Ahead of the upcoming elections, political parties have started announcing incentives to benefit women, but what do women truly seek for genuine gender parity, asks Nivedita Mookerji.
In August 2021, Nick Read, chief executive of Vodafone Plc at the time, did not mince his words while speaking about the India business in an earnings call. Replying to an analyst's question on Vodafone Idea, a venture with the Aditya Birla Group that had piled on huge debts and worrisome losses, Read described it as a highly stressed situation that "they (Vodafone Idea) are trying to navigate... "We, as a group, try to provide them as much practical support as we can, but I want to make it very clear, we are not putting any additional equity into India.''
Startup founders need to sit up and think about how not to take stardom for granted and how not to disappoint their fans who have stood in long queues for those precious selfies with popular entrepreneurs, notes Nivedita Mookerji.
Going by the RBI directive and the overall narrative, Paytm may have lost the rigour of stress tests, audits and compliance.
'To get a 100 per cent consensus document without any reservation, any bracket, any chair summary is unprecedented in the history of multilateral forums.'
'India has the potential to do a lot more to take advantage of the time today where we stand to gain, geopolitically and in terms of market attractiveness.'
'I'm very much against petrol and diesel....'' 'I travel in an electric car.' 'I have had a really good experience with it.'
'If you are going to have only a handful of telecom players on whom the entire dream of Digital India rests, it's important they are financially sustainable.'
'India has a lot of potential, not just in commercial aspects, but also in hiring of people and sourcing of products.'
At a time when the overall narrative is around India being an attractive investment destination, the two American multinationals are more specific in projecting India as their centrepiece.
Bengaluru-based Prestige Estates Projects recently said it aims to double its annual residential sales bookings to Rs 25,000 crore by FY26 from its current markets and others such as Mumbai, Pune and National Capital Region (NCR). The company's chairman and managing director Irfan Razaq tells Raghavendra Kamath about his plans to achieve the target and outlook for the real estate market.
'The rising cost of construction, the cost of doing business, high compliance, and inflation/interest rates going up have already reduced returns to single digits.'
'India is showing a reasonable amount of resilience, but we are still living in a world that is quite fragile.' 'That's why we hope that the government will continue to invest significantly in public capex so that we are able to ride through this cycle till the private sector is able to play its part in investing and adding to the capex cycle.'
Most players are looking to invest anywhere between $500 million and $1 billion in new ventures in the next couple of years, said experts on this segment.
Shankar Prajapati, a 57-year-old potter in Dharavi, has given up hope of getting a bigger house for his family. He lives cheek by jowl in a hutment measuring 200 square (sq.) feet (ft) in the nondescript shanty town. "We have surrendered to our fate. We cannot wait forever for better accommodation. "Perhaps we are not meant to dream big," despairs Prajapati. Raju Korde, president, Dharavi Redevelopment Committee, and a local resident, agrees with Prajapati.
The NCR and the MMR together account for 77 per cent of 10 big housing projects stuck because of developers' bankruptcy or litigation.
'We showcased about 20 use cases in 5G trials in Pune and Gandhinagar and some of them were interesting and innovative.' 'However, which ones will take off and which ones would not be relevant, we don't know yet.'
Three business houses are likely to be in the final race to strike a deal with Germany's Metro AG for investing in its India unit -- Metro Cash & Carry. Industry sources in the know named Reliance, Adani Group, and Thailand's conglomerate Charoen Pokphand (CP) as potential frontrunners to acquire a partial or full stake in the Gurugram-headquartered Metro Cash & Carry, which has 31 stores and 5,000 direct employees. Around 20 companies, including strategic and private equity investors, were approached by the German chain, inviting them to bid for the Indian wholesale business, according to a source aware of the M&A developments.
'After Covid, people started looking for bigger houses with pools and landscaped gardens.' 'Even middle class buyers are looking at plots of land in smaller towns.'
A 5% increase is expected due to additional interest on approval costs.
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