Tag: India

Indian Monsoon

India was an island that separated from Pangea hundreds of millions of years ago. The separation created three significant landmasses, Australia, Madagascar and India. The separation of India and Madagascar created the Western Ghats in India and the same event gives Madagascar the central highlands and Tsaratanana Massifs.

As the Indian landmass moved north it crashed into the Eurasian plate. But before that happened, there was a waterbody called the Tethys Sea that existed all the way from what is modern-day Afghanistan to Myanmar. Hence, the Himalayas are one of the best places to find fossils of aquatic creatures from the era.

The meeting of the Eurasian and Indian plates led to the subduction of the Indian plate and the rise of the Eurasian plate. The Indian tectonic plate ploughed under the Eurasian plate. That gave us the Himalayas.

Source: Wikipedia

The birth of the Himalayas changed the Indian weather system completely.

But for the Himalayas, North India would have been dry and arid. The Gangetic plains would have been missing the river Ganga and would not have any agriculture on it.

The Monsoon

The Tropic of Cancer runs from Gujarat up to Mizoram dividing the country almost into two equal halves.

The Prevailing Winds on the planet change based on the latitude that you are present at. Between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, the winds move towards the East from the West also known as the Easterlies and above the Tropic of Cancer they from the West to the East, known as the Westerlies.

2560px-Earth_Global_Circulation_-_en.svg.png

Source: Wikipedia

And here comes the peculiarity of the Indian landmass. India is surrounded by sea on three sides. During summers, the land heats up faster than the sea and this causes a low pressure to develop above the land since hot air is lighter and rises up. As the pressure drops, cooler air from the sea moves in to fill the void, bringing moisture and therefore rain. As a consequence even though the prevailing winds in India should move from East to West from land towards the sea, the reverse happens.

Source: Wettergefahren

This gives us the Arabian Sea branch of the monsoon which routinely paralyses Mumbai and ensures that Kerala and South Karnataka are heaven to live in. The sea breeze crosses the western ghat which is not high enough to entirely obstruct the clouds and delivers cool evening showers every day in Bangalore.

A similar thing happens in the Bay of Bengal and the sea breeze moves northwards and here is where the role of the mountains shielding the north comes into play. The moisture-laden air comes upon the Himalayas. The mountain chain runs all the way from Afghanistan to Arunachal Pradesh before turning towards the Bay of Bengal (you could refer to the diagram of the Indian plate above). It rises again briefly to give us the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The Bay of Bengal branch of the monsoon turns West thanks to the Himalayas and waters the entire length of the Gangetic plains.

This is how India gets its water.

So what changed this year?

This year, cyclone Biparjoy sucked up the entire moisture from the Arabian Sea branch of the monsoon and took it all to Gujarat and Rajasthan. Consequently, Mumbai was not submerged in water! Instead, we had flooding in places that are not used to receiving much rainfall throughout the year.

Source: Wikipedia

This is the path of Biparjoy which formed on the 6th of June and dissipated on the 20th of June. As you can see, it went right up to Uttar Pradesh causing much precipitation all along the way.

Also the warmer weather this summer delivered a higher-than-usual volume of rain in the Bay of Bengal branch. The result was that Sikkim, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have been flooded.

Nearly half a million people in northeast India have been affected by severe flooding after heavy rains battered the region, turning roads into rivers and submerging entire villages.

More than 495,000 people spread across 22 districts in the state of Assam have been impacted by floodwaters, its disaster management authority said in a statement Thursday.

About 14,000 people were evacuated to relief camps after torrential rainfall swept across the region, resulting in the river Beki, which flows through Assam, to overflow. At least one person has died, according to state authorities.
Source: CNN

The first instalments of rain arrived on the 22nd of June in the North-East. The rains have not abated since. Here is a report from 12th July.

The India Meteorological Department has issued a red alert for northeast India, Sikkim, and Bihar with the region expected to receive over 204.4 mm of rainfall.

The weather office also expects localised flooding, landslides and flash floods in these regions and has advised people to avoid areas prone to water logging and stay away from vulnerable structures.
Source: Mint

In the meantime, up North…

Having already received rains from Biparjoy, the additional rain from the monsoon caused the Yamuna to fill up and overflow in Delhi. This resulted in losses to the small shopkeepers who live and sell close to the Yamuna.

The Yamuna water level was recorded at 206.01 meters in Delhi on Monday at 11 pm, which is a level-up from the earlier gradual decrease in the water level of the Yamuna. Earlier on Monday morning, the water level of the Yamuna crossed 205.48 metres. This was slightly above the danger mark of 205.33 metres, even as the waterlogging persisted in several parts of the national capital.

Delhi is in the middle of battling one of its worst flood-like scenarios due to the recent heavy rain, with more than 25,000 people evacuated from inundated areas.
Source: Mint

The Taj Mahal is also located on the banks of the Yamuna and has a wooden foundation that has been crumbling because the Yamuna had stopped flooding.

The Yamuna river on ganga Basin’s water level is on the decline, however the swollen river still continues to flow above danger mark at 205.46 metres, as noted by Central Water Commission (CWC). The Yamuna river’s water level has risen so much that it touched the walls of Taj Mahal in Agra.

According to reports, this is the first time in forty five years that the Yamuna waters have breached embankments to reach the walls of Taj Mahal.
Source: Mint

Down South, several states were robbed of the monsoon by Biparjoy.

The crucial southwest monsoon had covered the entire country as of 2 July, six days ahead of schedule, but deficient rainfall in major food grain-producing regions is a cause of concern.

“Though the monsoon has covered the entire country and reduced the rainfall deficiency in eastern, central and southern parts of the country to some extent, the situation remains worrisome,” said GP Sharma, president, Skymet.
Source: Mint

This is going to result in poor harvests later in the year. Of course, we will not have any discussion on climate and restrict ourselves to talking in sanitised terms such as inflation and the Consumer price index.

Historically, cyclones are known to form in the Bay of Bengal and the entire coast from Chennai all the way to Bangladesh is often at the receiving end of it. The cyclones that form in the Arabian Sea are often formed close to the Arabian Peninsula and have a particular liking for Oman. I looked up Wikipedia and could not find a single cyclone in history (at least since the 1800s) that has risen in the Arabian Sea and tracked towards India. This is a first.

And like that Climate changes!

Tags climate, India, Monsoon, Weather

Learning by Proxy

New Space Race

When Sputnik was launched there was no way of knowing what the Russians were able to see in the US. There was a great deal of paranoia. In those days, it always felt like the Americans were far behind the Russians when it came to space.

Two researchers from John Hopkins University decided to monitor the signal emanating from the satellite. As they monitored the signals they noticed a Doppler Shift. It is the same effect that you notice when a train is moving towards or away from you. They also were able to determine the approximate location of the satellite as it moved across the sky.

An idea germinated. If we can determine the location of a satellite from the ground, it might be possible to do the reverse. And like that, we got the Global Positioning System. Launched in the 1970s the system was initially available only for military purposes. It was a constellation of satellites across the globe such that at any point three satellites would be able to accurately pinpoint any location on the planet. Any ground-based station or device would be able to ping three satellites and get their exact location.

black satellite dish on brown field during daytime — Photo by Darya Jum on Unsplash

Eventually, the US government decided to open this up to the public but with a healthy error added to it. This healthy error resulted in the shooting down of a Korean Airlines flight by the Russians. The plane was flying in Russian airspace. It was Ronald Reagan who decided to open up the system completely after the Korean Airlines disaster.

Most of our devices are connected to the GPS system which is owned and operated by the US. The GPS has 38 satellites as a part of its constellation. It is one thing to depend on a system that belongs to the US for civilian use but another to depend on it for military use.

Europe has its own constellation called Galileo which is operated by the European Space Agency, Russia has its own constellation called Glonass, China is building one called BeiDou which they launched in 2018 and India has been building its own called Navigation with Indian Constellation (NAVIC) since 2013.

The latest launch related to NAVIC was made in May 2023. That took the constellation to 9 satellites, there are plans to add many more. The next step would be to expand it to 11 satellites. The constellation still does not have GPS accuracy, but as a more recently launched constellation, it will have more up-to-date technology. As the constellation grows, the capabilities are bound to improve.

In 2019, ISRO attempted to land its first craft on the Moon. Chandrayaan-2 failed. The lander went off trajectory in the final moments of descent and went off-nominal course. It would have been India’s first landing on another celestial body. Expectations were high, the chief of ISRO was in tears as the Prime Minister consoled him as he departed from Sriharikota after the failed mission.

This week the successor, Chandrayaan 3 was launched and it will also have a lander and a rover.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, at 2.35 PM IST on Friday, July 14.

The mission follows Chandrayaan-2 where scientists aim to demonstrate various capabilities including reaching the orbit of the moon, making a soft-landing on the lunar surface using a lander, and a rover coming out of the lander to study the surface of the moon.

Sixteen minutes after lift-off, propulsion module successfully separated from the rocket and would orbit the earth for about 5-6 times in an elliptical cycle with 170 km closest and 36,500 km farthest from earth moving towards the lunar orbit.

Source: Mint

If they manage to land it successfully this time, India will become the fourth country after the US, USSR and China to manage this feat.

Rakesh Sharma was the first Indian to go to space. He was followed by Ravish Malhotra. Both men belonged to the Indian Air Force and went to space aboard Russian Soyuz T-11. India has never had a space vehicle capable of carrying humans into space. They are building one now called Gaganyaan. It will be the first indigenously developed space vehicle which would be able to carry a human into space.

Media watches Soyuz rocket launch — Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Truth be told it is not difficult to get a human into space. The real challenge is bringing them back to Earth. Withstanding the heat produced by friction with air during re-entry is challenging. Amongst the slew of announcements made during the Modi visit to the US, NASA will be sharing the heat shield technology.

NASA and ISRO have also agreed to a joint mission to the International Space Station in 2024, the White House said on Thursday.

“In the space sector, we will be able to announce that India is signing the Artemis Accords, which advance a common vision for space exploration for the benefit of all humankind,” said the US officials, adding that NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are developing a strategic framework for “Human Spaceflight Operations this year”.

Source: Times of India

In addition to this, the InSPACe program launched by ISRO has already spawned 140 private space-related companies including launch as well as satellite companies.

On the other side of the Himalayas…

As I mentioned earlier, China has started the development of its own geo-positioning system. China does not trust anybody. Depending on the US for something as critical and GPS in the battleground does not augur well for the country. Although their program started only in 2018, the country already has a constellation of 35 satellites in space dedicated to global positioning. Three times as many as India.

It also has a moon mission called Chang’e. There have been a total of 5 missions that have gone to the moon. Of these 3 have landed on the moon and Cheng’e 4 landed on the South Pole of the moon. It is almost the same mission that Chandrayaan 3 is trying to pull off.

The Chang’e 5 mission brought back samples of moon rock and dust back to Earth. Their next mission is scheduled to fly in 2025. By the end of this decade, China plans to put a man on the moon.

International Space Station orbits earth — Photo by NASA on Unsplash

In 2021, China also got started with the construction of the Tiangong Space Station. In 2022, they added two more modules to the first one and with that, they ensured that there can be a permanent Chinese presence in space.

The goal that they have stated is to get the first human to Mars.

The Chinese space program is far more developed than the Indian program which was focused purely on satellite launch till 10 years ago. The ambition in India, to do more than that and leave the mundane work of satellite launch to private organisations has been aggressively taking shape in the last 5 years.

But there is a yawning budgetary gap. ISRO has an annual budget of about $1.5 billion whereas the Chinese Space Agency has an annual budget of $12 billion, which is the second largest in the world. India is operating at 1/10th of the Chinese budget and it is commendable what they are able to do with so little.

If India is genuine about catching up with China, policy alone will not help. The government will have to put its money where its mouth is.

Tags China, India, Space

Learning by Proxy

Condom Diplomacy

In 1970, when Hurricane Bhola was ravaging what was then, East Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, who was then the Court Martial Law Administrator, a euphemism for Dictator, could not be less bothered about the millions of corpses floating in the water. He was too busy trying to set up a meeting between Henry Kissinger and the Chinese Premiership. Nixon wanted to “open up” China and Yahya Khan thought aiding that effort would mean an unlimited supply of weapons from the US.

Kissinger went to Pakistan and pretended to be spending a couple of days at a hill resort while he was surreptitiously whisked away to China. Yahya Khan made the meeting happen.

Of course, the US did not give a shit about Pakistan. They just wanted to get what they wanted and Pakistan was an excellent conduit for it.

The Hurricane precipitated a series of events that would eventually result in India and Pakistan going to war in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. Pakistan was convincingly defeated. That defeat also put an end to Yahya Khan’s power.

The US offered moral support to Pakistan. The weapons never arrived.

Today, the US donates billions each year to Pakistan, even though the country has proved to be a hotbed for terrorism. It is so conducive to housing terror that Osama Bin Laden was hiding there.

In the 60s and 70s, the reason for US alignment with Pakistan was to use the country against India, if and when the need arose since India was aligned with USSR at the time. It never came into direct conflict, although the CIA carried out several assassinations including that of Dr Homi Bhabha who had put India on the fast track to becoming a nuclear power. Instead, acting out of Pakistan the US constructively spent its time creating a militia called the Taliban in Afghanistan. Described as rebel fighters fighting against the tyranny of the USSR.

They did the same thing in 2001 in their righteous war against terror after 9/11. They used Pakistan as a launching ground and let them deal with the refugees from Afghanistan.

Effectively Pakistan has served as a high-quality condom to screw around in the region.

18 months ago, few Americans would have been able to point out Ukraine on a map. I am sure many of them would not have even known if Ukraine was a country or a city.

In April 2022, there was a draft for a ceasefire between Ukraine and US, on the table, negotiated by Israel. Boris Johnson on behalf of the “West” went to Kyiv and told Zelensky not to accept it. Now that a confrontation had started, Ukraine was a great condom to have intercourse with Russia.

Every time it has looked like there would be a settlement reached, the US is just too eager to send across some more defence equipment. They don’t have money to spend on their own students, but for this, there is always money to be found.

They say, “Wait, wait; I am going to convince the Germans and Britains to also provide some equipment.”

And like that, with complete and total indifference to the plight of the Ukrainian people, this war has been kept going on for more than a year.

Now, the Ukrainians are being forced to produce a report card and Zelensky is left telling them, “This is not a Hollywood movie.”

This is what condom diplomacy looks like. You are a friend till such time that I can use you with no concern about the consequences to you.

The greatest rebranding that nobody ever knows was pulled off by the American government after the Second World War, when the War Department was rebranded Department of Defence.

What the hell are they defending anyway?

Since the beginning of 1900, except for the One Hour and Fifteen Minute raid on Pearl Harbour, everything that the Americans have fought has been on foreign lands.

The China that Nixon courted has grown up and it is no longer amenable to playing second fiddle to the US. The Biden administration has had a very antagonistic relationship with China since the beginning.

Recently, Antony Blinken had visited China to mend fences and no sooner had he stepped on the plane back to America, that Biden spoke at a campaign stop…

At a fundraiser in California, Biden said Xi was very embarrassed when a suspected Chinese spy balloon was blown off course over U.S. airspace early this year. Blinken had said on Monday the chapter should be closed.

“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it was he didn’t know it was there,” Biden said.

“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course,” Biden said.

Source: Reuters

This is why you do not put an octogenarian in positions of diplomacy. They are not always sure what they are saying. Even Trump was better than this at keeping secrets, secrets; “Filegate” notwithstanding. For 30 seconds of bravado, Biden must have undone months of work that the Department of State put in.

In this context, Modi was invited to the US and serenaded like a statesman and offered another opportunity to speak at the Congress. A man who was banned from entering the US just a decade ago.

The US contends that India has taken a neutral stance on the Ukraine war because it depends on Russian arms. The US is trying hard to sell more arms to India so that India can be decoupled from Russia. China has been India’s antagonist along the entire northern border from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. This lends itself well to acting as a condom for American intercourse with the Chinese. Or so the thinking goes in the US.

In 2001, when George Bush (the greatest war criminal ever) was putting together “the coalition of the willing” for the “war on terror”, India was asked to join in. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then Prime Minister hailing from the very same party that Modi now represents refused. A visionary stance in hindsight.

Just 3 years prior to that India had tested its nuclear bomb at Pokhran and been slapped with all kinds of sanctions. The liberalisation was just about a decade old. India had handed Pakistan a defeat at Kargil (insofar as you can call reclaiming your territory a victory). India’s GDP was less than half a billion dollars.

Today, India’s economy is 7 times larger. India’s priorities are a lot clearer.

As the External Affairs Minister made clear last year at Bratislava, India is disabused of the notion that somehow if we have a problem the West is going to show up and help resolve it. India has its issues, whether that is with Pakistan or China, India has to find its own solution. Every country is going to cater to its own interests and change its stance as it suits them.

India will not serve as a condom. The Americans are mistaken.

In order to appease the Americans the Modi government cleared a military drone deal before he left for the US. The moment the wheels of Air India One lifted off US soil, news broke…

Amid claims that the valuation of the drone deal announced with the US was on the higher side, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on Sunday clarified that the price, $3,072 million quoted by the Biden administration for 31 MQ-9B unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to India, is not final and would be negotiated before inking the pact.

Source: The Hindu

Loosely translated – This whole deal is still up in the air.

For Modi, this whole trip was a necessary PR stunt. His party recently got a drubbing in the state elections in Karnataka. Manipur, one of the Eastern states is burning with protests (quite literally), Olympic medal-winning wrestlers have been protesting in Delhi over allegations of sexual misconduct by a government-appointed administrator. He needed to feel good about himself. Biden and his administration left no stone unturned to help the cause.

The only shadow cast on this PR offensive was by Barack Obama.

Former US President Barack Obama during a media interview made statements on protection of the rights of ethnic minorities in India. He added that if rights of minorities in India are not protected, there is a strong possibility of the country “at some point starts pulling apart”.

His remarks came during an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He added that if a US president meets with PM Modi, “then protection of the Muslim minority in a majority-Hindu India, that is something worth mentioning.”

Source: Mint

The Indian administration with paper-thin skin had to respond to this.

The Indian finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, said she was shocked Obama had made such remarks when Modi was visiting the US aiming to deepen relations.

“He was commenting on Indian Muslims … having bombed Muslim-majority countries from Syria to Yemen … during his presidency,” Sitharaman told a press conference on Sunday. “Why would anyone listen to any allegations from such people?“

Source: Guardian

She went on to say that Obama had bombed 6 Muslim nations during his presidency. Not really striking a friendly note I should say.

Also, the BJP online army unleashed itself on Sabrina, the WSJ journalist who had posed a question about religious minorities to Modi. The White House condemned this. Streisand Effect in full force. You can look at the response from the White House at this link.

Modi’s US trip has not improved Modi’s image, it has ruin it. pic.twitter.com/KzKG0R6Dk2
— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) June 27, 2023

It is not as if there is going to be a material change in India’s stance towards the war in Ukraine. It is not like India will stop buying oil from Russia much like the US won’t from the Saudis no matter who they chop up.

The US offered an ego massage to a narcissist. He enjoyed it much. Now, we will go back to business as usual.

Tags Diplomacy, India, Modi, US

Learning by Proxy

Populous India is Popular India

Post author By Vivek Srinivasan
Post date May 12, 2023
No Comments on Populous India is Popular India

In 1951, India conducted its first census. Since then, every 10 years like clockwork India has been conducting its census. The Indian census is quite an affair, superseded only by the election in the breadth of logistical and operational challenges that it poses. No undertaking in the world is more complex than the Indian elections.

The last census was conducted in 2011.

Spread across 28 states and 8 union territories, the census covered 640 districts, 5,924 sub-districts, 7,935 towns and more than 600,000 villages. A total of 2.7 million officials visited households in 7,935 towns and 600,000 villages, classifying the population according to gender, religion, education and occupation. The cost of the exercise was approximately ₹2,200 crore (US$280 million) – this comes to less than $0.50 per person, well below the estimated world average of $4.60 per person. Conducted every 10 years, this census faced big challenges considering India’s vast area and diversity of cultures and opposition from the manpower involved.

Source: Wikipedia

2.7 million officials! Just to put that in perspective, that is a little more than the population of Lithuania or half the population of Denmark.

Thanks to COVID-19, the census never happened in 2021 and is slated to take place sometime in October 2023.

In 2011, India’s population was 1.210 Billion.

people walking during daytime — Photo by Laurentiu Morariu on Unsplash

In the intervening decade, the standards of living have gone up and ~~millions~~ 500,000 officially were lost to COVID. Not to mention, the current government has done everything in its power to devastate all statistical bodies including the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) and the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO). This was meant to manufacture growth number post demonetisation in 2016 which decimated the economy.

So much so that the RBI at one point, when it still had a governor with a spine, commented that the economic data had to be taken with a grain of salt and deemed it “somewhat unreliable”.

On 24th April somebody in the UN “projected” that the Indian population has surpassed that of China.

The latest estimates and projections of global population from the United Nations, indicate that China will soon cede its long-held status as the world’s most populous country. In April 2023, India’s population is expected to reach 1,425,775,850 people, matching and then surpassing the population of mainland China (figure 1).

India’s population is virtually certain to continue to grow for several decades. By contrast, China’s population reached its peak size recently and experienced a decline during 2022. Projections indicate that the size of the Chinese population will continue to fall and could drop below 1 billion before the end of the century.

Source: UN

Given all of the factors mentioned above, this must be taken with a large grain of salt. If this is true, India would have added the equivalent of the working adult population of the United States in the last 12 years.

India’s population is not radically different from what it was a month ago. It may have changed by a few thousand, but not all that much. It nevertheless seems to have had a huge psychological impact on businesses.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said he was very bullish on India and that was the reason why Apple was investing in retail and online stores in the country and putting out a significant amount of energy here.

Speaking on the post-pandemic opportunity in India in the first quarter earning call, he said, “We actually did fairly well through COVID in India and I’m even more bullish now, hopefully on the other side of it. I’m very bullish on India.’‘

Source: The Hindu

Apple does not offer many of its online services including Apple Fitness in India. India is one of the last countries where most of its products are released. Till 30 days ago, the company did not even have a company-owned store in India. But he is bullish.

Hospitality major Airbnb’s cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky is betting big on the Indian market and expects the country to be the startup’s biggest growth market in the current decade.

“From a business perspective, India is an exciting new market for us. We now have 1,000 employees there, and I believe it will be one of the biggest growth markets, if not the biggest, in this decade,” Chesky told The Economic Times.

Noting that India is well poised to have the world’s biggest middle class in future, Chesky said that rising internet penetration and GDP would enable the company to build a ‘really important business’ in the country.

Source: Inc42

After one and a half decades, Airbnb figured out India exists! In India, Airbnb is the last place you turn to, to find lodging. But “Big Bets”.

US network gear maker Cisco today announced manufacturing plans for Tamil Nadu, India, as its chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins asserted that the company is bullish about India market and its prospects.

The company, in a statement, said it is targeting over USD 1 billion in combined exports and domestic production.

Source: NDTV

This is partly motivated by the need to hedge against China whose relationships are growing more and more frosty with the US. But at the same time, it is also the “largest nation” tag that is playing on their minds.

The fact is that the middle class in India is very different from the middle class in a developed country. A middle-class household in India has an average monthly salary of Rs 8000 ($95) per person per month. With that much money, let alone the iPhone, the household cannot afford the myriad connectors and cables one is forced to buy when one buys an iPhone.

The population that consumer brands end up targeting in India is about 10 million people. CRED an app that bills itself as one catering to the upper crest of India has 11.2 million users as of FY22.

Frankly, it does not matter whether we have the largest population or not. It is a great advertisement and it is causing many companies to take notice and try to include India in their roadmap if not for any other reason, to signal to the investors about avenues of growth.

In the late 90s, the young English-speaking population attracted global attention, which led to the outsourcing boom in India. It resulted in wealth creation for a lot of young graduates. Between the BPOs and KPOs, there were a lot of jobs to be had. It changed the face of India.

More than anything else, it changed what one could aspire to be. There were only three people who could run large businesses in 1980s India, Tata, Birla and Ambani. Come the 2000s not only did more people dare but also more of them found success.

The attention attracted by being the most populous nation alone has the potential to turn a possibility into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Tags India

Learning by Proxy

Learning by Proxy | China

Post author By Vivek Srinivasan
Post date July 31, 2020
No Comments on Learning by Proxy | China

This edition became insanely long. I going to have to take some of the stuff that happened this week and move it to the next edition. Something significant is afoot in China and its relationship with the rest of the world.

As a kid, I used to love cricket. Now and then there would be these matches where India would play a team that represented the Rest of the World. All without exception were exhibition matches, but there was a thrill associated with it. If we won, we got to beat the whole world in a single match. The best from every country.

China is increasingly taking a position where it looks like China (and some crook states) Vs the rest of the world (not that there are no crooks here). How it will end is anybody’s guess, but the tension is building.

The biggest participants of the first world war were France, Britain and Germany, but it started in Sarajevo with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. The world is a tinderbox right now. A random spark can set it ablaze.

Shifting Sands

Japan was considered a manufacturer of cheap transistors in the 1960s. Their products were considered low quality. Fast forward to 1980s, getting a Sony was a mark of buying a high-quality product. China went through a similar cycle. Even a decade back Chinese products were considered cheap and low quality. The last decade has caused a huge pivot in perception. Along with that pivot, a lot of product manufacturing moved to China.

Being at the epicentre of the manufacturing revolutions made Japan the economy it became. From the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki emerged a nation that was revitalised and more powerful economically. The same happened with China, from being a hopelessly poor agrarian economy, they became the second-largest economy in the world. With the newfound power and money, there are new problems that are emerging.

Where does China end? (Physically)

China has always had a different interpretation of where its borders end. China seems to think all of the South China Sea belongs to it. The reason the South China sea is important is because of its strategic value to trade. The countries involved in this dispute include – Japan, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Borneo. By extension of the fact that the US is responsible for the safety of Japan as per the treaty to end World War II, they are also involved.

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Hong Kong has been burning for the past 2 years. China is not used to defiance by its citizens. Further, they cannot afford for this spark to spread to the mainland. A lot of money and power will be at stake if that does happen. Hence the clampdown on Hong Kong.

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China has had border disputes with India for the past 60 years. They continue to claim that land on the Indian side. This has led to a war-like situation at the northern border. For China, Aksai Chin which they occupied over 60 years ago is important to keep their control over Xinjiang. The road from Tibet to Xinjiang passes through Aksai Chin.

The northern army commander, Lt Gen. Y.K. Joshi, on Saturday said the army would “continue all efforts to restore status quo ante along the LAC”, the statement assuming significance against the backdrop of the no-intrusion claim by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
This is the first time an army commander has officially spoken about “restoring status quo ante” along the Line of Actual Control, which entails that the Chinese have occupied Indian territory.
Source: The Telegraph

They have also been having disputes with Bhutan

China is stepping up pressure on Bhutan to settle their bilateral border dispute. In addition to laying claim to more territory in Bhutan, Beijing has revived an old land swap deal that will require Thimphu to cede control over the territory to settle its border dispute with China.
Source: The Diplomat

Pandemic

There are a lot of tall buildings in China, but there is no Trump Tower in China. Also unlike Moscow, Beijing never wanted one. So Trump has been quite pissed with China right from the outset. Despite berating them for years, he did not have anything that he could really hold against China given the American dependence on China for manufacturing.

COVID-19 provided the perfect segue to turn against China and also get all of the “allies” to turn against China as well.

China made things worse

China had been giving away loans across Africa because Africa was seen as the next big thing. The idea was not to help them develop, the idea was to trap them in debt. This became obvious when they squeezed Sri Lanka for the port China had financed. Sri Lanka could not repay the debt and ended up handing over the port. There is a Wikipedia article on this – Debt trap diplomacy.

The total loans outstanding from China come up to USD 600 Billion.

There is a global (especially western) push to forgive African Debt. This is deeply motivated by other considerations and China has said – No.

—

Also, when the pandemic began, and a lot of countries rushed supplies to China.

A total of 21 countries and the United Nations Children’s Fund have donated epidemic prevention and control supplies to China, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Wednesday.
Those countries are the Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belarus, Turkey, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, spokesperson Hua Chunying said at an online press briefing.
Source: Xinhuanet

A couple of months later when those same countries needed supplies…

Countries’ procurement agents are fighting each other in China for access to the protective equipment that must play a key role in stemming the spread of the novel coronavirus, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said.
He was responding to a spate of reports of consignments of protective masks destined for European countries being bought up by United States officials, sometimes even as aeroplanes stood ready for departure on the tarmac.
Source: Reuters

Hanlon’s Razor – Do not ascribe to malice what can often be ascribed to incompetency. Even so, the mind looks for a more complex explanation.

In this context

Hong Kong is an important port through which a lot of capital moves. The Chinese take over of Hong Kong has hurt the financial interests of rich people in several countries. There is no better way to attract the ire of nations than hurt the rich. The policy, for now, seems to be to hurt China economically.

Huawei is a Chinese company which has played a crucial role in the development of telecom infrastructure across several countries. The next couple of years were supposed to be windfall years with the introduction of 5G. Hurting Huawei means hurting China. The UK which is going to embrace Brexit screaming and yelling at the end of this year fired the first shot!

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden told the House of Commons that UK mobile providers will be prevented from buying Huawei 5G equipment after December 31 under a revised telecommunications bill that the government will table for a vote in the fall. Dowden also announced that providers with Huawei kit in their networks must remove it by 2027.
Source: Quartz

Australia in the meantime is heavily dependant on the Chinese import of ore. Mining is a huge contributor to the Australian economy and China is the biggest trading partner. Even so, in a world that is rapidly changing, it is important to pick sides.

Australia has declared “there is no legal basis” to China’s territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea, marking an escalation of recent tensions with Beijing and bringing Canberra further in line with Washington.
Source: The Guardian

India which is even more hopelessly dependent on China banned TikTok and 58 other apps. This is by far the most inconsequential push back. But you know how they say – an enemy of an enemy is a friend. Not only that, but there are also three Trump Towers in India.

The two countries have been working quietly to step up information sharing amid the tense military standoff between Indian and Chinese troops — it has been on for 11 weeks now — along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh.
After US Secretary of State Michael R Pompeo spoke to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in the third week of June, at least two high-level phone conversations, the key to this cooperation, have taken place.
Source: Indian Express

and

India and the US are close to inking a “quick” trade deal, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said Tuesday, adding that the pact aims to get issues that have been pending over the past couple of years “out of the way”.
Source: Indian Express

The USA also has banned Huawei. In addition to that, there has been heavy rhetoric. That rhetoric translated into action finally. The US government forced the Chinese Consulate at Huston to shut down. Why? The claim was that espionage operations were being run from the consulate. The Chinese diplomats were burning files outside the consulate causing local emergency service to respond to the smoke. And then…

US officials prised open a small back door having previously tried to gain access via three other entrances. The consulate was ordered to close on Wednesday by the Trump administration which said it was seeking to protect American intellectual property.
Source: Express

And then

Beijing ordered the US embassy to close on Friday in a tit-for-tat move, after Washington instructed China’s consulate in Houston, Texas, to cease operations, claiming it had been involved in a US-wide Chinese espionage effort.
Source: CNN

From the perspective of manufacturing –

Entire nations and their governments are questioning their excessive dependence on Chinese manufacturing. Scores of companies have been instructed and have already started moving production to other countries. Production of strategic importance like pharmaceutical and electronics are being moved to home countries. TSMC, the largest contract chip manufacturer, was given Billions by the US government to set up production in Arizona.

A Gartner, Inc. survey of 260 global supply chain leaders in February and March 2020 found that 33% had moved sourcing and manufacturing activities out of China or plan to do so in the next two to three years. Survey results show that the COVID-19 pandemic is only one of several disruptions that have put global supply chains under pressure.
Source: Gartner

Reliance boss Mukesh Ambani, announcing the partnership at his company’s annual meeting last week, said Google would build an Android operating system (OS) to power a low-cost “4G or even 5G” smartphone that Reliance would design.
Source: Mint

Most importantly pharmaceuticals

But this grant was different. It went to a Richmond, Virginia-based public benefit company that was just seven months old. Before the pandemic, it hadn’t manufactured any drugs, although its founders were pharmaceutical veterans.
The company, named Phlow, isn’t tasked with making new drugs against Covid-19. Instead, its goal is to shore up the US supply of generic drugs.
Source: Quartz

Adding salt to injury

China’s economy had its first contraction in decades thanks to COVID. After a decline of 6.8% in the first quarter, the economy seems to be back to growth posting a 3.2% growth in the second quarter of the year.

China’s economy grew 3.2% in the second quarter following a record slump.
The world’s second-biggest economy saw a sharp decline in the first three months of the year during coronavirus lockdowns.
But figures released on Wednesday show China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) returned to growth between April to June.
Source: BBC

But here is the thing, Retail consumption is lower than it was pre-COVID. So internal consumption is low. Externally, every large economy, esp. the USA has been struggling with the effects of COVID. So the consumption is not coming from outside either; then how? It is a result of government spending. This was the original recipe that worked for China. But given that they are a much larger economy, with a highly developed infrastructure and a global economy which is stagnant at best; how long can they keep bankrolling it? Also, if the spending is on infrastructure what do they plan to build?

And the final nail in the coffin. China seems to be poised to have its own Lehman Brothers moment.

Losses at global banks are projected to soar by $926 billion to $2.1 trillion through 2021, according to Standard & Poors. Almost $400 billion of that increase is forecast to come from Chinese institutions, compared with a $360 billion increase for those in North America and Western Europe combined. While an impending wave of soured loans isn’t expected to cause a credit crisis, the forecast demonstrates the economic pain that’s anticipated from heightened unemployment and bankruptcies.
Source: Quartz

Fallout

The excessive nationalistic push at a time of great global economic instability is not helping China. If at all anything, it has helped galvanise opposition to the country. Even countries like Australia who are tied up in a lot of trade are pushing back.

The sands are shifting and we do not know where and how this will end. The one thing that is for certain is that many of the squabbling global powers – US, India, EU, Britain and Australia (mostly thanks to Trump) are seemingly uniting due to their hatred of China. In 6 months there might be a new president in America.

The sands are definitely shifting!

Indian Monsoon

Monsoon is very important for India because agriculture depends on it. This year the north-western branch of the monsoon has arrived with great fury. The winds carry moisture from the Bay of Bengal and move towards the north-east till they meet the Himalayas. From there they follow the Himalayas as the wind turns to move the clouds westwards delivering rains along the way. What started as heavy rains in Assam, turned into flooding and now has turned into a catastrophe.

“Since the first week of June, we are having no respite with wave after wave of flood that has wreaked havoc inside the Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve,” said Kaziranga’s park director, P. Sivakumar. He said an animal that had drowned in a swollen river near the park on Saturday brought the death toll of the endangered rhinoceroses up to 10.
Source: New York Times

Now as the monsoon clouds move westwards, it’s claiming more victims.

Floodwater entered one more district of Samastipur in Bihar and spread to more inundated areas, hitting half a million more population on Tuesday, even though no fresh casualty was reported and the count remained at 10, an official bulletin said.
According to the bulletin by the state Disaster Management Department, more than 5 lakh people were affected by floods on Tuesday alone, taking the tally of marooned people to 29.62 lakh in 12 districts of the state.
Source: NDTV

It remains to be seen how far this monsoon rage continues. UP, Haryana and Punjab are very important to the food production in the country and if flooded especially at this time, it could turn into an unmitigated disaster especially since the economy is already reeling.

When you see it

Donald Trump had expected to head into the elections with a great economy, unemployment at historic lows and a great platform. Instead, his Attorney General is being questioned on the hill, unemployment are at historic highs (only the great depression saw worse unemployment) and a GDP decline of 10%. The US economy has contracted by 1.8 Trillion dollars! Yes – perspective – add a Trillion to that – India’s GDP.

Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of goods and services produced — fell 9.5 per cent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. On an annualized basis, the standard way of reporting quarterly economic data, G.D.P. fell at a rate of 32.9 per cent.
Source: New York Times

Another way to looking at it. The US economy lost a shade more than the Market Capitalisation of Apple (which posted blockbuster results last quarter). (~1.75 Trillion)

One of the stories last week was titled – Spending is back to normal for poor Americans—but not for rich ones.

Research shows that when low-earning families lose income, they do substantially decrease how much they buy. So it’s not that poor Americans are going into credit card debt to keep up their spending. Rather, economists have found that the US government’s stimulus payments and enhanced unemployment insurance have kept many low-income families afloat.
Source: Quartz

To me, this fact only indicates how little the poor have for discretionary spending. They are surely not going to be buying anything that is not absolutely necessary when they are living on doles. Turns out their lives were the same as living on a 600 dollar cheque even before COVID!

Simply put, rich people spent 1.8 Trillion less.

—

No sooner was this data released, Trump tweeted that the elections needed to be postponed! To which Mitch McConnell said, “Never in the history of the country, through wars, depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3,”

The illusion of democracy is the only thing America has going for itself. If that illusion falls apart, there would not be much that is different between America and Russia.

Raising Capital

Now that Mukesh Ambani and Reliance have tasted blood, they can’t stop coming up with fundraising ideas. A while ago, Amazon had bought up stakes in Kishore Biyani’s Future Retail, which had been saddled with debt. In the aftermath of Facebook, Microsoft, Google investments in Jio, Amazon felt left out.

Jeff Bezos called Mukesh Ambani and said ‘aisa kyun bewafa?’ (why this unfaithfulness?).

Mr Ambani promptly asked – you got money?

Jeff said lots – I have so much money that the only way I can blow it up is building spacecraft and destroying Flipkart.

Mr Ambani – I might have something else you can blow it upon…

Rumours are that Amazon is going to buy 9.99% of Reliance Retail. Now some corporate juggling is taking place to bring Future group under the same umbrella.

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd will pay between Rs 24,000 crore and Rs 27,000 crore ($3.2-$3.6 Billion) to buy the Indian retail chains owned by Future Group
Source: ToI

The Antitrust people are looking on the wrong side of the Atlantic. This is just wrong. The Confederation of All India Traders has been going to court and making a ruckus about Flipkart and Amazon, where are they when they have to fight?

Rise and fall of the OTT

Since we are talking about the Atlantic. Recently Apple acquired the Tom Hanks movie ‘Greyhound’; a World War II story from the middle of the Atlantic. The movie is said to have cost USD 50 Million. Given that the year is a bust and going to the theatre does not make any sense, Mr Hanks sold it to Apple. But what about movies that are made with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars? No OTT player would buy it! What then?

Paramount Pictures announced yesterday it is delaying the releases of two highly anticipated blockbuster films again—this time until 2021. A Quiet Place: Part II will move from Sept. 4, 2020, to April 23, 2021, while Top Gun: Maverick will eject out of its Dec. 23 date and now land on July 2, 2021. Both films had already been postponed from their original release dates this summer.
Source: Quartz

Signing off…

Tags China, Cinema, GDP, India, OTT, Trump, USA

Learning by Proxy

Learning by Proxy | Business of Politics and Politics of Business

Post author By Vivek Srinivasan
Post date July 3, 2020
No Comments on Learning by Proxy | Business of Politics and Politics of Business

Every Saturday, I publish this series called “Learning by Proxy”. It is a capsule of some of the stuff that I found interesting over the week along with some context to it. I hope you enjoy it.

Follow Up

It turns out the Indian and Chinese forces have been brawling at the border since September 2019 when the government decided to convert the Ladakh into a Union Territory. The current situation was just an escalation of the troubles that had been boiling over for a while. So – The government has kept this issue concealed from the people because they would not have wanted to be blamed for fomenting it.

In the past two months, there have been at least three clashes between Indian and Chinese soldiers in the Pangong Tso area. As seen in satellite images, the Chinese side has constructed pillboxes, shelters, breast-walls and bunkers at Finger 4, both on the bank and the ridge, where they have deployed troops in large numbers.

Source: Indian Express

Politics

Politics of Business

You know how companies owned by the Indian government, which have created an entire category, end up in a heap of losses. You need to look no further than aviation to see the shining example. Air India (né Tata Airlines) created the airline business in India. After the economy was opened up in 1990, many private airlines started to appear. The government, in its quest to ensure that cities other than metropolitans develop, created a rule forcing airlines to take up unprofitable routes to smaller cities and state capitals. Air India is a loss-making mess because it gets a disproportionate share of these routes.

Source: ET

Something similar is afoot with the telecom sector. When a company takes 50% of the market share in a country like India, it often comes with a fair amount of support. It is unprecedented in world history for a 50-year-old industry to be shattered by a new entrant in 5 years. Now, when the government employees themselves start pointing it out.

Employees of state-owned telco Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) feel that the central government is favouring Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio in awarding state-funded projects to it, and denying opportunities to other players by creating an uneven playing field.

Jio was recently allocated INR 50K Cr worth government contract under the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) to deploy 54 mobile towers in Ladakh’s rural areas. Moreover, impending restrictions on BSNL to extend telecom connectivity in the so-called left-wing extremism (LWE) affected villages are also denting the state-run telco’s already frail revenue numbers.

Source: Inc42

Let me put that in context – Jio Platforms has raised ONLY twice that amount through all of the fundraisings that it has undertaken in the last 3 months.

Good Old Fashioned Regime Change

When you think regime change, you think CIA. Americans have been great players of this game. Having said that, others have also learnt a thing or two along the way. Chinese aggression against India is well known. In one of my previous editions, I had mentioned the dire circumstances that Pakistan is in. This leaves other neighbours that can be encouraged to stew trouble. Of all countries, Nepal decided to change its map and declare Indian territory as a part of Nepal. Now, India seems to be creating trouble for the leadership of Nepal. The PM is Nepal has been asked to put up or shut up.

Prachanda said at the outset that Oli’s allegation against India was wrong. “Not India, it is me who is demanding your resignation. You must furnish proof of such irresponsible remarks,” Dahal is believed to have said.

Two days after Nepal Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli claimed that India was trying to topple his government with support from some politicians at home, party leaders, including three former prime ministers, Tuesday asked him to prove his allegations or quit.

Source: Indian Express

Economics

Economic War

There has been a call to boycott Chinese businesses and Chinese products for the past couple of weeks since the border clashes took place. At the same time, a lot of ink has been spilt trying to argue how impossible it would be to disengage economically from China. Further, it would be Indian manufacturers and Indian consumers who would be hurt by such moves. In the meantime, the Indian government has been putting its greatest weapon to work – Its bureaucracy. Chinese shipments have been delayed at the port of entry for “checking”. The Chinese have been returning the favour. This has caused a lot of trouble to both exporters as well as manufacturers in India. The next step seems to be apps that generate little to no revenue from India.

TikTok has been banned in India. The IT ministry has banned 59 Chinese-owned applications, including TikTok, ShareIt, UC Browser, Likee, WeChat, and Bigo Live. The Ministry stated they were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, the security of the state and public order.”

Source: Indian Express

Supply Chain

Over the last 30 years slowly and steadily more and more of the manufacturing base shifted to China. First, it was due to the lower cost. Off late it has been only about convenience. China has been behaving badly using the Pandemic as a distraction to push its nationalistic agenda. From the South China Sea, Hong Kong and even up to India the country has been pushing to expand.

There is no other way to hurt them but economically. The military engagement will not end well for anyone involved. But shifting supply chains is a decades-long process. The biggest risk is chip manufacturing which is necessary not only for the phone in your hand but also for defence applications. TSMC one of the largest contract manufacturers of silicon set up a plant recently in Arizona with federal funding. It can produce as many chips in a month as their plants in China can in a day!

China’s rising costs had companies looking to broaden their sourcing well before the trade war or coronavirus, but those events are increasing the urgency. In a recent survey of 260 global supply chain leaders across different industries and regions, research and advisory firm Gartner found 33% had already moved their sourcing or manufacturing out of China or planned to do so within the next three years.

Source: Quartz

Business

Under Pressure

Facebook has been under pressure ever since Twitter flagged the Trump tweet on mail-in ballots. The Chairman of the Board, Peter Thiel; whose data company Palantir played a role in the Trump victory, was one of the prominent supported of Candidate Trump. It came as little surprise that Facebook was willing to look the other way. But when your revenues streams get threatened, you cannot continue to look the other way.

Facebook has said that it will flag all “newsworthy” posts from politicians that break its rules, including those from President Donald Trump.

Separately, Facebook’s stock dropped more than 8 per cent, erasing roughly USD 50 billion from its market valuation, after the European company behind brands such as Ben & Jerry’s and Dove announced it would boycott Facebook ads through the end of the year over the amount of hate speech and divisive rhetoric on its platform. Later in the day, Coca-Cola also announced it joined the boycott for at least 30 days.

Source: News18

Some have argued that the USD 10 Million per month or so that most of these companies spent on Facebook was a drop in the bucket. But come to think of it – USD 10 Million across a year is USD 120 Million, and 10 such clients backing out would mean a loss of a billion dollars in revenue. Anybody else wants to lose a Billion dollars in revenue during this economy?

How does the medicine taste?

Dear Chinese Tech Company, for years your government protected you. They pretended to be extending a level playing field to all but they really were not. They made life so difficult that behemoths like Google and Amazon had to call it quits and leave the country. Agreed, it was mutually beneficial. China needed you guys to win so that a local company could be beaten into submission when it came time to censor. How does it feel to be fed the same medicine by another? Hurts?

DTH Dying with Cinema

OTT is going to be the undoubted winner of Lockdown 2020. Cinemas have been shuttered and by the looks of it, are going to have to wait for a long long time before things return to business as usual. On the other hand, DTH companies are also having a hard time. In India during 2019, DTH lost 2 Million subscribers. With the glut of streaming services who wants DTH anymore?

India lost 2 Mn direct-to-home (DTH) television subscribers in 2019, findings from the Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicator Report October-December 2019 published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) revealed. The segment ended the year with 69.98 Mn subscribers, down from 72.44 Mn in March the same year.

Source: Inc42

Technology / Science

Zoox

A few years ago, being pressured about Uber drivers not being given the same benefits as an employee, founder and CEO Travis Kalanick pushed back. He said anyway, they will all be replaced by self-driving cars and caused a slight panic amongst the drivers. The firing of Travis, a bad IPO and several dozen lawsuits later, Uber is nowhere close to bringing self-driving cars to the roads.

So it came as quite a surprise that Amazon went ahead and acquired a self-driving car company. Amazon’s logistics needs to deliver in hours or days not minutes and hence self-drive would not be valuable to Amazon as much as it would to a cab company or food delivery company. Google, Tesla and a few dozen other companies have been pursuing self-drive. Apple is rumoured to be testing something of the sort as well! Remains to be seen what road Amazon takes.

The e-commerce giant said it had agreed to acquire Bay Area-based autonomous vehicle company Zoox, a deal reportedly worth more than $1 billion. (Amazon did not respond to questions.) Since its founding in 2014, Zoox has been known for its technical chops, its secretiveness, and its sky-high ambition.[…]

In 2018, it showed off its first prototype vehicles, which look like sensor-laden golf carts on steroids. The company has also been testing its software on more conventional-looking Toyota Highlanders in San Francisco, where it is learning to handle chaotic city streets.

Source: Wired

Brain

When you see you are not really seeing. Your brain in interpreting the electrical signals being generated by your eyes upon being subjected to light. The same is true of almost every organ. Therefore there is almost no objective reality in the world. It is all subject to how your brain chooses to interpret it. This was highlighted by the ‘Yanni’ / ‘Laurel’ sound recording a few years ago, where, part of the people heard one thing while the other another. Also, perhaps why some people like classical music while other rock.

Instead of presenting his lab animals with real chemicals, he went straight into their brains. Last week, Chong and his colleagues published a study in the journal Science showing that they’d worked out some of the details of just how the olfactory bulb represents odours—by making mice smell scents that don’t actually exist in the real world.

Source: Wired

Misc

This should probably not come under Miscellaneous but the other sections are covered.

China is increasingly being isolated. Almost no country can eradicate its dependence on China for the moment but all attempts are being made. Further, there is also a push to align against China.

China is livid after the US stepped in on Wednesday evening to delay a draft press statement condemning the terrorist attack at the Karachi Stock Exchange at the UN Security Council.

The US was the second country after Germany to delay the statement, both silent expressions of solidarity with New Delhi, after the Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and later PM Imran Khan blamed India for the attack.

Source: Quartz

How many enemies can you make before your luck runs out?

Cash Free India

I am very proud of the fact that when it comes to transaction protocols, India has some of the best and most secure protocols. 4 years ago, NPCI launched the UPI which made it really easy for anybody to make microtransactions right from their bank accounts. This further resulted in greater penetration of banking and online transactions.

India has been a cash-heavy country but the demonetisation coupled with the introduction of several of these technologies has changed the way things work in the country. UPI hit almost 2 Billion transactions last month. This is significant because the economy is busy taking a dump in the toilet and this number reflects the greater dependence on online transactions.

The National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI) said that the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) recorded 1.98 Bn transactions worth INR 2,06,950 Cr in June 2020.

Source: Inc42

Signing off…

Tags Brain, Business, China, India, Politics, Supply Chain, TikTok

Learning by Proxy

Tax – Real Estate – Water | Learning by Proxy

Post author By Vivek Srinivasan
Post date June 19, 2020
No Comments on Tax – Real Estate – Water | Learning by Proxy

Every Saturday, I publish this series called ‘Learning by Proxy’. It is a capsule of some of the stuff that I found interesting over the week along with some context to it. I hope you enjoy it.

Follow Up

Indian and China have been having a lot of heated exchanges in Ladakh. This week it escalated and resulted in India losing 20 soldiers including a Commanding Officer.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh Tuesday reviewed the current operational situation in Eastern Ladakh, following Monday’s violent faceoff on the LAC, along with the Chief of Defence Staff and the three Service Chiefs. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar was also present during the meeting.
Source: Indian Express

One name is conspicuously missing, don’t you think? Modi has been AWOL.

Also

The Indian army said that both sides suffered casualties, but there has been no word on numbers from China yet.
Tuesday’s battle was reportedly fought with rocks and clubs. However, no shots were fired.
The Indian army said a number of its troops “were critically injured in the line of duty”.
Source: BBC

Rocks and Wooden Clubs? No Shots fired? What the hell is going on?

China has taken the Galwan Valley and now their Foreign minister is like – Go on. Nothing to see here. Everything is resolved.

Politics

LGBTQ

Law is always very political and the appointment of supreme court justices is the greatest power wielded by politics over law. Trump got to appoint two Supreme Court justices and that was expected to swing the Supreme Court towards the far right. Imagine the surprise then, when the court declared that employment could not be taken away if a person was LGBTQ. The final vote came down the interpretation of the term ‘sex’ in a 1964 act. Whether it meant only man and woman or all sexual orientations. Neil Gorsuch who was the first appointments by Trump wrote out the order.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday outlawing anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination is a triumph for both the country and the court. It is a victory for the country because, in one fell swoop, the court granted vital protections to LGBTQ people in every state, making the United States a fairer, freer place.
Source: Quartz

Shooting yourself in the foot

The so-called stimulus package is an attempt by the Modi government to roll out the red carpet to investors to choose India. At the same time, the abysmal state of the government is forcing the tax officials to look at any vestige from which revenue can materialise. The Central GST collection during the lockdown fell from Rs. 47,000 Crores same period last year to a shade below Rs. 6000 Crores this year. An 87% per cent drop. The IT Department slapped Tiger Global with a tax bill of Rs. 14,500 Crores. Flipkart would not be Flipkart without Tiger Global. Antagonising them despite a Double Tax treaty with Mauritius is not a great move.

Earlier this week, news reports said Tiger Global may take India’s quasi-judicial body, Authority of Advance Ruling (AAR), to court over its claim that the investor has outstanding tax dues on its sale of shares in e-commerce major Flipkart in 2018.
Prima facie, experts, believe Tiger Global is protected against the payment under the India-Mauritius Double Tax Avoidance Agreement (DTAA), which prevents investors from being taxed twice on the same income in both countries.
Source: Quartz

Economics

Tipping Energy

Coal has been on its way down for a few years. In the US, gas-powered power plants have proved to be a much more viable source of energy than coal. This combined with the falling costs of renewable energy has made it harder for coal mines to continue to operate. Trump had said he will bring these coal jobs back. No one can stop the steady march of better economics, especially in a capitalistic system. This is not about the environment, it’s about profits.

The Texas-based utility that owns the Maryland plant just announced it will shut down Dickerson’s three power units after 60 years of operation, citing the high cost of operation. Like dozens of other coal plants across the country, Dickerson is a casualty of coal’s fast-moving demise. The industry has been squeezed between cheaper natural gas and expanding use of renewable energy for several years, but now the Covid-19-driven recession has jammed a stake through its economic heart.
Source: Wired

Stimulus – Togo Style

All of the big nations have been busy announcing large stimulus programs to get their economies back on their feet. To date, Germany has been one of the few that has put its money right in the hands of the workers who have lost their jobs or stand to lose their jobs. Togo is going a step further and putting money in the Novissi (digital wallet) accounts of informal workers!

For its part, Togo has looked to solve that problem with Novissi, a digital cash transfer program that sends funds to citizens through mobile money. Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbé has said the scheme targets informal workers whose incomes were “disrupted” by lockdowns. As of mid-April, over 1.1 million Togolese citizens—13% of the population—had registered for Novissi with around 450,000 people (65% of which were women) proving eligible beneficiaries and receiving up to 35% of the minimum wage.
Source: Quartz

Business

Flying Low

The airline industry has always been out with a begging bowl. In good times and in bad. As Richard Branson famously put it – If you want to be a Millionaire make a Billion dollars and start an airline. Almost every major western airline has been bailed out by the government and in some of them, the governments hold massive stakes. Interestingly, low-cost budget airlines in Europe seem to be in better stead despite not having needed a bail-out.

Ryanair and Wizz stocks are better bets right now than Air France-KLM and Lufthansa, according to Morgan Stanley. That’s because the flag carriers rely more heavily on business travel and long-haul routes that will likely to be slower to bounce back. They will also have a lot of work to do to repay the money they’ve borrowed from taxpayers. (Norwegian Air, a discount carrier for long-haul flights that got a $271 million loan from the Norwegian government, has fallen more than 90% in the stock market this year.)
Source: Quartz

Real Estate

I had written about the reckoning that real estate will soon be faced with. The increasing move towards ‘work from home’ and the closure of malls causing an upsurge in OTT was bound to hit commercial real estate. Malls thrive because of the footfalls multiplexes drive to the malls. Multiplexes have been closed and have no clear opening date. Retailers refused to open their stores unless malls waived rent. An open mall with stores closed does not make for good business. DLF blinked.

Under the new proposal, DLF Shopping Malls is offering rental partners a 100% waiver on MG rent for the entire lockdown period till June 15. Post this, a 75% off on MG rent is offered till June 30, sources said. DLF has also proposed a 50%, 24% and 10% waiver on MG rent for July-September 2020, October-December 2020 and January-March 2021, respectively, they added.
Source: Financial Express

To add insult to injury, CavinKare one of the large FMCG companies based in the south known for brands such as Chic and Nyle decided to pull the shutters on its HQ. Everyone except factory employees can work from home!

“We have shut down our corporate office and closed all four branches. We see no need for it. We have called for bids from tenants for the 40,000sqft office,” Ranganathan said. Additionally, the four branches have also been shut. “Only factories and R&D centres will have employees come in and work,” he said. Nearly 300 people worked out of the corporate office, while the company has a staff strength of 1,900.
While most companies have announced aggressive WFH models in a bid to save on costs and stop the spread of the Covid pandemic, Cavinkare’s Ranganathan said he has chosen it for productivity reasons. “It is more from a productivity standpoint. We have seen a 30% increase in productivity in the nearly 100 days of lockdown,” he said.
Source: Times Of India

Technology / Science

The Price of Water

In space water is an especially valuable resource, but not for the reasons that you think. Yes, water is important for humans to survive. Also, in space, the only way to create thrust is by losing mass. Water = Mass. When you use fuel in space to propel, you are essentially ejecting mass to create force (thrust) towards the opposite direction. It costs about USD 18,500 to put one Kg in space. Not the most economical way to put fuel in space. Alternatively, you can mine the water on the Moon and use it as fuel. Now, NASA is going to determine the price for it.

That’s why Bridenstine’s statement is so important: If NASA follows through by saying we’ll pay $X for propellant delivered to location Y, that could give hypothetical lunar mining entrepreneurs the market they need to get off the ground and encourage private propellant buyers to make their own plans to use these resources. (One technological wrinkle will be designing spacecraft for regular refuelling.)
Source: Quartz

Retweet no more

Recently Twitter has grown a spine. This has meant that the company is beginning to cut back on all kinds of misinformation. How many times have you retweeted an article just after looking at its headline without even bothering to read it? They have started tracking that!

Twitter seemingly expanded the amount of data it collects from users to include the links in tweets that were opened, the tweet that included the links, and when it was opened. Zucker-Scharff noted that the link-tracking appears to have begun last month; he said the file containing the history of links on which he had clicked did not appear the last time he examined Twitter’s code in 2018.
Put together, this does much more than flag if a user is sharing something they haven’t read. It could also identify them. For example, if law enforcement has anonymized browser data on several users, officials could use timestamps to identify the person, matching the anonymous data with the Twitter timestamps.
Source: Wired

Spying with Lightbulbs

Researchers have found a way to listen to conversations taking place by watching the vibrations on a lightbulb! So stop using bulbs. LED all the way.

Researchers from Israeli’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science today revealed a new technique for long-distance eavesdropping they call “lamphone.” They say it allows anyone with a laptop and less than a thousand dollars of equipment—just a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor—to listen in on any sounds in a room that’s hundreds of feet away in real-time, simply by observing the minuscule vibrations those sounds create on the glass surface of a light bulb inside. By measuring the tiny changes in light output from the bulb that those vibrations cause, the researchers show that a spy can pick up sound clearly enough to discern the contents of conversations or even recognize a piece of music.
Source: Wired

Misc

Have you ever watched a Chess match? I am guessing not.

Hence it would come as a great surprise that Twitch, a service that streams video games is getting hooked to Chess. All thanks to Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. I was watching a short video included in the news piece and its amazing.

Signing off…

Tags China, Energy, Flying, India, LGBTQ, Misc, Real Estate, Shooting, Space, Spying, Stimulus, Water

Learning by Proxy

America – Testing – Space | Learning by Proxy

Post author By Vivek Srinivasan
Post date June 5, 2020
1 Comment on America – Testing – Space | Learning by Proxy

Every Saturday, I publish this series called ‘Learning by Proxy’. It is a capsule of some of the stuff that I found interesting over the week along with some context to it. I hope you enjoy it.

When I started on the suggestion of a friend, I did not know how it would play out. This is the 10th edition already! I know some of you like it. Do share if you do.

Follow Up

China has already crossed into Indian territory and by the looks of it, the de-escalation suggested is because their goals have been met. They took a bit of the salami slice they wanted to. Read this piece on the Chinese strategy from Hindustan Times.

Politics

Mr. President

Americans have a way of doing things that few others can.

The death of George Floyd, juxtaposed on the Pandemic where a disproportionately larger number of black people have died was like putting salt on an open wound. To make matters worse, this was not a stray incident, Ahmed Aubrey a young boy was shot in a residential area by while men just a few weeks back. The anger coalesced and spilt onto the street. 72 cities in America protested and many of them burned. The president instead of soothing the pain was searching for cayenne pepper.

The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020

If anti-fascists are terrorists, then does America represent the opposite?

The protests even reached the gates of the white house. And the brave president hid in the bunker!

US President Donald Trump was rushed to a White House bunker after hundreds of protesters gathered outside the White House, with some of them resorting to stone-pelting. The incident, according to the Associated Press, happened on Friday night as protests against George Floyd’s death spread to several cities. The AP report said Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which was designed for use in emergencies like terrorist attacks.
Source: Indian Express

And then he threatened to unleash the military on his people.

Declaring himself “your president of law and order,” President Donald Trump vowed Monday to return order to American streets using the military if widespread violence isn’t quelled, even as peaceful protesters just outside the White House gates were dispersed with tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets.
Source: CNN

Reminds you of Tiananmen Square? Maybe all the hate directed at China is just love in disguise! You see we often do the worst things that we can to those we love the most.

The last time that social and economic inequality was rising, new political ideas were emerging, economic mismanagement and environmental factors led to agricultural failure, unmanageable national debt, and political mismanagement were rife; it was January 1793 and King Louis XVI was executed by the guillotine at Place de la Revolution in Paris.

Revolutions tend to start in this climate.

G7 or G10 or G11

In the first post which I had written in this series, I had mentioned the oil crisis of 1973 which had brought the USA to its knees when the Saudi’s refused to sell them oil. This oil crisis led to an informal meeting of Western Finance Minister which resulted in the creation of the Group of Seven – G7. Seven developed countries for geopolitical purposes met each year to plan how to carve up the world, each year. The world has changed a lot in the last 50 years. Trump wanted the composition of this group to change. Perhaps rightly so.

“I don’t feel that… it properly represents what’s going on in the world. It’s a very outdated group of countries,” Mr Trump said on Saturday.
The G7 group, which the US hosts this year, includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the UK.
The president said Russia, South Korea, Australia, and India should be invited.
Source: BBC

Economics

Transparency

Closer home we have the PM Cares Fund. An opaque account that has been taking in Crores from every organisation that can afford to curry favours. At the same end of the Spectrum are US and UK who have been putting the country under greater debt and distributing the money to keep the shareholders rich. There is a growing call for transparency and the call to know who were these companies that were supported by the government.

While it’s not naming recipients, the UK-owned development bank said it will, sometime in the near future, provide information about the amount of emergency funding each lender has made available to help small businesses weather the coronavirus disruption.[…]
In the meantime, a firestorm is brewing in the US. More than $500 billion has been shovelled out through the government’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that provides forgivable loans to smaller enterprises. Controversy erupted when it emerged that large, publicly traded companies like Shake Shack had accessed the borrowing (the burger chain and others have since returned the money).
Source: Quartz

Flattening the Curve

In India, the lockdown has devastated several businesses especially the small ones. In addition to this, the stimulus announced has had little or no support for the small businesses. Now that the lockdown is being relaxed, India is having a ‘Hold my Beer’ moment. The number of daily cases has surged upwards from 4000 per day to close to 10,000 per day. The government had the entire population locked up for 8 weeks and did nothing to ramp up testing! And even now very little is being done.

The city tested between 4,000 and 4,200 daily, even as the number of positive cases detected rose steadily. Mumbai has the capacity to carry out about 10,000 tests every day.
The city’s stagnant testing numbers were in sharp contrast to the daily testing figures for Maharashtra as a whole, which saw a 100 per cent jump over the same period — from 7,237 tests on May 1 to 14,504 tests on May 31.
Source: Indian Express

Source: @20ncounting [twitter]

Indian has the unique distinction of ending the lockdown as the cases began to surge.

As Rajiv Bajaj aptly said – “We seem to have flattened the wrong curve – The GDP Curve”

Business

Space

The US and USSR embarked on their respective space programs in the 1960s out of fear of one another. Once the fear died, so did the space programs. None of it has been for the want of Investment.

The USA retired its Space Shuttle Program which had outlasted its expiry date by over a decade. In 2010, under the Nasa Authorisation Act, the Space Launch System (SLS) contract was awarded to ULA backed by Boeing. They have since taken in USD 18.6 Billion and delivered zero flights. SpaceX, the new kid in town has posed a credible threat to Boeing and this week managed to put a man in space for the first time.

With privately-led spaceflight, NASA will once again be able to send astronauts to low-earth orbit, expanding its scientific research and preparations for missions to the Moon or Mars. Today’s launch is also a crucial step toward a new orbital economy, which SpaceX founder Elon Musk believes will have the same impact as the internet.
Source: Quartz

Board Games

Charles Darrow is improperly credited for the creation of Monopoly. It was created by Elizabeth Magie, who in 1903 created the game in Washington DC. Monopolists were big in those days and Elizabeth, a stenographer would spend her nights trying to create this game, to create a world where anybody could be one. The lockdown has given board games a second life. Families can play them together. Most of them last for some time and they are very engaging.

When most people hear “board games” they think games like Monopoly, Clue, and Guess Who?—household names that many of us played as children. The biggest companies like Hasbro, which makes Monopoly, would consider anything less than a million copies sold as a failure, says Englestein.
But hobbyist tabletop games are a different breed. Some of them, like Settlers of Catan or Pandemic, are fairly popular. But there are hundreds and thousands of smaller games that most people will never hear of. In this industry, selling 20,000 units is considered a success, says Englestein. While a single large mainstream gaming company may bring in $10 billion in annual revenue, the entire hobbyist industry could generate just $1.5 billion.
Source: Quartz

Technology / Science

Perception

When a professional tennis player delivers a service, the ball goes from one end of the court to the in about 200 milliseconds. The player at the opposite end of the court has already decided what shot he/she is going to play based on the way the ball is thrown up. Professional players can predict where the ball will go based on the shape of the body as the opponent begins to serve.

Turns out we can hear hand movement even we don’t see it. So would hand movement have a role to play in communication? Can you predict what is about to be said?

There’s a strong chance that your conversation partner’s movements will leave an acoustic signature that you may be able to perceive, says Wim Pouw, a cognitive scientist at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the author of a new study on this topic recently published in the journal PNAS.
Source: Quartz

Misc

The American Supreme Court has offered an incredible amount of protection to Cops who have killed citizens. Here is an incredible article from Reuters on the subject. Worth a read!

The Cyclone that landed in Mumbai caused rains in Patna. The winds were strong and took it all the way across, saving Mumbai from prolonged showers which we know the city cannot take.

Signing off…

Tags America, Board Game, Covid, Cyclone, G7, India, Monopoly, Perception, Space, Transparency, UK

Learning by Proxy

China V India – Telecom – Social Network | Learning by Proxy

Post author By Vivek Srinivasan
Post date May 29, 2020
No Comments on China V India – Telecom – Social Network | Learning by Proxy

Every Saturday, I publish this series called ‘Learning by Proxy’. It is a capsule of some of the stuff that I found interesting over the week along with some context to it. I hope you enjoy it.

I was planning to follow-up on some of the topics that I had written the last time. But the geo-politics of it is so interesting, it almost turned into an essay in and of itself. I lost the politics section to it.

Follow Up

See below!

Politics

Chris Voss is a former CIA negotiator and the author of the book ‘Never split the difference’. The premise of the book is – when you are negotiating for the life of a hostage you can’t agree to split the difference. You have to get it the way you want it. One of the lessons therein – When negotiating, always give your adversary a way out. If you corner them – expect the unexpected.

Some context first

China had started down the path of world dominance a few years ago. They decided to use the American (actually British) play of economic dependence = political dominance. They announced this thing called One Belt One Road, which was to be second coming for the Silk Route. They engaged over 130 countries and poured in hundreds of Billions to create infrastructure such as Road, Ports, Airports, etc. Every continent apart from North America was involved. India refused to be a part of it.

Now let us see the corner China has been painted into.

Hong Kong was an itch which has been hard to scratch for the last 3 years. In addition to that Trump and his trade wars had made life difficult.

The Coronavirus put a new spin on things. Many of these countries that China has lent to are poor Asian and African nations and with Coronavirus ripping up their economies, they have requested loan waivers and renegotiation.

As the coronavirus spread around the globe, Pakistan’s foreign minister called his counterpart in Beijing last month with an urgent request: The country’s economy was nose-diving, and the government needed to restructure billions of dollars of Chinese loans. […]
With each request, China’s drive to become the developing world’s biggest banker is backfiring. Over the last two decades, it unleashed a global lending spree, showering countries with hundreds of billions of dollars, in an effort to expand its influence and become a political and economic superpower. Borrowers put up ports, mines and other crown jewels as collateral.
Source: New York Times

Pakistan was supposed to keep India in check. They are now broke. The Middle-East is in a financial crisis of its own with oil prices at historic lows. This implies very limited options available to finance terrorism. Therefore, Trump is not going to give money away to Pakistan as liberally as Obama did.

Further, not agreeing to the cries of the poorer countries will make it seem like it was an engineered Virus. The optics of it all are terrible!

Trump called it the ‘China Virus’ and has been pressuring WHO to investigate them – WHO acquiesced. India supported the probe into China. China grudgingly agreed.

A pretty deep corner you see. Now for the push back.

China put an end to Hong Kong by passing a law that forever ends Hong Kong’s democracy – at least the way we knew it. With Pakistan now being rendered incompetent, they had to take matters into their own hands. They started trouble in Ladakh and Sikkim. India pushed back. Both sides said they will protect their sovereignty. All good distraction. But then…

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday ordered the military to scale up the battle preparedness, visualising worst-case scenarios and asked them to resolutely defend the country’s sovereignty.
Source: Economic Times

That escalated fast!

Then Trump tweeted offering to arbitrate between India and China. China changed course and figured this was one more thing they would want the American to stay out of.

On Wednesday tensions between the two nations seemed to de-escalate as China took an apparently conciliatory tone by saying that the situation at the border with India is “overall stable and controllable.”
Source: India Today

While there is a change of tone, satellite pictures show artillery build up on the Chinese side of the border. The US in the meantime is preparing to pass a law rescinding Hong Kong’s trade status.

Economics

Truth

It was a couple of editions ago that I had mentioned that the truth about the actual economic state of India will emerge post-COVID when nobody is paying attention. It is happening.

Bank lending to MSME collapsed after 2016 as per RBI data. This during a time when the government claimed to have 7.2% GDP growth rate. Many of the MSMEs are critical suppliers to large industries how could they not want loans? If they saw an opportunity, they would have taken loans to grow.

While large industries saw their credit expand by Rs 1.73 lakh crore, or at an annual growth rate of 1.9 per cent between April 2016 and March 2020, micro and small industries saw their credit expand by only Rs 10,335 crore, or at a 4-yr CAGR of 0.69 per cent during that period.[…]
The decline in demand for credit by the industry, however, coincides with the decline in the demand in the economy and falling capacity utilisations. The RBI’s Order Books, Inventories and Capacity Utilisation Survey (OBICUS) for the October-December 2019 quarter shows that the capacity utilisation declined to at least 12-year low of 68.6 in the quarter ended December 2019.
Source: Indian Express

Repo Rate

The interest rate is an instrument that is used to stimulate the economy when the times are good, expectations form the future are clear and risk can be estimated. When none of this is clear – the Interest rate becomes merely a number. If you play with it unnecessarily, you diminish your power. Modi placed a historian at the head of the RBI to act as his puppet and the bankers are giving him a lesson. RBI dropper repo rate (the rate at which banks borrow) once again to 4%. An all-time low.

“When a heightened level of risk aversion exists among banks, lower cost of capital alone incrementally will not translate into higher lending in the current situation,” said Sreejith Balasubramanian, an economist at Mumbai-based mutual fund IDFC AMC. “Banks make lending decisions based on their risk appraisal and appetite which is currently low.”
Source: Quartz

Business

Sizzling Telecom

In a world that is locked inside their homes, connectivity is a very valuable resource. It is the only thing that preserves a certain degree of sanity and allows for commerce in whatever form to thrive. Connectivity is unlocking its value.

A couple of editions ago, I had mentioned how Reliance has used Jio to free itself of debt. Also last time I had shared the surprise upswing that Airtel had registered. Airtel is now borrowing a trick or two from the Reliance Playbook. They have raised over a Billion dollar through a stake sale and reduced their debt burden.

Bharti Airtel’s promoter firm Bharti Telecom raised Rs 8,433 crore on Tuesday, selling 2.75% stake in the telecom major to institutional investors through an accelerated book-building process in the secondary market. With this, the Sunil Bharti Mittal led-Bharti Airtel’s promoters are ostensibly looking to go ‘debt-free’, a path similar to the one chosen by Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani. Bharti Airtel share price traded flat on the BSE on Wednesday. After the sale, the promoter group will continue to own 56.23% in the company.
Source: Financial Express

Also, rumours are that Google is planning to buy into Idea-Vodafone.

Not to be upstaged – Jio Platforms as it continues to raise its Billions announced Microsoft as one of the suitors willing to throw in USD 2 Billion. And they also announced their wishes to list on an international stock exchange.

Post bagging multi-billion dollar deals from marquee investors in the last one month, Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is said to be now considering an overseas listing of Jio Platforms, according to people aware of the development.
Source: Mint

Technology

Social media is an echo chamber and that echo chamber has resulted in far too many countries in the world having right-wing governments. India included. Life is good so long as you are on the right side of the line – White in the US – Hindu in India and so on. Facebook knew what it was doing and why it was wrong. An explosive and incriminating report exposes the upper echelons of the company brushing aside genuine concerns.

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” […]
But in the end, Facebook’s interest was fleeting. Mr Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products.
Source: WSJ

The person who made this presentation was the head of the ‘Integrity Team’ at Facebook. The company has none of it.

Twitter has been a haven for trolls permitting harassment at an unprecedented level. It came as a huge surprise when Twitter which is in part responsible for Donald Trump being president decided to flag this tweet at false.

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

[click on the tweet and open it to see the flag]

The move, which escalates tensions between Washington and Silicon Valley in an election year, was made in response to two Trump tweets over the past 24 hours. The tweets falsely claimed that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Twitter’s label says, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” and redirects users to news articles about Trump’s unsubstantiated claim.
Source: Washington Post

The president threw a fit on Twitter about Twitter. Then announced on Twitter that he would be releasing an Executive Order against Twitter.

In the meantime, Kellyanne Conway his “Counselor” went on a rant against – guess who? – the head of the Integrity Team of Twitter; Yoel Roth. He has been subjected to a lot of trolling by Republicans and Trump supporters – where else – on Twitter.

Here is a list of all the false claims made by the President of USA to date – all 18,000 of them. – https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/

And Twitter is not backing down!

Misc

The Indian Government is using drones to chase away locusts.

These are designed to spray 10-litre of chemicals, along with creating a sound that would disperse the locusts into different areas. “It has successfully contained the movement of locusts in an open area and on the foothills where it was not possible for the usual tractors to make it reach. A detailed assessment of its impact is being studied by the field officers,” said Om Prakash, commissioner, state agriculture department.
Source: Times of India

The Democrats are using the Republican playbook – GOD. Only God can save them now. God is peddling conspiracy theories on Trump!

Donald Trump killed his personal assistant, Carolyn Gombell, in October 2000. He strangled her because he’d gotten her pregnant and was threatening to tell the press. Then he bribed NYPD Police Chief Bernie Kierik to cover it up. IT’S TIME TO INVESTIGATE. #JusticeForCarolyn
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) May 26, 2020

Go on check out the twitter handle. It’s got a lot more there. About Ivanka’s Shoplifting and much more…

Signing off…

Tags Airtel, China, Drones, Facebook, Flagging, God, Idea, India, Reliance, Telecom, Twitter, USA

General Thinking

Demonetisation is a lost opportunity for digital payment providers

Post author By Vivek Srinivasan
Post date November 24, 2016
No Comments on Demonetisation is a lost opportunity for digital payment providers

The move made by Modi to Demonetise 86% of the notes in circulation might be a move that was triggered with various interests in mind. The one thing that it has undoubtedly made many Indians do it use digital payments. I was speaking the other day to one of the managers at National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and he was telling me that the numbers of transactions have spiked many folds!

For those who do not know NPCI is a quasi government body that creates the standards such as IMPS and UPI using which many of the online transaction networks function.

Yes digital payments and transactions are spiking to new levels.

This was quite possibly the best opportunity to transition the vast majority of Indians who are currently dependent on cash transactions for the most part to digital payments. Are we really doing what is necessary?

Let me share an incident that happened:

I had to travel to Mumbai the day after the demonetisation scheme was announced. When you land at the international airport in Mumbai for some reason they change a toll only in cash. I did not have any, so the Uber driver paid for it. We did not find a single ATM on the way which could dispense cash and hence upon reaching my destination I asked my driver if he has PayTM so I could transfer him the money. He had the app installed but did not have an account. I asked him to create an account. He looked at me uncertainly. He proceeded only to get stuck at the point where the app asked for him to put in a password. He did not wish to set a password in English, he was afraid he would forget it. PayTM does not offer the choice of any other language. So after much goading he set a password and I was able to transfer him the money.

Seems like a minor oversight; but affects Millions if not a Billion people in this country.

Arguably e-wallets have a critical role to play in this context since there are a lot of small and micro payments for which using the card (credit or debit) does not make a lot of sense. Besides there are a lot of small businesses and stores that do not possess the infrastructure necessary to (PoS Machines) to process payments using cards. In such cases it is very easy for the merchant to get up and going & start processing payments.

If this was the opportunity straight out of a dream, all of the wallets have blissfully squandered it away.

The most significant error in judgement that was made when all of the VC firms came rushing in to setup shop in India was to assume that India was going to be next China. India is nothing like China, with over a 100 languages, poor digital infrastructure and still poorer adoption of digital payment services; India was and still is nothing like China.

As of 2012, the best estimates put a population of 125 Million English Speakers in India. For the sake of argument let us assume that this number has grown to 200 Million today. That still leaves aside 1.07 Billion people, who do not know the language.

How many applications do you use which have a non-english version?

This was probably one time when almost every Indian has had the need to rely on digital solutions in order to make sure their lives were not hindered greatly. Under such circumstances, it is a priority to ensure that all of the solutions are able to cater to the needs to all Indians, English speaking or not.

It seems rather sad that someone like Vijay Shekhar Sharma who himself came from a Hindi medium school did not see this need. The only wallet website that at least makes an attempt is Mobiqwik, which translates ONE page on the site to Hindi. All of the other wallet or payment applications continue to be exclusively English.

As English literate technology savvy Indians take advantage of technology and make things easy for themselves, a vast majority of people in this country cannot access these services because of language barriers.

I would have expected these wallet companies to translate their apps to 30 languages over the course of a week (at least on Android) and send teams of people out with missionary zeal to convert as many merchants as possible to wallet users. For the merchants everyday is a lost opportunity and hence they would have embraced and also taken the time to educate their customers of the product to make transactions possible.

But that is not how it played out. There companies continue to target an English speaking audience and make a whole host of payment processing solutions possible for English literate customers alone.

We in the “Startup” universe need to start looking at this entire nation. To start looking beyond what is “low hanging fruit” and can be targeted through Google AdWords alone. We need to start building solutions for the people of this nation, in all of their diversity and limitations.

You can build a billion dollar enterprise by making a million people pay $1000 or by making a billion people pay $1. There has been a preposterous degree of focus on the former. While the possibility of the former going from paying $1000 to $2000 is limited; the possibility of $1 going to $10 in incredibly high.

What kind of company do you want to build?

Tags Cash, Currency, Demonetisation, Digital Money, E-Wallet, India