'Defence funding is channelled to State-owned research organisations where scientists are merely bureaucrats holding meetings and sending out minutes of meetings and press releases, but have long ago stopped any innovative work.' 'Unless this tragedy is fixed, India's chances to create world-conquering and job-creating new industries are slim,' says Ajit Balakrishnan.
Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe has decided to halt its proposed acquisition of Goldman Sachs- and Xiaomi-backed ZestMoney, a Bengaluru-based buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform. The deal, which was poised to fetch anywhere between $150-200 million and $300 million, has hit a snag over lapses in due diligence, disagreements over valuation, sustainability of the business, and shareholding structure of ZestMoney, according to people familiar with the matter. The collapse of the deal is also being attributed to a slowdown in the financial technology (fintech) sector in the midst of a funding winter, difficult regulatory environment, and macroeconomic uncertainty, informed other sources.
Like software-as-a-service (SaaS), CaaS has emerged as a well-orchestrated ecosystem for cybercriminals.
Despite strong AUM growth, MFs lag behind other popular investment avenues. MFs received only 6 per cent of total household savings in 2021-2022.
E-commerce firms and sellers including Amazon and eBay have made recommendations to the government for a differentiated policy framework for e-commerce in the revised Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) which is expected to come into effect from April 1, 2021. This is because the existing policies on exports have catered largely to traditional, offline and business-to-business exports. Suggestions have been made to the government that through the FTP, it is important to create a conducive policy framework for e-commerce exports that lowers the entry barrier for small businesses to start exporting, according to the industry sources.
Shah said India's goal is to become a $ 5 trillion economy in the next five years and without contribution from the energy and petroleum sector, this goal can't be achieved.
'Wherever in the world there is political instability, those countries are beset with severe crises today. But India is in a much better position than the rest of the world due to the decisions taken by my government in the national interest,' President Droupadi Murmu said in her address to both Houses of Parliament.
The purchase or construction of houses by large numbers of people can add meaningfully to India's economic growth, points out Neelkanth Mishra.
Ajit Mishra answers reader queries on the stock market.
Telecom service operator Airtel on Thursday urged the government not to charge high fees for allotting 5G spectrum, saying a faster roll out of the next-generation telecommunication network can have more benefits than collecting revenue in upfront cost. Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Enterprises which runs the country's second largest telco, said that there are a variety of applications across sectors ranging from healthcare to video interactions, which will make 5G a technology to be introduced as soon as possible. "5G is important and that's why we keep on requesting the government to make the 5G as an enabler for hundreds of things that we develop in the country, to keep the spectrum at affordable pricing, to not load the industry too much," Mittal said at the Times Network India Economic Conclave.
While the first wave of moving work to India was driven by cost considerations, increasingly companies are banking on local talent to add value to their business by jointly developing products and solutions.
Son's offer to supply free power after 25 years is based on the idea that the cost of running a solar plant would progressively decline while its efficiency would increase.
For the first time in our economic history a government has thought about more than 50 per cent of our economic activity instead of the five per cent represented by the Sensex companies, observes IIM-B professor R Vaidyanathan.
The new rules are aimed at providing a strong impetus to the industry and positioning India as one of the most competitive IT jurisdictions in the world.
'When the average growth in the last three years was just 2.5%, how does that make us the fastest growing country?' 'They only tell you what has happened in the last 2 years; they are not taking into account what happened in FY21 on account of their mistakes.'
The Supreme Court asked the Centre and the RBI on Monday to place on record the K V Kamath committee recommendations on debt restructuring in view of Covid-19 related stress on various sectors as well as the notifications and circulars issued so far on loan moratorium.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's Rs 30,600 crore government guarantee for the bad bank has changed the body language of bankers for the better, observes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
In the excitement over the allocation of bank licences for the private sector, a new category of licence offered by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last year went almost unnoticed. That was when the RBI consolidated the rules for prepaid payment instruments (PPI), popularly understood as e-wallets or gift cards. In the process, the regulator has fast-forwarded a bottom-up card usage industry in India that is completely different from the world of bank-linked credit and debit cards.
Do you suspect that your partner is cheating on you and want to find out the truth by installing spyware on their phone? Or, perhaps you are a student who wants to get out of an online classroom so you can play an online game with friends? How about some Zoom raiding for a mere Rs 50-100? Or, are you a person who wishes to hack into someone's phone or laptop, and steal their financial details? Crimeware-as-a-Service (CaaS) allows you to do all this and more.
'Banking is a business of trust.'
Here's the full text of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to a joint session of the United States Congress, delivered on Thursday.
While weather forecasters remain divided on how the monsoons will play out in India over the next few months, analysts believe the news at the current juncture - at best - can trigger a knee-jerk reaction in the markets. They believe it is too early to say whether the sub-par monsoon on account of El Nino can seriously dent the market sentiment in the short-to-medium term. "These are just initial forecasts and we will have another round / status update from the weather forecasters a month down the line.
The Bharatiya Janata Party regime will have to make good on this election slogan to restore state-owned banks to health, says Rajiv Lall.
The 30-share Sensex ended down 208 points at 28,261 and the 50-share Nifty closed 64 points lower at 8,571.
NCP spokesperson and Maharashtra minister Nawab Malik said that AICC general secretary H K Patil was told about this scheduled meeting when he and other Congress leaders met Pawar in Mumbai recently.
Combining affordable IT with native Indian ingenuity and entrepreneurship F C Kohli believed would enable Indian small businesses match anyone and thrive.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday reviewed the impact of Covid-19 on the Indian economy and a possible second stimulus to boost sectors hit hard by the pandemic. Modi held discussions with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as the pandemic hit sectors from small industries to the aviation sector hard with millions of jobs at stake.
The World Bank's latest review of its purchasing power parity (PPP) baseline will reignite the poverty debate.
'The slide in growth has arisen primarily because we have an NBFC crisis on top of a banking crisis,' points out T T Ram Mohan.
'Public sector banks are like an extended arm of the government.' 'They rush to rescue certain sectors or they rush to invest in certain sectors to prop up the economy which the private banks don't.'
Had Finance Minister Sitharaman thought a little more about the middle class, disadvantaged sections, and the poor who are struggling, it would have been an inclusive Budget that would have made history, notes Ramesh Menon.
Make in India right now is just a slogan. The policy content is missing or not clearly articulated. The lion with cogs and wheels must now show some majestic movement forward, says Rahul Khullar.
Fintechs need to behave with responsibility and transparency. A lot of mis-selling has been happening. Other issues have been plaguing the fledgling industry -- high interest rates, even higher processing fees, harsh collection process and, most critically, data leakage leading to rampant frauds, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
With a sole mandate of inflation targeting, RBI wears many hats.
'It really doesn't matter that investors getting allotments sell their IPO stock holdings on listing day because a new set of investors are entering.' 'This explains the continued rise in stock prices even after the first day of listing.'
Like on Pegasus, like Covid, there have been no answers from the government about why the situation on the economy and India's future is where it is today, notes Aakar Patel.
Flipkart Group on Monday said it has raised $3.6 billion (about Rs 26,805.6 crore) in funding led by GIC, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Walmart, valuing the e-commerce giant at $37.6 billion. The company, which competes with Amazon, Reliance Industries' JioMart and others in the burgeoning Indian e-commerce market, said it will continue to make deeper investments across people, technology, supply chain and infrastructure to address the requirements of a rapidly growing consumer base in the country. The current funding round has also seen participation from sovereign funds DisruptAD, Qatar Investment Authority, Khazanah Nasional Berhad as well as marquee investors Tencent, Willoughby Capital, Antara Capital, Franklin Templeton and Tiger Global.
Adapting to an inevitable digital intervention is India's only hope at beating a long-standing job crisis. To do so, focus on quality education and better skill development is fundamental, says Dr Yogesh Kumar Bhatt.
Apart from fulfilling banking services, one can access more than 100 e-commerce sites, book tickets, and even pay for small value groceries through the app. The bank is now proposing to allow other banks to use this to serve their own customers.
SBI had a tough journey in the last 40 years.
