Arvind's Newsletter

1.Jio BlackRock MF NFOs raise ₹17,800 crore, enters top 35 fund houses: Business Standard

Jio BlackRock Asset Management’s three maiden mutual fund (MF) offerings—overnight, liquid and money market—garnered ₹17,800 crore in investments during the launch period, the company said in a release.

As a result of the strong new fund offering (NFO) collection, Jio BlackRock is now among the top 35 fund houses by total assets under management (AUM) in the 47-player industry.

The newly launched fund house is also among the top 15 players by debt AUM, the release stated.

2.ReNew Shareholders Raise Offer for $880 million Delisting: Economic Times

A consortium of key shareholders of ReNew Energy Global has raised the offer price to $8 per share from $7.07 last December for buying out other shareholders in a $880 million bid to delist the company.

ReNew on Friday said it has received “a final non-binding offer” from the consortium of Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company PJSC-Masdar, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Platinum Hawk, and ReNew founder and chairman Sumant Sinha, to acquire the entire issued and to-be-issued share capital of the company currently not held by them.

If the consortium succeeds in buying out all other shareholders, it will be able to delist ReNew shares from Nasdaq where it has underperformed since its listing in 2021. The end game would be to list in India stock market in which RE offerings have boomed.

3.Urban Indian women spend more time working in paid employment but they spend as much time as their rural counterparts in unpaid care and domestic work in the household: IndiaSpend

Indian women disproportionately bear the burden of unpaid domestic and care work, and this burden is especially acute for urban working women, with domestic responsibilities clashing with ‘corporate burnout’, work-related stress and mental health concerns. This is exacerbated by the inequality in employment trends and due to limited access to essential infrastructure such as healthcare and childcare, data show and experts say.

India’s 2024 Time Use Survey (TUS) shows that nearly 22% of rural women, and 18% of urban women spent time on employment and related activities. Nearly 82% of rural women and 81% of urban women spent time on unpaid domestic services, and 35% of rural women and 32% of urban women spent time on unpaid caregiving services for other household members.

An Indian woman, 6 years and above, who participated in that activity, spent 289 minutes on unpaid domestic services and 137 minutes on unpaid care work for household members. They also spent 341 minutes a day on employment-related activities, if they participated in these activities.

But urban women, who worked, spend more time on employment-related activities (391 minutes a day) compared to rural women (322 minutes). Urban women, who participated in that activity, spent 285 minutes on unpaid domestic services and 142 minutes on unpaid caregiving services in a day, nearly the same as rural women.

This implies a higher double burden–defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Gender Studies as the workload of people who do both paid work and unpaid domestic work– on urban women than on rural women.

4.Musk says he is forming new political party after fallout with Trump : CNN and others

Elon Musk, US President Trump’s ex-best friend and the world’s richest man, announced on X that he’s creating a new political party called‘The American Party.’ Musk’s party will be fiscally conservative, according to a CNN article, and will participate actively in next year’s midterm elections, per Musk.

Trump and Musk’s feud began when he publicly criticised the Trump administration’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ saying it would add trillions of dollars to the US government’s debt.

Though many have criticised the US’s effective two-party system, no one has been able to successfully start a third party. Experts say it’s financially and legally challenging to create a third party and that voters are hesitant to join it too.

According to Presidency himself (as a foreign-born American he isn’t eligible anyway). Rather, he says he wants to target two or three Senate seats and eight to ten House races to act as a swing bloc in a polarised Congress. He promises to champion fiscal discipline, deregulation, and centrism, positioning him as a potential spoiler for Trump in the 2026 midterms. But Musk’s personal brand is polarising: a Morning Consult poll from late June showed his overall net favourability at -14, and an Economist-YouGov poll found that Musk’s net favourability dropped from -9 to -23 after his feud with Trump.

Can Musk really pull this off? Despite Musk’s deep pockets, money might not be enough: in April, his $20-million political push in Wisconsin failed to sway a key judicial race. Logistical barriers might prove even tougher. Starting a nationally-competitive third party requires navigating a maze of state-level signature thresholds and party-registration deadlines, as well as building campaign infrastructure and volunteer networks – his disruptive intentions aside, does Musk really have that level of patience for politics?

And what if Trump acts against him? Last week he threatened to strip him of citizenship, and Sunday night called his third-party effort “off the rails.” With stakes this high, this next chapter in the clash between the world’s richest man and the president could have huge implications.

5.Japan’s nuclear revival is gathering pace: Financial Times

The country all but switched off its nuclear fleet in the wake of 2011’s earthquake and the Fukushima reactor’s subsequent meltdown. But soaring gas prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, growing need for energy for data centres, and Japan’s decarbonisation targets have led to a rethink.

The country has restarted 14 of the 54 shuttered plants, and plans to build new, small modular reactors on sites of several others. Tokyo — the most fossil fuel-dependent economy in the G7 — has further-reaching ambitions, too.

Last month it announced plans to deploy nuclear fusion power by the 2030s, including a collaboration with British scientists to share technology.

6.Explaining space tourism: 1440 Blog

The billion-dollar space tourism industry offers jaunts—whether for minutes or days—into zero-gravity conditions generally for recreation rather than scientific research. Space tourists can buy a seat—often in the tens of millions of dollars per trip—from a small number of space travel agencies (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Axiom Space, to name the major players) and experience unparalleled views of the Earth.

Industry leaders offer two tour categories: fast orbital launches high enough above Earth’s atmosphere to maintain stable orbit, and suborbital. Suborbital trips offer tourists a few minutes of weightlessness from just above or below the Karman Line—the generally acknowledged boundary into space at around 62 miles above sea level.

Read on.

7.Embrace the Pivot: The Power of Changing Your Mind: Prof Adam Grant in Knowledge at Wharton

In a rapidly changing world, the ability to reassess and revise your opinions can be a superpower. This article by Prof Adam Grant,  talks about how to cultivate your ability to rethink and adapt by integrating practical strategies into your leadership.

8.Pakistan’s solar paradox: Financial Times

The growth of rooftop solar in Pakistan has reduced energy prices for millions but created a problem for the country’s grid. Islamabad had said it would buy excess energy from rooftop generation in a bid to encourage solar installations.

But US tariffs on China have amplified what was already a glut of cheap panels, the Financial Times reported, resulting in faster-than-expected deployment. The grid spent more than $500 million last year buying such power, while the cost of paying for grid-supplied electricity is falling on fewer and increasingly fewer customers.

Pakistani officials are desperate to slow a world-leading solar revolution, as a surge in cut-price Chinese panels and batteries bleeds the country’s finances and threatens the viability of its debt-ridden grid.

The power ministry has proposed to reform the country’s “net metering” policy by reducing the amount paid to buy excess solar electricity from households from Rs27 to Rs10 ($0.035) per unit. In June, the government also proposed an 18 per cent tax on imported panels, later revised and passed at 10 per cent. 

9. How A.I. Could Make Us Dumber -David Brooks in New York Times

“I’m generally optimistic about all the ways artificial intelligence is going to make life better — scientific research, medical diagnoses, tutoring and my favourite current use, vacation planning. But it also offers a malevolent seduction: excellence without effort. It gives people the illusion that they can be good at thinking without hard work, and I’m sorry, but that’s not possible.

There’s a recent study that exposes this seduction. It has a really small sample size, and it hasn’t even been peer reviewed yet — so put in all your caveats — but it suggests something that seems intuitively true.

A group of researchers led by M.I.T.’s Nataliya Kosmyna recruited 54 participants to write essays. Some of them used A.I. to write the essays, some wrote with the assistance of search engines (people without a lot of domain knowledge are not good at using search engines to identify the most important information), and some wrote the old-fashioned way, using their brains. The essays people used A.I. to write contained a lot more references to specific names, places, years and definitions. The people who relied solely on their brains had 60 percent fewer references to these things. So far, so good.

But the essays written with A.I. were more homogeneous, while those written by people relying on their brains created a wider variety of arguments and points. Later the researchers asked the participants to quote from their own papers. Roughly 83 percent of the A.I. large language model, or L.L.M., users had difficulty quoting from their own papers. They hadn’t really internalized their own “writing,” and little of it had sunk in. People who used search engines were better at quoting their own points, and people who used just their brains were a lot better.

Almost all the people who wrote their own papers felt they owned their work, whereas fewer of the A.I. users claimed full ownership of their work. Read on for gift full gift article.

10.The River Seine reopened for swimming for the first time in more than a century. 

In the 1970s, the Paris river was considered biologically dead thanks to severe pollution; much of the city’s wastewater poured into it untreated, and wildlife all but disappeared. But after decades of improved sanitation, its ecosystem is thriving, and the number of fish species has tripled since 1999.

A $1.6 billion cleanup operation ahead of the 2024 Olympics accelerated the process, and now, three bathing sites have opened, with the city’s mayor joining in on the first day. Similar projects have created clean urban swimming sites in Amsterdam, Berlin and Copenhagen, while the Thames, once a similarly dead zone, has also seen wildlife return.