Arvind's Newsletter

1.Deutsche Bank puts India retail banking business up for sale: Reuters

Deutsche Bank is exploring the sale of its Indian retail banking assets and has invited bids from domestic and foreign lenders in the country, two sources told Reuters, making it the latest foreign bank to consider trimming its bets on India.

The Germany-based bank has pledged to make its retail business more profitable. In March, CEO Christian Sewing said headcount at its retail bank will be cut by almost 2,000 people in 2025, with a "significant" reduction in branch numbers. 

In India, Deutsche wants to completely sell its retail banking business, which spans 17 branches, according to the two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, who declined to be named as the discussions are private. 

Despite a rising number of wealthy individuals in India, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, foreign banks have struggled to boost revenues due to stiff competition from local players and regulatory limitations.

2.OpenAI Plans India Data Center in Major Stargate Expansion: Bloomberg

OpenAI is seeking to build a massive new data centre in India that could mark a major step forward in Asia for its Stargate-branded artificial intelligence infrastructure push. The ChatGPT-maker is currently scouting local partners to set up a data centre with at least 1-gigawatt capacity in the world’s most populous country, according to people familiar with the matter. The site could be among the largest in India',where tech giants including Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google — plus Asia’s richest man — have also invested in such facilities.

3. China welcomed more than a dozen world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi, for a summit aimed at countering a Western-led world order: Financial Times and others

Modi, who hasn’t visited China since 2018, also held talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping — a sign of the cautious rapprochement between the countries. New Delhi and Beijing are drawing closer as a result of US President Donald Trump’s trade salvo, reversing “decades of US cultivation of the South Asian giant as a democratic counterweight to China,” CNN wrote.

Xi and Modi have sought to reassure each other that they are “partners not rivals” as the world’s two most populous countries seek to repair ties amid the fallout from Donald Trump’s trade war. For Xi, the summit offers a chance to “further his image as a leader of a new global order,” and project strength, but what exactly he hopes to achieve remains murky, an expert said.

Modi declared India and Russia share a “special” relationship, standing by each other in difficult times, in a defiant show of ties as Washington criticizes New Delhi over oil purchases. “India and Russia have a special and privileged partnership. In the most difficult and testing times, India and Russia have always stood by each other,” Modi said in opening remarks at a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in China. He added that India “eagerly” awaits Putin’s visit later this year.

4.The Real Cost of Delivery: Kasim Saiyyad in Scroll

(With Thanks to Team Founding Fuel)

To understand how gig workers in the delivery universe survive, Kasim Saiyyad, a PhD candidate at Cornell University, embedded himself as a delivery partner at Swiggy. 

“During my shifts, I met Vishal, a 34-year-old delivery partner who had moved to Nagpur from a small town in Vidarbha three years earlier seeking better employment opportunities. After struggling to find stable work, he turned to food delivery 18 months ago. Our conversation during restaurant waits revealed the hidden economics that platforms never discuss.

“My phone plan costs Rs 400 monthly for 2GB daily data,” Vishal explained. “But during peak hours, especially when I work 10-12 hour days, I need top-ups. The GPS and constant app usage drain data faster than you’d think.” His total monthly mobile expenses, including extra data packages, averaged Rs 600.

Six months earlier, he had replaced his smartphone after the old one developed lag issues that cost him orders. The Rs 14,000 replacement, bought on EMI, still consumed Rs. 1,200 monthly from his income.

Vehicle maintenance proved costlier than expected. Puncture repairs were necessary roughly once monthly due to Nagpur’s uneven roads and construction debris, costing Rs 50 each time. Regular bike servicing, chain adjustments, brake repairs, and minor fixes averaged Rs 800 monthly. “I carry a power bank that cost me Rs 1,500,” he said, patting his delivery bag. “My phone battery dies twice daily from constant GPS tracking and customer calls.”

When we calculated his monthly expenses – fuel (Rs 5,100), maintenance (Rs 800), mobile costs (Rs. 600), phone EMI (Rs 1,200), punctures (Rs 50), and fines (Rs 170 average) – they totalled Rs 7,920. From his gross monthly earnings of Rs 14,000, this left Rs 6,080 as actual income, or roughly Rs 200 per day for 10-hour shifts.”

5.Inside India’s endless trials: Krishn Kaushik in Financial Times

“Over the years, successive governments have tried to reduce India’s judicial backlog and speed up the country’s legal process. Recent moves include deploying artificial intelligence for judicial research and chatbots to help litigants check their case status. 

But the government itself is the largest litigant clogging up the system. In total, there are over 50mn pending cases — up 50 per cent over the past decade. The vast majority involve property disputes.

One of the reasons for this accumulation is human resources. India has around 16 judges per million people, compared to over 150 for the US. In 2016, the issue brought the country’s chief justice, TS Thakur, to tears during a speech as he requested that the government hire more judges to wade through the “avalanche” of backlog. 

Namita Wahi, an expert on land rights and disputes with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, thinks that India has such a high caseload of land disputes because land is “the most important resource as well as most connected intrinsically to community identity, history and culture.”

There is no central data on the classification and tenure of such land disputes. But in one recent example a Delhi court concluded a property dispute after 66 years. Both the original litigants were dead. Still, the lawyer for one of the warring parties cautioned that the conclusion was in fact not the end, as the ruling would be appealed.

A 2021 study of Mumbai real estate found that more than a quarter of the projects under planning or construction and 43 per cent of all “built-up spaces” in the city were under some litigation.”

Read on gift article.

6.Earthquake in Afghanistan Leaves More Than 800 Dead: New York Times

More than 800 people were killed and 2,500 were injured after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the mountainous areas of eastern Afghanistan on Sunday night, Afghan officials said on Monday. The death toll would probably rise, they added, as rescue workers scrambled to reach communities stranded in isolated valleys hardly reachable by road.

The epicenter of the quake was near Jalalabad, a city of about 200,000 people, but most of the destruction took place in the province of Kunar, north of Jalalabad, where dozens of villages with mud and brick houses were hit. Less than 100 miles away, residents of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, felt the aftershocks across the city throughout the night, but no major damage was reported.

The quake was a shallow one, just five miles from the earth’s surface, which made it likelier to be more destructive, as shallower waves retain more of their power when hitting the surface. Soon after the initial shaking stopped, people scrambled in the middle of the night to reach neighbours trapped under the debris of collapsed houses, according to videos shared on social media.

7.Indonesia was engulfed by widespread protests driven by economic discontent and opposition to police brutality, marking the greatest challenge yet to President Prabowo Subianto’s government: Bloomberg

Demonstrators first took to the streets on Monday to push back against the country’s rising cost of living, and the protests have since ballooned and become violent after a police vehicle killed a 21-year-old motorcycle taxi driver at a rally.

Subianto, who canceled a scheduled visit to China because of the unrest, has seemingly bowed to some of the protesters’ demands, including cutting lawmakers’ perks.

Indonesia is able to hit its annual growth target despite recent protests, as the government pledges to continue its stimulus spending policy, according to the chief economy minister.

“Our economic growth is still on a positive track,” Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto said, reiterating an estimated growth range of 5%-5.2% this year. 

8.Novo Nordisk says Wegovy cuts heart risk by 57% compared with Eli Lilly’s obesity drug: Wall Street Journal

Novo Nordisk said its blockbuster Wegovy weight-loss drug cuts the risk of heart attack, stroke or death by 57% compared with Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound.

The Danish pharmaceutical giant said Sunday that the study suggests the heart-protective benefits of semaglutide—the active ingredient in Wegovy—may not be the same for all GLP-1 drugs such as tirzepatide, which is the active ingredient in Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound.

The real-world study used evidence gathered from actual patient experiences rather than a controlled trial, it said.

Compared with tirzepatide, overweight and obese patients with cardiovascular disease but not diabetes taking a 2.4 milligram dose of Wegovy showed a 57% greater risk reduction for heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular-related death or death from any cause, the company said.

9.Rise of AI shopping ‘agents’ set to transform e-commerce: Financial Times

The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are betting that shopping will become a major application of AI “agents”, in a shift that is set to transform the multibillion-dollar ecommerce sector.

OpenAI, Perplexity, Google and Microsoft have in recent months introduced AI-powered features that allow users to search for products through chatbots, with autonomous agents able to complete orders on behalf of consumers.

The rise of AI-powered agents has prompted sellers and brands to rethink how they sell products online, in particular how their products are spotted by AI systems and recommended by chatbots. Advertisers are employing techniques — such as creating longer URLs with keywords or securing a mention on websites considered to be more authoritative by bots — to appear more prominently in AI-generated results.

Start-ups including Profound, fashion-focused Refine and Algolia have also emerged, offering the ability to monitor brand presence in AI chatbot responses. Profound co-founder James Cadwallader said consumer behaviour was reaching an “inflection point” where people may no longer visit e-commerce sites.

“AI [agents and chatbots] steal or hijack that consumer from the brand,” he said. “Eventually, the consumer will only interact with the ‘answer engine’, and agents will become the primary visitors for websites and the internet.”

10.The global toy market for “kidults” is booming — and especially in countries with declining birth rates: BBC and others

Labubu dolls, created by China’s Pop Mart, are the latest example, having become a global juggernaut in part due to celebrity endorsements. Japan’s biggest toy trade fair, which ended Sunday, featured brands leaning into nostalgia to captivate adults who buy toys as “lifestyle products, stress relief, or collectibles,” the TokyoScope newsletter wrote.

The country’s toy market recently reached 1 trillion yen annually, fueled by “grown-up customers who haven’t given up their passion for play,” NHK wrote. Similarly in South Korea, which also has a low birth rate, “kidults” with disposable income are driving the market for gadgets and trinkets, ChosunBiz reported.