All the global transitions are working in India's favour, giving it the potential to become a force in today's uncertain world, but one of the country's biggest challenges is inclusive growth, Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran said on Monday. In his address at the JRD Tata Oration, the head of the Tata group also asserted that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay and it will be beneficial if India prepares for it. Post the cold war era of relative stability and prosperity, the world appears to have given way to unpredictable conflicts and economic uncertainty, he said, adding that the pandemic resulted in supply chain shocks of gigantic proportion.
'From data on enquiries, we can build what we call a data lake or a data warehouse where data is classified into various cohorts and then we use AI and ML tools to predict demand down the line.'
As artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to replace jobs, a new report from Microsoft has suggested that Indian employees are caught between a fear of losing jobs and an opportunity to reduce workload by delegating tasks to technology. Microsoft's Work Trend Index 2023 found that while 74 per cent of Indian employees are worried about AI replacing their jobs, 83 per cent would delegate as much work to it as possible, to help lessen their workloads. More than three in four Indian workers would be comfortable using AI not just for administrative tasks (86 per cent), but also for analytical work (88 per cent), and for the creative aspects of their role (87 per cent).
Widening of the tax base, doing away with cess and surcharge, improvement in compliance and moderation in tax for emerging sectors are some of the suggestions submitted to the Finance Ministry ahead of the Budget by Think Change Forum (TCF). Experts are of the opinion that there is a need to grow tax revenues for the government to drive economic growth and make investments in developmental activities, TCF, the think tank said in a statement. Towards this end, poor compliance was identified as a weak link in achieving targeted collections leading to complex issues like overtaxing, complicated tax structures, rising litigation, among others.
While digitisation and automation have made internal processes more efficient, front-end products are being enhanced digitally through robotics, artificial intelligence and botchats.
IMD has decided to increasingly use cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in forecasting, both to avoid such glitches and to counter the disruption of normal seasonal patterns as a result of climate change. It has formed various internal sub-groups of senior officials and meteorologists to decide on how best to use AI and ML in predicting cyclone intensity, and in making short-range weather forecasts (those valid for up to three hours) as well as long-range forecasts.
'The leadership values I learnt while playing cricket in India helped me compete vigorously in the face of uncertainty -- putting the team first and bringing out the best in everybody.'
As India builds its data centre capabilities, it is imperative that it is supported by green energy. This is because data centres are guzzlers of energy.
The MQ-9B predator armed drones -- 10 each for three services -- is seen to be a key part of India's national security and defense needs.
Justice Chelameswar said the State has reasons to keep surveillance depending upon the situations, but there should be "an amount of transparency in the process".
New models of skilling will provide both jobs and entrepreneurship opportunities to inspire recipients to capture the jobs or entrepreneurial opportunities they seek and provide them the agency to stay on and improve on their skills on the job, says Ganesh Natarajan.
India's sprawling digital public infrastructure received a glowing endorsement from billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates on Wednesday as he praised the country's "great" digital network, reliable and low-cost connectivity, and said this will be the cheapest 5G market. Under the G20 presidency of India, a session on 'Building resilient and inclusive economies- the Promise of Digital Public Infrastructure' was held on Wednesday in New Delhi, where the Microsoft co-founder spoke of India's digital identity Aadhaar, its payment infrastructure, and rapid strides that the country has taken in bringing more people into formal banking system. "India in particular, by laying the groundwork for digital public infrastucture starting with identity system, allows people to build on top of that.
Liv.Ai makes speech recognition software that allows people to transact in their native languages.
'Similar to the case of the digital payment system where the government created a public platform and others joined in, we are exploring a similar structure to create a PPP platform where the compute required for AI could be accessed by the small player.'
The development assumes significance as Prime Minister Narendra Modi had last month announced 10 lakh government recruitments in the next 1.5 years.
Leading scientists and experts said this monumental accomplishment not only marks India's indelible imprint on lunar exploration but also demonstrates the prowess of human collaboration, determination, and cutting-edge technology.
China, Russia, Iran and international terrorism form the 'big four' set of security threats in an era of dramatic change, Britain's chief spy said in a rare public speech on Tuesday.
... Are far-reaching social changes coming with it, asks Ajit Balakrishnan.
In keeping with the main theme of 'Tides Surging in Asia', the ceremony was about the intermingling of China, Asia and the world in the new era
In his speech during the Army day parade, he also said that there has been 44 per cent increase in ceasefire violations that reflects Pakistan's sinister design.
'The kind of jobs the advent of artificial intelligence, data science and so on are creating simply didn't exist before'
The CDS has the option to focus on key areas of capability development to fight new generation wars or get bogged down in trying to bring cosmetic changes to humour the political leadership, asserts Brigadier Narender Kumar (retd).
The IVRS is a toll-free service, where citizens are asked to give a missed call to the number 1921 and they will get a call back requesting for inputs regarding their health.
The Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) has issued summonses to Twitter and the city police over the alleged availability of child pornography videos on the microblogging website.
The finance ministry (FinMin) has asked Infosys to work on ways to extract and access taxpayers' real-time data faster and accurately as it is crucial for taking decisions on policy changes. While reviewing progress of the income tax portal 2.0, which had faced glitches, the officials also told the Infosys team to increase the scope of pre-filled data in the ITR forms. Senior officials in the ministry held a review meeting last month with the Infosys team and officials of the Central Processing Centre (CPC).
It is only the Indian approach of holding on to multiple realities and contradictory ideas simultaneously that is likely to deliver peace and progress. Binary logic is out of sync with reality, notes R Jagannathan.
John Abraham is impressive in Attack. Sadly, the story is not, notes Namrata Thakker.
The information technology (IT) services industry could see value investors taking selective punts in the near future. While growth remains visible, managements across the board have been cautious or measured in their guidance and have also complained about a combination of margin pressures and high churn. The two factors are related in that employee compensation is a large component of IT costs and high churn has forced firms to hike compensation packages and also invest more in hiring, training, and retention.
The government of Tamil Nadu on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoUs) with 35 companies that may see investment to the tune of Rs 17,141 crore, creating employment opportunities for 55,054 people. The major companies that would be coming up with fresh investments over Rs 1,000 crore in the state include JSW Renew Energy Two, TCS, ZF Wabco and Srivaru Motors among others. JSW Renew Energy Two will be coming up with a 450 megawatt (Mw) wind power generation unit at Tuticorin, Tirunelveli, Dindigul and Tiruppur for Rs 3,000 crore. TCS will be coming up with its third phase of expansion at SIPCOT IT Park in Siruseri, ZF Wabco with an auto component unit at Kancheepuram for Rs 1,800 crore and a two-wheeler EV unit by Srivaru Motors for Rs 1,000 crore at Coimbatore.
As many as 2,000 chips are annually designed in India by semi-conductor and fabless companies, Intel India managing director Prakash Mallya said in a conversation with Business Standard. Mallya was reiterating the importance of India in the semi-conductor sweepstakes. "As much as 90 per cent of the semi-conductor companies have a design footprint in India.
Believe it or not, the regulator is even stretching its arm to identify stressed borrowers and gauge the 'distance to default' as a measure of a particular bank's fragility, reveals Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
'India has a lot of potential, not just in commercial aspects, but also in hiring of people and sourcing of products.'
Our caste warriors will not even ask these questions, let alone explore better solutions to address the problems of inequality and skewed life outcomes, argues R Jagannathan.
'In investing, you have to first make sure you don't make big mistakes.' 'I would advise small investors to be systematic, don't be arbitrary; don't be on either end of the risk spectrum.' 'Don't go from fixed deposit to option trading or crypto trading.'
Tata Power on Saturday said it has inked a pact with IIT Delhi to work together on clean energy and other projects that can be transformed from research and development level to pilot stage. Tata Power, one of India's largest private sector integrated utilities, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate in areas like smart grid technology, clean energy solutions, a company statement said. Considering the large number of experts with their excellence in different fields in IIT Delhi and Tata Power, there is an immense potential to collaborate between academia, research and domain experts from business with a high transformational impact, it added.
The papers noted that the 5G network is built on easily accessible and open Internet protocols and it inherits all the vulnerabilities of previous generations which make it vulnerable to cyber-attacks and compromising the security of the entire system.
Think organic food, affordable homes, artificial intelligence, suggests Prof Manmeet Barve.
Along with Salman Khan's Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan and Keanu Reeves' action blockbuster John Wick: Chapter 4, we have Nawazuddin Siddiqui's rom-com Tiku Weds Sheru releasing on OTT this week and much more.
Tata Group is in discussions with some major international companies, including those from Taiwan, for its foray into the semiconductor chip business. The Union government had earlier tried to bring in Taiwanese manufacturers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) for chip manufacturing in India. A person close to the development said the Tatas have now opened a separate channel for a possible tie-up. Currently, India mostly imports chips, which are fabricated and assembled to put into various applications, including automobiles, renewable power, mobile phones, televisions, and other electronic items.
We have the workforce, now we need to ensure that we take full advantage of game-changing technologies and geopolitical openings, suggests Jayant Sinha, chairman, Parliament's Standing Committee on Finance.
