Arvind's Newsletter

1.India Q3 GDP: Indian economy grew 6.2% in December quarter, FY25 growth pegged at 6.5%

India Q3 GDP: India's economy grew 6.2% year-on-year in the October-December quarter, government data showed Friday, faster than in the preceding three months due to higher government spending and improved urban consumption.

The reading was largely in line with economists’ expectations for the financial third quarter, and up from the revised estimate of 5.6% on-year expansion in July-September. Analysts and economists had pegged India’s Q3 GDP growth at 6.2-6.3%.

India's infrastructure output, which accounts for about two-fifths of industrial production, remained steady at 4.6% in January, slightly lower than 4.8% in December. The growth was driven by increased production in cement, refinery products, coal, steel, fertilizers, and electricity. 

2.Tata Group-backed grocery giant plans to go public in 2 years amid demand surge

India's BigBasket is planning to go public in the next 18 to 24 months, its CEO said, as the Tata Group-backed grocery giant seeks to tap surging demand for quick online deliveries of everything from fruits to Apple iPhones.

The company is on track to double its business year-on-year by March 2026 and expand to about 70 Indian cities from 35 currently over the next year, CEO Hari Menon told Reuters on the sidelines of a retail summit in Mumbai. He stopped short of detailing any investment plans.

3.Microfinance sector NPAs hit ₹50,000 crore at the end of December last year, an all time high

This accounted for 13% of gross loans during this time period, The Economic Times reported. Last year, loan portfolios reduced while there was a rise in delinquencies. This comes even as India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, announced that micro-finance loans in the category of consumer credit will be excluded from having higher risk weights of 125%  and will only have to have a risk weight of 100%.

4.India's contract drug makers seek government support in China fight

Contract drugmakers in India want the government to make it easier to import raw materials as it is essential for them to scale their business. Reuters reports that they have urged the government to remove regulatory hurdles. The report said that this was essential as more international firms are counting on India rather than on China, an after effect from the supply chain hurdles during the pandemic.

While the global market is valued at  $140 billion-$145 billion, Boston Consulting Group found that the industry in India could grow seven-fold to $22 billion-$25 billion by 2035.

5.Trump Says Canada, Mexico Tariffs to Take Effect, Adds New China Duty

After a monthlong pause, sweeping tariffs on America’s largest trading partners are set to go into effect March 4 as planned, Donald Trump said. The president confirmed 25% levies on Canada and Mexico from next week, after giving apparently contradictory answers about a potential timeline. 

Trump added that he’ll also impose an additional 10% tax on Chinese imports. The dollar surged. As for stocks, a selloff in megacaps drove the Nasdaq 100 to its lowest since November.

However, US stocks rose on Friday, halting a sharp sell-off that has put the S&P 500 index on course for its worst week since November.

6.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to sign a deal granting Washington access to Kyiv’s mineral resources during talks with US President Donald Trump today. 

The agreement comes amid intense diplomatic maneuvering over the Ukraine war: American and Russian officials held talks in Istanbul this week, the UK will host European leaders this weekend, and Moscow’s defense chief is in Beijing.

Trump said, through the minerals deal,“American taxpayers will now be effectively reimbursed” for providing military support to Ukraine, arguing it would also “help the Ukrainians rebuild.”

It is only a few days since Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator,” but asked Thursday whether that was still his position, he said “Did I say that ? I can’t believe I said that.”

7.OpenAI reveals GPT-4.5 amid flurry of new AI model releases

An early version of the company’s long-awaited new AI model is finally being rolled out to select users after hitting stumbling blocks in developing the system last year.

It’s better at picking up on and responding to subtle cues from users’ written prompts and is particularly adept at chatting, writing and coding, according to the startup. 

The new model’s launch comes as developers race to outsmart their competitors in generative AI, especially after DeepSeek’s stunning ascent last month. On Thursday, Tencent joined the ranks of companies measuring themselves against DeepSeek by touting the speed of its latest AI model.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI (Grok3) is pushing its artificial intelligence model towards giving users more risqué answers than its risk-averse competitors, in an effort to attract users with adult content.

The start-up released its latest model, Grok 3, this month boasting comparable performance to competitors from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. xAI’s model underpins its Grok chatbot, which has fewer “guardrails” than rivals, in an effort to align with Musk’s mission of being a “maximally truth-seeking AI”.

8.Ever-Bearish Grantham Insists AI Is a Bubble Waiting to Pop

AI is pushing humanity toward a more efficient future, but will eventually crash and hurt investors, according to longtime Wall Street doomsayer Jeremy Grantham. 

The co-founder of Boston-based GMO, speaking in the latest Merryn Talks Money podcast, compared AI technology to the 19th century expansion of the British railroads.

 “Everyone lost their shirts. It was one of the most spectacular busts,” Grantham said. Heaps of money piled into a network that elevated GDP and productivity, but “every really important new technology has had a bubble around it,” he said.

9.'Something stirring beneath the surface': What eight ghostly portraits found hidden inside masterpieces reveal

In the past month alone, shadowy portraits have been found hidden in longstanding masterpieces by Titian and Picasso. What can they and other such discoveries tell us?

Something's stirring. Every few weeks, it seems, brings news of a sensational discovery in the world of art – of paintings hidden under other paintings and vanished visages twitching beneath the varnish of masterpieces whose every square millimetre we thought we knew. This past month alone has brought to light the detection of mysterious figures trapped beneath the surface of works by Titian and Picasso. But what are we to make of this slowly swelling collection of secret stares – these absent presences that simultaneously delight and disturb?

10.CRISPR technologies hold enormous promise for farming and medicine: The Economist

OF THE MANY patients who need an organ from a donor, 90% go without. About 240m people live with rare genetic diseases, most of which cannot be treated. Each year poor diets cause more than 10m early deaths. Suffering on such an immense scale can appear hopeless. However, a technique called CRISPR gene editing promises to help deal with these issues and many more—and wise regulation can spur it on.

CRISPR is like an editor that can rewrite DNA letter by letter or gene by gene, to remove harmful mutations or add protective ones. Clinical trials will begin this summer on pig organs edited for transplanting into humans. Last year the first new therapy went on the market. It seemingly cures sickle-cell disease and beta-thalassemia, two blood disorders that afflict millions. If ongoing clinical trials succeed, a one-off therapy could provide lifelong protection against heart attacks. Farming will benefit, too: CRISPR could raise yields or protect crops from climate change. Consumers could soon get white bread with fibre-like starch or tastier varieties of healthy but unpopular foods, such as mustard greens.

But as we report, now is a critical moment. Since CRISPR’s discovery in 2012, it has begun supplanting old ideas that never reached their potential. Gene therapy, a different technique that uses viruses to insert genes into patients, can treat many rare genetic diseases but is and will remain costly to prepare. Genetically modified (GM) crops, which borrow genes from other species, have faced misguided opposition in Europe and elsewhere. CRISPR offers an alternative to both. But if, unlike them, it is to live up to its promise, it will need to attract a continuing flow of investment—which, in turn, means chalking up some real-life successes.

For that to happen, scientists must show that they can get CRISPR into more types of cells in the body cheaply and easily. The technology would also be boosted if it could serve as a platform to create personalised therapies for people’s individual mutations. That will require new science, but it would also be catalysed by a better system of regulation.

Regulations that govern drugs for rare diseases were not designed for an era of specialist medicines and will hinder patients from receiving new treatments. Developing drugs for a small group of people has always been difficult and many CRISPR companies are struggling, despite government help. But CRISPR is programmable, meaning that the same drug can be tweaked to target many different mutations. On-demand, small-batch drugs for rare diseases could be made more cheaply today if requirements on safety testing and manufacturing standards were loosened. For many desperately ill people who may die before a drug is approved, if it is developed at all, that is a worthwhile trade-off. In America the Food and Drug Administration has already taken some steps towards liberalisation.

Agriculture also badly needs reform. Gene-edited foods fall under GM regulation in many regions, including the European Union, despite being quite different: gene-edited plants have had their own genes tweaked rather than incorporating genes from other species. Mindful of the threat of climate change to food security, Britain is poised to implement new liberal laws governing gene-edited foods; the EU should follow. However, public trust in regulators and scientists could become a problem with the confirmation as health secretary of Robert F. Kennedy junior. He has invested in CRISPR therapies, but is also anti-GM. If America slows down or even goes into reverse, it will be a blow to progress—and humanity.