We have our own problems for sure and they are not trivial, but for now, our economy is in not too bad a shape, our politics is as personality-driven and authoritarian as that of most countries in the world. We must make the best of what we have and not be excessively unhappy looking at the grass on the other side of the septic tank which may not be greener after all!, observes Shreekant Sambrani.
Thirteen companies have joined the Rs 1-trillion-plus market capitalisation club this year, so far. This even as the benchmark Sensex has gained less than 3 per cent on a year-to-date basis, underscoring the bullish undercurrent in the broader market. The trend shows a harsh second wave of Covid-19, subsequent lockdowns, and hit to the economic activity has made little dent into India Inc or shareholders' wealth. At the start of the year, there were 29 companies with a market value of more than Rs 1 trillion.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday unveiled a Rs 39.45 lakh crore Budget with a view to fire up the key engines of the economy to sustain a world-beating recovery from the pandemic. This was Sitharaman's fourth Budget. While the taxpayers were left in the lurch, once again, was she able to cheer Corporate India?
Housing sales across top eight cities rose 51 per cent last year, even as the office market continued to slump due to the Covid pandemic with gross leasing witnessing a 3 per cent fall, according to Knight Frank India. Housing sales increased to 232,903 units during last year, from 154,534 units in 2020, but demand was down 5 per cent from the 2019 pre-pandemic levels and 37 per cent lower than the 2011 peak numbers. In the office segment, the gross leasing of office space fell to 38.1 million square feet in 2021, from 39.4 million square feet in the previous year, due to the adverse impact of the second wave of the Covid pandemic.
'The current economic contraction is certainly due to the lockdowns as a response to the pandemic, which is an act of God.' 'Nobody has seen such a thing in the last 100 years.' 'Saying that this was an act of mismanagement is largely incorrect'
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday met Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates on the sidelines of the climate summit here and discussed ways to further sustainable development, steps to mitigate climate change and vaccine research. The meeting between Modi and the American business magnate, whose foundation is focusing on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, took place after the former launched the Initiative for the Resilient Island States (IRIS) for developing infrastructure of small island nations. Prime Minister Modi expressed appreciation for the work being done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in India, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in a statement.
India and Italy inked 15 pacts and finalised an ambitious action plan to further expand their ties following a virtual summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Italian counterpart Giuseppe Conte that primarily focused on ramping up economic engagement.
Modi's unexpected announcement of achieving net zero by 2070 may have neatly deflected the pressures on India to sign up to an ambitious pledge but it does nothing to dispel the ecological emergency that threatens all life on the planet, , points out former forerign secretary Shyam Saran, the prime minister's special envoy and chief negotiator on climate change 2007-2010.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday called for focus on 'repair and prepare' as the nation emerges out of a devastating pandemic. "Over the past year, we have witnessed a lot of disruption in different sectors. Much of it is still there. Yet, disruption does not have to mean despair," he said at VivaTech Summit. "Instead, we must keep the focus on the twin foundations of repair and prepare," he said referring to the need to augment healthcare infrastructure in the country as well as prop up the economy.
Prime Minister Modi, who is in Japan on a two-day visit to attend a summit of the Quad leaders at the invitation of his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida, penned an op-ed on the vibrant relations between India and Japan in the Yomiuri Shimbun.
They believe that the key reason behind such a high growth rate could be "a steep downward revision" of the year-ago base period.
A majority of the CEOs are expecting the economy to show growth in the next financial year on the back of rising consumer spending and a sharp turnaround in rural India.
The agency welcomed the Rs 1.70-lakh crore package announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman earlier in the day but said more measures like loan forbearances for small businesses and households are necessary.
Renowned Indian environmental economist and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) goodwill ambassador Pavan Sukhdev has won the 2020 Tyler Prize, regarded as the 'Nobel Prize for the Environment', for his ground-breaking "green economy" work. Sukhdev, 59, who will receive the award alongside conservation biologist Gretchen Daily, has been acknowledged for his work on bringing the economic consequences of environmental degradation and loss to the attention of corporate and political decision-makers.
'The prospect is of a self-confident and self-sustaining India will make it a more effective player in the global arena,' External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar points out delivering the Sardar Patel Lecture-2020: India and the Post-Covid World.
With nearly 100 countries closing national borders during the past month, the movement of people and tourism flows have come to a screeching halt. The contraction could be even higher if governments fail to provide income support and help boost consumer spending.
August witnessed the fastest pace of growth in new business orders since February.
According to the Biden-Harris Transition, 'the president-elect noted that he looks forward to working closely with the prime minister on shared global challenges, including containing COVID-19 and defending against future health crises, tackling the threat of climate change, launching the global economic recovery, strengthening democracy at home and abroad, and maintaining a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific region'.
India should engage the world on the basis of its confidence in its identity rather than trying to please the global community as their "pale imitation", External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Wednesday amid increasing Western pressure on the country to oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Narendra Modi also conveyed to Xi his appreciation for facilitating evacuation of around 650 Indian citizens from the Hubei province last week.
'Several businesses like entertainment, hospitality, travel etc would never be the same again.'
About 1.2 crore passengers flew in November compared to 1.1 crore in October. While the industry opinion is divided over the sustainability of unprofitable growth, which is primarily led by low fare, some described it as the resilience of air travel against the economic slump.
Wall Street brokerage Goldman Sachs has lowered its estimate for India's economic growth to 11.1 per cent in fiscal year to March 31, 2022, as a number of cities and states announced lockdowns of varying intensities to check spread of coronavirus infections. India is suffering the world's worst outbreak of COVID-19 cases, with deaths crossing 2.22 lakh and new cases above 3.5 lakh daily. This has led to demand for imposition of nationwide strict lockdowns to stem the spread of the virus - a move that the Modi government has so far avoided after the economic devastation last year from a similar strategy.
This is reflected in an improvement in their sentiments as well, explains Mahesh Vyas.
The World Bank on Sunday said the coronavirus outbreak has severely disrupted the Indian economy, magnifying the pre-existing risks to its outlook. In its 'South Asia Economic Update: Impact of Covid-19', the World Bank estimated the Indian economy to decelerate to 5 per cent in 2020 and projected a sharp growth deceleration in fiscal 2021 to 2.8 per cent in a baseline scenario.
Modi also urged the BRICS Business Council to create a roadmap to achieve the $500 billion intra-BRICS trade target by the next summit.
Those hardest hit by the second wave of the pandemic have been blue-collared workers, doctors and healthcare workers, law and order and municipal personnel, individuals eking out daily livelihood, and small businesses. And there should be more measures taken to alleviate their pain, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said on Monday. The report also indicated that the RBI's growth numbers might have to be revisited as the central bank's real GDP growth projection of 26.2 per cent given in the MPC's resolution of April 7 for the first quarter of 2021-22, were "made before the full fury of the resurgence." Nevertheless, the "resurgence of COVID-19 has dented but not debilitated economic activity in the first half of Q1: 2021-22.
After years of disappointing growth, the economy and the markets are poised for a breakout, notes Akash Prakash.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram's road show in Singapore highlighted India's strong growth and investment prospects.
'People always short-change the resilience of the economy.'
The report says, the emerging markets continue to have uneven performance but India recovers from decelerating growth. Narendra Modi government, it added, continues business-friendly growth reforms, the economy grows at 6 per cent and the market rises 20 per cent.
83% of the CEOS plan to hire more in the new year.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday that India and China are going through a 'particularly bad patch' in their ties because Beijing has taken a set of actions in violation of agreements for which it still doesn't have a 'credible explanation' and it is for the Chinese leadership to answer where they want to take the bilateral relationship.
Highlighting the role of MSMEs in enhancing exports and helping the country achieve self reliance, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari on Monday said India does not need to import from China. "Already in automobile sector, in many sectors now, in agriculture, automobiles, everywhere, we have already found the solutions. Now we don't need to import from China," said the minister. He observed that India was exporting a lot of items instead of importing them.
The government kept its nerve in the face of a massive shock. It chose not to resort to a massive fiscal stimulus. It focused instead on providing liquidity support and easing restrictions on movement in stages, observes T T Ram Mohan.
5G networks in India can be deployed in three months but in limited areas as the optical fibre based infrastructure to support the technology is not ready yet, telecom industry players said on Tuesday. Nokia India head of marketing and corporate affairs Amit Marwah said that India has to take a call on deployment of 5G services otherwise it will miss to take advantage of the next generation technology that it can bring for the economy.
India's macroeconomic situation is improving fast and the country's GDP growth will turn positive in the third and fourth quarters of the current financial year, eminent economist Ashima Goyal said on Sunday. Goyal in an interview to PTI said the management of the COVID-19 pandemic and gradual unlocks announced by the government have helped in avoiding multiple COVID-19 peaks. The growth estimates by different agencies are being continuously revised, she said.
In the opinion piece after the summit, the leaders said the cooperation, known as "the Quad," was born in crisis. It became a diplomatic dialogue in 2007 and was reborn in 2017.
The economy has shown sharp resilience in the past and has also bounced back in good time. We could hence expect a similar trajectory next year, observes Madan Sabnavis, chief economist, CARE Ratings.
Buoyed by an increase in public investment and incentives to boost manufacturing, India's economy is expected to grow by 8.3 per cent in the fiscal year 2021-22, less than the previous projection early this year before the country was hit by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Bank has said in its latest report. World Bank chief economist for the South Asia Region Hans Timmer told PTI here that when one looks at the high frequency data, they see that as a result of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the recovery paused, and some indicate that the recovery actually declined briefly. "We project for this fiscal year 8.3 per cent (growth rate for Indian economy) that is less than we projected early in the year before the health crisis caused by the second wave. "Given the sharp contraction of the economy last year, it might not look like a lot, but in my view, that is actually very positive news, given the violent second wave and the severity of the health crisis," he said on Thursday.
