. Around a year ago, he had made the difficult decision to wind up his startup in Bengaluru, a B2B tech platform for the tourism industry, and return to his hometown Port Blair in order to spend more time with his ageing parents.

“I had to close the company because the internet was dismally slow in Port Blair which makes remote working impossible," said Gupta, who has since his return has opened a tourist hostel for budget travellers in Wandoor beach about 25km from Port Blair. But with data speeds set to improve dramatically once the undersea cable becomes fully operational, Gupta said that those plans have suddenly changed.

“Once connectivity improves, then it doesn’t really matter whether one is in Port Blair or in Bengaluru, rather the cost of operations will be less in Port Blair," he said.

The 2,300km submarine optical fibre cable link, a long-standing demand among the local population, will deliver a bandwidth of 2x200 gigabits per second (Gbps) between Chennai and Port Blair, and 2x100 Gbps between capital Port Blair and the other islands. Though the internet arrived in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands via satellite connectivity in the early 2000s, data transfer speeds during all these years have been rudimentary.

While users in the Indian mainland upgraded to superfast digital ecosystems, the islands have remained in the 2G era (Lakshadweep will also get an undersea cable soon). Though technically speaking 4G service is available on the islands, it seldom worked. In the absence of proper connectivity, internet bandwidth, a precious commodity in the islands, was kept largely for the exclusive use of the local government machinery, leaving a large portion of the local population without any form of digital connectivity.

Now, the arrival of the undersea cable is expected to usher in an IT and ITes revolution on the islands. The islands have a high literacy rate of 86.6% and a ready workforce made up of a large English-speaking young population. While the internet in itself will not solve persistent developmental challenges—ranging from geographic remoteness to a heavy reliance on the government for the supply of goods and services—it does offer a pathway to amplify economic transformations which are already underway. The internet may finally offer the islanders a reasonable shot at diversifying beyond tourism.

A decade long wait

Located around 1,200km from the Indian mainland in the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a former prison colony, carefully chosen for its sheer inaccessibility and remoteness, served as a natural prison for more than a century. The nearest continental landmass from the Andamans is the coast of Myanmar, which is about a day’s journey by sea from the capital Port Blair.

The island group is India’s largest union territory and is centrally administered by the union government through a lieutenant governor, the highest-ranking official of the local administration. The islands are scattered across an 800km zone from north to south. The main island clusters of Andaman and Nicobar are separated by high seas and lie to the north of the Malacca Strait, a busy sea route through which one-third of the world’s sea trade passes. Over the years, the islands have emerged as a sought-after tourist destination as well as a strategic point in the Bay of Bengal for the defence forces and currently serves as the headquarters of India’s first tri-services command, which is headed by all the three services on a rotation basis. While the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) initiative began in 2011 to provide broadband connectivity to over 200,000 gram panchayats across all 26 states and union territories, it did not include the Andaman and Nicobar Islands due to technical challenges. Telecom providers in the islands, therefore, were left to rely on expensive satellite connectivity to provide 2Mbps speeds. The high cost meant digital connectivity remained out of reach for a large section of the population.

3G services provided by the state-run BSNL and by private operators worked only intermittently. Uploading a single file could take hours. “For years, it was simply impossible for local businesses in the islands to stay competitive due to the lack of proper connectivity," said M. Vinod, president of the Andaman and Association of Tour Operators. “Right from managing flight and hotel bookings online to accepting payments digitally, everything was a big challenge," he said, adding: “But we expect things to be markedly better in the coming months."

Lt General A.K. Singh, former lieutenant governor of the islands who played a key role in getting the project sanctioned, agrees. “It is a defining moment, a game-changer in multiple fields—education, health, governance, e-initiatives. The feeling of isolation which prevailed among the people will reduce; business opportunities will enhance. The islands are well placed for establishing call centres & BPO industry. The people are multilingual and there are no labour issues. In anticipation of the undersea cable, we had started foreign language classes to prepare our people. The possibilities are immense," he told Mint.

The idea of optic fibre connectivity to the islands was first introduced by the erstwhile Planning Commission in 2010, following which it constituted a technical committee for studying the existing available bandwidth, future requirement and the strategy to be adopted for providing adequate bandwidth through reliable connectivity to the islands.

The technical committee after conducting several rounds of discussion with stakeholders such as the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), the ministry of defence and the local administration submitted its report to the Commission in January 2011. In its report, it proposed provisioning submarine optical fibre connectivity to six major islands which include Port Blair, Havelock, Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Kamorta and Campbell Bay and satellite connectivity for other islands.

As per the proposal, the six islands were to be connected through one of the existing consortium cables passing through the region to the Indian mainland. Based on the report of the technical committee, the Planning Commission, in April 2011, conveyed its in-principle approval for laying the undersea optical fibre cable to connect the six major islands. Soon after, the Andaman and Nicobar administration prepared a proposal and invited bids for implementation of the project including its operation and maintenance for 15 years on a turnkey basis. The financial bids of the project were first opened in March 2013, with an initial estimated project cost of ₹413.55 crore. However, the project went into cold storage soon after and was revived only in 2016 under the Modi government.

A strategic asset

In addition to improving digital connectivity to the islands, the project is expected to provide heft to India’s strategic ambitions in the Indian Ocean region, where China’s dominance has been on a steady rise.

Over the years, the Chinese have steadily increased their presence in neighbouring Myanmar. In 1992, China is believed to have established a SIGINT (signals intelligence) gathering station on Great Coco Island to monitor Indian naval activity and missile launches in the Bay of Bengal. In addition to that, the Chinese are believed to have constructed an airstrip in the islands for surveillance-related purposes.

“The Andaman Nicobar Islands are like an unsinkable aircraft carrier of India in a very strategic location in the Bay of Bengal, overlooking the sea lines of communication (SLOCS) and the Malacca Straits," said Lt. General Singh. “Communication was a huge challenge even for our defence forces. The three-tier security around the islands will be greatly facilitated. The west coast of the islands, which is very sparsely inhabited, can now be continuously monitored using technology," he added.

When conceived, it was also suggested that the undersea cable connectivity be extended from Kolkata to the Andamans, in addition to Chennai. The resulting ring-like structure will reduce downtime of the optic fibre cable significantly, which takes a relatively long time to repair and restore given the complexities involved. Additionally, Trai had also suggested that the connectivity from Kolkata may be used to route traffic from the entire North-Eastern region of the country directly to Chennai, bypassing the large fault-prone terrestrial part of the international connectivity from Kolkata to Chennai. Trai had further argued that the optimum fibre network may also be used to provide connectivity to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) nations such as Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Further, connectivity could be extended beyond Chennai to Sri Lanka and the Maldives via submarine cable. Experts say that the project, if extended by another 1000km eastward, will open up a host of opportunities for India in the Asean region and help counterbalance China. With this, experts feel that countries such as Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam too will eventually connect their respective digital highways with the project.

In conclusion

With digital connectivity already up significantly in several pockets in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands due to the cable, the transformative impact of the project has begun showing results.

The islanders say that dealing with rising covid-19 cases, which poses an extinction threat to the indigenous tribes of the island, will be relatively easier now. In the absence of proper connectivity, locals claim that the infections have been on a steady rise as people are forced to venture out for daily chores risking themselves and others. Alongside, students who have returned to their homes from the mainland continue to sit out of online classes in the absence of internet connectivity. But that may not be for long. With digital connectivity set to improve, it is the service sector which harbours the highest level of anticipation and hopes regarding newer job opportunities and new possibilities.

“When I arrived (in the islands) in July 2013, I witnessed first-hand the great challenges faced by the people there. Communication was one of them," said Lt General Singh. “To see the project get complete is very satisfying," he added. In the long-run, it may also turn out to be an important milestone in India’s long-standing Look East policy, an effort to cultivate extensive economic and strategic relations with the nations of Southeast Asia in order to bolster its standing as a regional power.

Above all, the long-awaited project will create a sense of integration and confidence among the islanders, who are living in one of India’s remotest corners and who have until now been disadvantaged and deprived of their ‘right to internet access’–a fundamental right no less.

24. Adani zeroes in on a big reason cities will thrive
Livemint, 01 Sep. 2020

As work goes wireless, airports may come to underpin the raison d’être of urban life. With Mumbai’s and six others under its wing, the Adani Group’s lead raises monopoly concerns

In the board game Monopoly, a player must buy all railway stations to maximize his or her returns. The game’s prototype can be traced to 1903, the year a famous flight by the Wright brothers opened up the skies to us. Today, the role of airports in connecting people is rivalled only by the internet, a role that is likely to survive and thrive even as web interactivity soars. This view of the future could offer a context to explain the verve displayed by the Adani Group, an infrastructure major, as it moves into this field with big money. It recently bagged leases to operate six Indian airports for 50 years: Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram (though this one has been contested). On Monday, news broke that Adani would take over Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) by acquiring a 74% stake, the rest being with the Airports Authority of India. For the Gautam Adani-run conglomerate, this is a significant win, not least for the determination that marked its pursuit of the country’s second busiest air hub (after Delhi). Adani had been stalking this buyout target for months, before MIAL’s majority owner agreed to a sale.

Indeed, how the Hyderabad-based GVK Group came to sell Adani its control of MIAL is a saga in itself. Burdened by debt, GVK had run into financial trouble more than a year ago. It sought to raise fresh capital in staving off a hostile takeover bid, reflected in Adani’s reported attempt early last year to buy the 13.5% stake in MIAL of its minority partner, South Africa’s Bidvest Group. GVK invoked its right of first refusal on such a sale, and tried to rally other investors instead. It signed a pact with a consortium that included Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund and Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investments to sell four-fifths of its airports business for over ₹7,600 crore. This led Bidvest to cite its own right of first refusal to block this sell-out.

As the stalemate wore on, covid-19 crunched GVK’s finances further and pushed it closer to bankruptcy. Another setback awaited the group’s principals, G.V.K. Reddy and his son Sanjay Reddy, in the shape of money-laundering and fund-misappropriation charges levelled against them by the Central Bureau of Investigation. GVK seemed in deep trouble by the time it opened talks with Adani. Now Adani is set to take over all the debt of GVK Airport Developers, against which a majority stake in MIAL had been pledged, and also the shares of its South African partners. Upset, the foreign consortium left out in the cold has been up in protest. But the deal is reported to have our competition authority’s okay, and looks likely to go through.

Yet, the deal also grants salience to the uneasy question of private monopolies in key fields of infrastructure. As work goes wireless and gets decentralized, airports may emerge as one of the few attractions of big cities, and their private control could conceivably go against the public interest. Competition must prevail in all spheres of business, after all, except those reserved for the government. When airport privatization first came up as an idea, second airports for cities were touted as the answer to that objection. But progress on these has been tardy, slowed further perhaps by covid’s impact on civil aviation. In Mumbai’s case, Adani will take charge of the Navi Mumbai airport project as well. All in all, we may need to tweak our policy to assure flyers and air carriers some choice.

25. Japan to subsidise manufacturers if they shift to India from China: Report
IBEF, Sep. 07, 2020

A Nikkei Asian Review report has stated that Japanese manufacturers will be eligible for government subsidies if they shift production out of China to India or Bangladesh. The subsidy aims to diversifying Japan's supply chains. Manufacturers can receive subsidies for feasibility studies and pilot programs. The total amount granted is expected to run into the tens of millions of dollars.

The subsidy aims to reduce Japan's reliance on a handful of links in its supply chains, particularly China, and ensure a steady flow of such products as medical supplies and electrical components in an emergency, said the Nikkei report.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while to speaking to an Indo-American business summit, on Thursday called for a coordinated global effort to get back growth in the coronavirus pandemic.

"This pandemic has also shown the world that the decision to base global supply chains should not only be based on cost but also on trust. Along with affordability of geography, companies are now also looking at reliability and policy stability. India is the location that has all these qualities. As a result, India is also becoming one of the leading destinations of foreign investment," Modi said.

The Nikkei report said Japan’s first round of subsidies announced in July granted more than 10 billion yen to 30 companies relocating manufacturing to Southeast Asia, such as Hoya, which is moving production of electronic components to Vietnam and Laos. Another 57 are receiving support for shifting production facilities to Japan.

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

* * *

Pages

Sunday, 20 September 2020

NEWSLETTER, 20-IX-2020

INDIA

- General policy, Infrastructures, Country Finances, etc.

- Agriculture, Fishing and Rural Development

- Industry and Manufacture

DELHI, 20th SEPTEMBER 2020

NEWSLETTER, 20-VIII-2020

INDIA

GENERAL POLICY, INFRASTRUCTURES, COUNTRY FINANCES, ETC.

1.1. Government of India and AIIB sign agreement for $500 million to improve the network capacity, service quality and safety of the suburban railway system in MumbaiIBEF, Aug. 25, 2020

2.1. Nutrition is India’s next big headacheLivemint, 25 Aug. 2020, Amir Ullah Khan, Saleema Razvi

The current reality

Roots of a slide back

Ways forward

2.2. The gloomy reality of Gulf returneesLivemint, 18 Aug. 2020, Nidheesh M.K.

Bitter homecoming

The deepening crisis

The road ahead

3. India’s descent into stepwells of growthLivemint, 28 Aug. 2020, Kaushik Basu

Lockdown woes

Economic virus

4. Self-made billionaires now dominate India’s rich list, not dynastsLivemint, 13 Sep. 2020, Tanay Sukumar, Sneha Alexander

5.1. India among top three emerging markets globallyLivemint, 18 Aug. 2020, Nikita Kwatra, Sneha Alexander

5.2. Manufacturing is key to creating jobs in servicesLIvemint, 13 Sep. 2020, Vivek Kaul

Agriculture, Fishing and Rural Development

6.1. Another milestone for farm sector: Now, Kharif acreage at lifetime high; bumper harvest likely. After a bumper rabi harvest, the acreage of the Kharif crops has skyrocketed to a lifetime high in the current year.IBEF, Sep. 03, 2020

6.2. Food price flare-up has no real winnersLivemint, 20 Aug. 2020, Sayantan Bera

Protein inflation

Food for thought

Uncertain future

A silver lining

7. How farmer-led firms are vying for a fairer share of the consumer rupeeLivemint, 14 Sep. 2020, Sayantan Bera

Market connect

Access to capital

Way forward

8. Stories of distress from small borrowersLivemint, 17 Aug. 2020, Sayantan Bera

Risk of slippage

Preparing for the worst

Living on hope

9.1. Flipkart signs MoU with Assam government to promote local art, craft and handloomsIBEF, Aug. 27, 2020

9.2. Flipkart starts wholesale e-commerce service in IndiaIBEF, Sep. 03, 2020

10. PhonePe to digitize 25 Million small merchants across 5500 talukas in IndiaIBEF, Sep. 01, 2020

INDUSTRY AND MANUFACTURE

11.1. Mahindra ties up with Israel's REE Automotive to develop commercial EVsIBEF, Aug. 27, 2020

11.2. Ester Filmtech to set up Rs 1,350 crore manufacturing plant in TelanganaIBEF, Aug. 18, 2020

12.1. Indian Railways set to meet all its energy consumption needs of more than 33 billion units by 2030. Current annual requirement is about 21 billion unitsIBEF, Aug. 28, 2020

12.2. Medha invests Rs 1,000 crore, sets up rail coach factory in TelanganaIBEF, Aug. 17, 2020

13. Government approves proposal to export made in India mobile phones worth $100 billionIBEF, Sep. 08, 2020

14.1. Koppala to get India's first toy manufacturing clusterIBEF, Sep. 02, 2020

14.2. Amazon enters fitness space with Amazon Halo smart bandLivemint, 27 Aug. 2020, Prasid Banerjee

15. India's apparel exports to register 40% growth in FY21: AEPCIBEF, Sep. 04, 2020

SERVICES (EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE, IT, R&D, TOURISM, ETC.)

16.1. Saptagir partners with Jubliant Generics to manufacture 'Remdesivir'IBEF, Sep. 15, 2020

16.2. Dr Reddy' launches Remdesivir under brand name 'Redyx' for Covid-19 treatment in IndiaIBEF, Sep. 10, 2020

17. Apple begins assembling iPhone SE (2020) in India, to go on sale soonIBEF, Aug. 26, 2020

18. India test-fires hypersonic technology demonstrator vehicle; joins select groupIBEF, Sep. 08, 2020

19.1. Cabinet approves establishment of new All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at Darbhanga, BiharPress Information Bureau, Sep. 16, 2020

19.2. Telemedicine market in India to reach USD 5.5 bn by 2025: EY-IPA studyIBEF, Sep. 09, 2020

20.1. TCS becomes second Indian firm to cross Rs 9 lakh crore ($122,5 bn) market valuationIBEF, Sep. 15, 2020

20.2 Mumbai adds highest data centre capacity in January-June: ReportIBEF, Sep. 01, 2020

INDIA AND THE WORLD

21.The world is in need of strong trade championsLivemint, 20 Aug 2020

22. The silver lining in India’s export performanceLivemint, 24 Aug. 2020, howindialives.com

23. What internet means to an island economyLivemint, 24 Aug. 2020, Deborshi Chaki

A decade long wait

A strategic asset

In conclusion

24. Adani zeroes in on a big reason cities will thriveLivemint, 01 Sep. 2020

25. Japan to subsidise manufacturers if they shift to India from China: ReportIBEF, Sep. 07, 2020

1.1. Government of India and AIIB sign agreement for $500 million to improve the network capacity, service quality and safety of the suburban railway system in Mumbai
IBEF, Aug. 25, 2020

2.1. Nutrition is India’s next big headache
Livemint, 25 Aug. 2020, Amir Ullah Khan, Saleema Razvi

2.2. The gloomy reality of Gulf returnees
Livemint, 18 Aug. 2020, Nidheesh M.K.

3. India’s descent into stepwells of growth
Livemint, 28 Aug. 2020, Kaushik Basu

4. Self-made billionaires now dominate India’s rich list, not dynasts
Livemint, 13 Sep. 2020, Tanay Sukumar, Sneha Alexander

5.1. India among top three emerging markets globally
Livemint, 18 Aug. 2020, Nikita Kwatra, Sneha Alexander

5.2. Manufacturing is key to creating jobs in services
LIvemint, 13 Sep. 2020, Vivek Kaul

6.1. Another milestone for farm sector: Now, Kharif acreage at lifetime high; bumper
harvest likely. After a bumper rabi harvest, the acreage of the Kharif crops has skyrocketed to a lifetime high in the current year.
IBEF, Sep. 03, 2020

6.2. Food price flare-up has no real winners
Livemint, 20 Aug. 2020, Sayantan Bera

7. How farmer-led firms are vying for a fairer share of the consumer rupee
Livemint, 14 Sep. 2020, Sayantan Bera

8. Stories of distress from small borrowers
Livemint, 17 Aug. 2020, Sayantan Bera

9.1. Flipkart signs MoU with Assam government to promote local art, craft and handlooms
IBEF, Aug. 27, 2020

9.2. Flipkart starts wholesale e-commerce service in India
IBEF, Sep. 03, 2020

10. PhonePe to digitize 25 Million small merchants across 5500 talukas in India
IBEF, Sep. 01, 2020

11.1. Mahindra ties up with Israel's REE Automotive to develop commercial EVs
IBEF, Aug. 27, 2020

11.2. Ester Filmtech to set up Rs 1,350 crore manufacturing plant in Telangana
IBEF, Aug. 18, 2020

12.1. Indian Railways set to meet all its energy consumption needs of more than 33 billion units by 2030. Current annual requirement is about 21 billion units
IBEF, Aug. 28, 2020

12.2. Medha invests Rs 1,000 crore, sets up rail coach factory in Telangana
IBEF, Aug. 17, 2020

13. Government approves proposal to export made in India mobile phones worth $100 billion
IBEF, Sep. 08, 2020

14.1. Koppala to get India's first toy manufacturing cluster
IBEF, Sep. 02, 2020

14.2. Amazon enters fitness space with Amazon Halo smart band
Livemint, 27 Aug. 2020, Prasid Banerjee

15. India's apparel exports to register 40% growth in FY21: AEPC
IBEF, Sep. 04, 2020

16.1. Saptagir partners with Jubliant Generics to manufacture 'Remdesivir'
IBEF, Sep. 15, 2020

16.2. Dr Reddy' launches Remdesivir under brand name 'Redyx' for Covid-19
treatment in India
IBEF, Sep. 10, 2020

17. Apple begins assembling iPhone SE (2020) in India, to go on sale soon
IBEF, Aug. 26, 2020

18. India test-fires hypersonic technology demonstrator vehicle; joins select group
IBEF, Sep. 08, 2020

19.1. Cabinet approves establishment of new All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at Darbhanga, Bihar
Press Information Bureau, Sep. 16, 2020

19.2. Telemedicine market in India to reach USD 5.5 bn by 2025: EY-IPA study
IBEF, Sep. 09, 2020

20.1. TCS becomes second Indian firm to cross Rs 9 lakh crore ($122,5 bn) market valuation
IBEF, Sep. 15, 2020

20.2 Mumbai adds highest data centre capacity in January-June: Report
IBEF, Sep. 01, 2020

21.The world is in need of strong trade champions
Livemint, 20 Aug 2020

22. The silver lining in India’s export performance
Livemint, 24 Aug. 2020, howindialives.com

23. What internet means to an island economy
Livemint, 24 Aug. 2020, Deborshi Chaki

24. Adani zeroes in on a big reason cities will thrive
Livemint, 01 Sep. 2020

25. Japan to subsidise manufacturers if they shift to India from China: Report
IBEF, Sep. 07, 2020