Arvind's Newsletter

1.The India story: Population explosion or declining fertility rate?

Prominent voices from political, business, social, and cultural fields have highlighted various aspects of India's population in recent months. While one leading figure from India Inc expressed concern over the burgeoning population, others were worried about the declining fertility rate. Their views reflected the different dimensions of population dynamics in India that have emerged and will shape the remaining years of this century. 

If we look at the first decade of this century, population growth declined to 17.70 per cent during 2001-2011 from 21.54 per cent in the preceding decade, according to the Census. This is to say that marginally fewer people were added in the 2001-2011 decade than in the previous one. In fact, this growth was the lowest in six decades. Before this, the growth was lower, at 13.31 per cent, back in 1951. 

This was so because India’s total fertility rate (TFR) declined to 2.2 during the decade, from 2.5 in the previous ten years. This meant that each couple had an average of 2.2 children compared to 2.5 in 1991-2001. 

2.Jio Adds More Active Users, but Airtel Wins 4G/5G Race

Reliance Jio added more active users than Bharti Airtel in October, but the Sunil Mittal-led telco boosted its base of 4G/5G users while its bigger rival lost such higher-paying customers during the month. Vodafone Idea (Vi), the third-largest private telco, continued to lose both active users as well as 3G/4G mobile broadband users.

Jio added 3.84 million active users to Airtel’s 2.72 million additions in October, while Vi lost 720,000 active users. Vi’s active user losses underlined its continuing inability to effectively fight bigger rivals, Jio and Airtel, as it has neither launched 5G services nor fully concluded its targeted fundraise.

As per Trai data, Jio, Airtel and Vi’s active user bases were at 448.33 million, 383.4 million and 178.8 million, respectively as of end-October.

3.IndiGo leads Indian aviation with record 10 million passengers in November.

Indian airlines carried 1.42 crore passengers on domestic routes in November, nearly 12 per cent more compared to the year-ago period, amid rising air traffic demand.

In terms of domestic market share, IndiGo topped the list with a 63.6 per cent pie, followed by Air India (24.4 per cent), Akasa Air (4.7 per cent) and SpiceJet (3.1 per cent). While all these carriers saw their share rise, the share of Alliance Air was unchanged at 0.7 per cent in November, according to the latest data from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

4.Touching the Sun

NASA is set to make history with its Parker Solar Probe scheduled to make the closest-ever flyby of the sun to date. At its nearest, the spacecraft will reach 3.8 million miles of the solar surface—about 4.5 times the diameter of the sun. For comparison, the moon sits at a distance from Earth roughly 30 times our planet’s diameter.

In addition to studying the sun’s atmosphere, the probe is expected to shed light on our understanding of solar wind—streams of fast-moving particles that sweep throughout the solar system, creating auroras and interfering with electronics on Earth. The spacecraft, which launched in 2018, now travels at approximately 430,000 miles per hour and is designed to withstand temperatures around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The probe honors physicist Eugene Parker, who first proposed the existence of the solar wind.

5.Countries are racing to take advantage of nuclear power’s recent resurgence.

 Russia is building more than 10 nuclear plants around the world, boosting its global influence and taking advantage of growing energy demand to power artificial intelligence data centres, the Financial Times reported.

Argentina, meanwhile, announced plans to increase both nuclear generation and uranium mining, part of plans for a “Nuclear City” in Patagonia intended as a hub for overseas investors keen to build plants to power tech projects.

And France attached its first new nuclear plant to the grid in 25 years, further entrenching nuclear’s dominance there: More than two-thirds of France’s electricity is nuclear-generated.

6.How to disappear completely

The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?

A recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained.

This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be.

7.Singapore pulled ahead of Hong Kong in the race to be a crypto hub in 2024. 

Singapore doled out 13 crypto licenses in 2024 to a range of crypto operators including top exchanges OKX and Upbit, as well as global heavyweights Anchorage, BitGo and GSR. That’s more than double the licenses awarded by the city-state the previous year.

A similar licensing regime in Hong Kong has been slow to progress. The city has now fully licensed seven platforms in total, with four of those given the green light — with some restrictions — on Dec. 18. A further seven hold provisional permits. Prominent exchanges such as OKX and Bybit withdrew their applications for Hong Kong licenses.

8.To see the cars of the future, look at China’s electric vehicles; The Economist

The main appeal of a Chinese electric vehicle (EV) to foreign buyers is obvious: high quality at prices Western carmakers cannot match (even allowing for import tariffs on Chinese vehicles). But Chinese EVs do not just offer lower prices. They also have more impressive features. The styling and technology in their 2025 models show where cars, as a whole, may be heading.

Some vehicles made by BYD, for example, offer rotating touchscreens in the centre of the dashboard, which can swivel themselves between landscape and portrait modes. Its Atto-3, a quirky mid-size eV, has unusual guitar-like strings on its door panels, and a gear-selector seemingly inspired by a rocket ship. The upmarket Yangwang U8 SUV, meanwhile, can “tank turn” on the spot by spinning its wheels in different directions, and has a “floating” mode that lets it drive on water in emergencies.

If that sounds a bit much, marvel instead at the minimalist cabin of the Jiyue 01, a collaboration between Baidu, a Chinese tech giant, and Geely Auto. Aside from a touchscreen, its only controls are two pedals (brake and accelerator) and two buttons, located on the steering yoke. Its autonomous-driving system copes admirably with Beijing’s crowded streets and unpredictable traffic. But the $30,000 car also doubles as a giant video-game system. Pull over, and you can use the steering yoke to control a virtual car in an on-screen game.

The SU7 Max, a new EV from Xiaomi, best known as a maker of smartphones and home appliances, accelerates like a supercar (0-60mph in 2.8 seconds) and has a battery range of 800km (497 miles). It also allows for remote control, while on the road, of Xiaomi devices in the driver’s home.

Chinese new-car buyers, whose average age is around 35 (some 20 years younger than in Europe), are tech-savvy and expect vehicles to be loaded with whizzy features. Chinese firms are giving them what they want. Western carmakers may not be able to catch up.

9.Economist Abhijit Banerjee: ‘Good storytellers are very powerful’; John Reed of the FT has a lunch interview with the Nobel Prize winning economist. Long Read.

“I arrive a few minutes late to my lunch with Abhijit Banerjee, carrying a bottle of chilled Indian rosé and feeling a bit exposed. Banerjee, an avid home cook and keen observer of human behaviour, will be sitting with me for that rare beast: a Lunch with the FT in which the interviewee cooks.

One of the ironclad rules of the column, I explain before we meet, is that the FT pays. So throughout the morning, my phone has been pinging with invoices for ingredients: fresh coconut milk, green grapes, radish, coriander, tahini, which I promptly settle.

It feels wrong to be served home-cooked food by an interview subject: an upending of the power dynamic of what Janet Malcolm called my “morally indefensible” profession, where any self-respecting journalist pays his own way, but always prevails by getting the last word. So to level the playing field — and in hope that some booze might loosen my subject’s tongue — I grab wine from my fridge on the way out.

“There’s plenty of food — dig in,” says Banerjee, professorial behind glasses. The 63-year-old MIT economist flew in the previous evening from Kolkata, where he was working on a series of economic-themed films for children, called Water Wars. I had hoped to watch him cook, but our meal is laid out on a sideboard when I arrive at a house he has borrowed in Nizamuddin East, a south Delhi suburb favoured by journalists and writers.  

Banerjee, a native of Mumbai who grew up in Kolkata but now lives in Boston and teaches at MIT, is one of the world’s leading development economists, nearly always mentioned in the same breath as his colleague, wife and former student Esther Duflo. The pair transformed their field by using randomised controlled trials to measure the impact of small interventions on policy outcomes for poor people, finding for example in one 2004-07 study in Rajasthan that providing a bag of lentils to parents boosted childhood immunisation rates. They won the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics with Harvard’s Michael Kremer.

Banerjee invites me to serve myself from a plate of roasted figs and roasted spiced potatoes with sesame seeds. “Do you mind if I eat with my fingers?” he asks. I invite him to, but too clumsy for Indian table etiquette myself, I stick to a knife and fork.

Disappointingly, he declines a glass of wine, so I abstain too. Banerjee and Duflo, self-critical to a fault about their field, have between them authored several books meant to popularise it. The first joint effort on this front was Poor Economics, which won the FT and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year in 2011.

Banerjee’s latest book is Chhaunk (a Hindi word for spices flash-fried in oil and stirred into a dish at the last minute), a compendium of essays on issues ranging from cultural capital to gift-giving, shot through with memories of his Kolkata childhood. The recipes in Chhaunk, though largely Indian in origin, have fusion elements that reflect Banerjee’s own cosmopolitanism (he is a US citizen and Indian “overseas citizen” cardholder) and this might best be described as global comfort food. 

Read on.

10.What is neijuan, and why is China worried about it?

The buzzword – which went viral after a student was filmed working on his laptop while riding his bicycle – reflects a mix of competitiveness and hopelessness amid China’s slowing economy.

On the Chinese internet, the country’s current predicament – slowing economic growth, a falling birthrate, a meagre social safety net, increasing isolation on the world stage – is often expressed through buzzwords. There is tangping, or “lying flat”, a term used to describe the young generation of Chinese who are choosing to chill out rather than hustle in China’s high-pressure economy. There is runxue, or “run philosophy”, which refers to the determination of large numbers of people to emigrate. Recently, “revenge against society” attacks – random incidents of violence that have claimed dozens of lives – have sparked particular concern. And there is also neijuan, or “involution”, a term used to describe the feeling of diminishing returns in China’s social contract.

Neijuan is the Chinese term for “involution”, a concept from sociology that refers to a society that can no longer evolve, no matter how hard it tries. Applied to the individual, it means that no matter how hard someone works, progress is impossible.

In China, the term has been used to describe the feeling of diminishing returns in China’s economy. The characters “nei” and “juan” literally mean rolling inwards. After decades of rapid growth, many Chinese millennials and Gen Z people feel that the opportunities that were available to their parents no longer exist, and that working hard no longer offers guaranteed rewards.

Yes. China’s leaders have made it clear that they don’t want the idea of neijuan to catch on more than it already has. In December, top economic policymakers gathered for the annual Central Economic Work Conference, which sets the national economic agenda.

According to the readout of the closed-door meeting, the cadres pledged to “rectify ‘involutionary’ competition”. And speaking at Davos in June, China’s premier, Li Qiang, warned against “spiralling ‘involution’” in the world economy.