1.Youth skilling boost: Govt, India Inc to launch internship scheme on Oct 3

In a major bid to boost youth employability, the government and India Inc launched a one-year internship scheme today for 21-24-year-olds. 

Announced in the Union Budget as part of the Prime Minister’s Package for Employment and Skilling, the programme offers internships in the top 500 companies. Applications open October 12, with exclusions for full-time workers, government family members, and elite institution graduates. Backed by Rs 2 trillion, it aims to skill one crore youth over five years. 

2.Chennai Warehousing marketing is buzzing; Economic Times

Known as the Detroit of Asia, Chennai has had a significant presence of the automobile industry for the past couple of decades. There are over 1,500 auto and auto components manufacturing facilities in the city. Chennai accounts for about 36% of the total two-wheelers and 25% of the total four-wheelers manufactured in India. These facilities require spacious areas to store raw materials and finished goods, which has fuelled the development of warehouses. Also, export-import of products through sea routes require warehouses to store products temporarily. 

Tamil Nadu introduced its Logistics Policy and Integrated Logistics Plan 2024 to promote an integrated and sustainable logistics ecosystem. It has also evolved into a hub for electronics, mobile phones and electric vehicles (EV) manufacturing. It was also among the first three states to introduce an EV policy in India. As a result, around 40% of all EVs sold in India are made in Tamil Nadu. 

With all the winning ingredients in place, Chennai is attracting some of the biggest investors and PE funds. As per real-estate services firm Vestian, warehousing and logistics sector witnessed a robust absorption of more than 16.6 million square feet in H1 2024, an increase of 8% over H1 2023. Chennai accounted for 9% of the total absorption in H1 2024. 

 As per warehousing experts in the Chennai market, land transactions amounting to more than 1,500 acres have already taken place in the last 12 to 15 months.

3.India is losing the taste for toddy

Toddy is an excellent drink. Very mildly alcoholic, it is good for gut health and is a part of many cooking recipes as well, writes Vikram Doctor on the Scroll. But for various reasons such as its inability to give people the “buzz” they expect and the “low returns” on the investments that go into cultivating it, the drink is falling out of favour.

4.China’s Sudden Stock Rally Sucks Money From Rest Of Asia

A strong rebound in Chinese stocks is set to trigger a shift in global portfolios as some investors rush to catch the rally. 

A wave of money which earlier left Chinese equities in favor of stocks from Japan and Southeast Asia is poised to reverse course after Beijing’s latest stimulus blitz, according to market watchers. The shift is already underway: shares in South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand posted net outflows last week while BNP Paribas SA said over $20 billion was withdrawn from Japan’s equities in the first three weeks of September. 

The nascent rotation may spell the end of a stellar run for Asia ex-China equities, which previously benefited as money managers hunted for better returns outside the world’s second-largest stock market. For much of this year, Taiwan shares got a boost as chipmakers soared while Indian stocks rallied on the back of quickening economic growth. Southeast Asia’s markets were lifted by lower US interest rates.

“We are trimming our long positions across Asia to fund China purchases,” said Eric Yee, senior portfolio manager at Atlantis Investment Management in Singapore. “Everyone is doing so. It’s a good policy-driven by recovery from rock bottom. You wouldn’t want to miss out on such opportunity.”

5.Toyota to invest $500mn more in flying taxi start-up Joby

California-based Joby Aviation plans to build electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) capable of carrying four passengers for short intercity journeys, and hopes to have a commercial service running next year. Toyota previously backed it with $400 million, while Uber invested $75 million.

Air taxis are an increasingly near-future proposition: This year, China’s aviation watchdog gave a preliminary license to an autonomous eVTOL craft that resembles a consumer drone, and the manufacturer has already received 1100 orders.

6.Is nuclear energy the zero-carbon answer to powering AI? Malcolm Moore and Lee Harris in Financial Times

The rise of AI and its insatiable demand for energy could not have come at a better time for the nuclear industry.

After decades of stagnation in the west, this year has seen a rush of demand for nuclear plants from the so-called hyperscale tech companies, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, which need vast amounts of low-carbon 24-hour electricity to run their data centres and win what one of the companies internally calls “the AI war”.

Some of the world’s biggest banks also threw their weight behind the industry at a climate event in New York last week in a public show of support for a sector that is selling itself as a key part of the transition to clean energy.

“AI data centres will be built next to energy production sites that can produce gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity continuously. Basically, next to nuclear power plants,” said Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, on X.

“There is real appetite. There’s a limit to what we can say, you can read between the lines at every hyperscaler, there’s appetite,” said Chris Rees, energy strategy manager at Meta.

The excitement in the nuclear industry is palpable. While China and South Korea have been busy building nuclear reactors in recent decades, there has been marked decline in the US and Europe. Not any more. Read on.

7.Electricity prices have gone negative in parts of China as renewable energy overwhelms the grid. 

The country is building twice as much wind and solar as the rest of the world combined, and grid officials have had to resort to reducing output, while the industry’s focus is increasingly turning to building battery storage to smooth the flow of energy, OilPrice reported.

The US, although lagging behind China in absolute terms, is also seeing a huge increase in solar capacity: Average solar output in the 48 contiguous states was 36% higher year on year in August, and solar is expected to make up almost two-thirds of new electricity generation capacity in the last months of 2024.

8.India has a unique opportunity to lead in AI; The Economist

HINDI IS THE world’s most widely spoken language after English and Mandarin. Yet it constitutes only 0.1% of all freely accessible content on the internet. That is one obstacle to India developing its own generative artificial-intelligence (AI) models, which rely on vast amounts of training data. Another is that Hindi is spoken by less than half the country. More than 60 other languages have at least 100,000 speakers. Data for some of them simply do not exist online, says Manish Gupta, who leads DeepMind, Google’s AI arm, in India. Natives of those languages stand to miss out on the AI revolution.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, a chatbot, are powered by large language models, or LLMs. The “language” bit is crucial: without a corpus of data it is impossible to make models, whether large or tiny. That is one reason why, two years into the new AI race triggered by the launch of ChatGPT, India has yet to produce any noteworthy AI innovations. But behind the scenes the government, non-profit outfits, Indian startups and global tech giants are working to adapt the technology to the country’s needs. The pace and scale of their success will influence India’s progress in the coming century. It will also offer lessons for other developing countries.

There are two big reasons for India to develop its own AI capabilities. First, as a rising power it is wary of depending on foreign technology. Second, it could be transformative for development. “The real value comes from how you apply these technologies to make a difference to people,” says Nandan Nilekani, a tech grandee.

For a better sense of India’s AI challenges—and opportunities—consider the analogy of cooking dinner. The raw ingredients for AI are data. In the absence of a well-stocked pantry India is doing the equivalent of growing its own food. AI4Bharat, a research lab at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, has sent people across the country to manually collect voice recordings in 22 languages. Google is doing something similar. Both feed into Bhashini, a government project to create a translation system for Indian languages.

Next, the data are blended, simmered and seasoned using a recipe known as a model. Models can be huge, with lots of ingredients and many complicated steps, or they can be relatively straightforward. The recipes behind ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini are enormous. But for India’s purposes, simpler ones may suffice. One idea is to use open-source models, such as Meta’s Llama, as a base sauce, and then add ingredients or tweak the techniques according to local needs. Sarvam AI, a startup in Bangalore, is going down this route.

Lastly, cooking requires the skilful harnessing of power. Just as turning ingredients into food depends on the application of heat, so AI relies on specialised computer chips. The sort needed to build and run sophisticated AI models are expensive and in short supply globally. Earlier this year the government said it would acquire 10,000 of them at a cost of 50bn rupees ($600m) to make computation power available at subsidised prices. And Indian innovators are exploring other types of chips that may be better suited to their purposes.

What, then, will all this effort produce? As in the West, the most visible products will at first be chatbots. The difference is that these will be tailored to immediate, practical uses, revolving around translation and simplifying dealings between citizens and the state. Moreover, Indians use the internet largely as an audiovisual, rather than textual medium. So Indian AI products, unlike Western ones, will be voice-first or exclusively voice-based.

Take form-filling, which can seem like India’s national pastime. Allowing citizens to verbally answer questions in their own language, which a machine inputs into forms, would widen access and remove middlemen. Automating checklists for compendious compliance rules or bots that assist in interpreting requirements could make the process less soul-crushing. “For the first time with UPI [a home-grown digital-payments system] we can say something in India is better than the rest of the world. But the truth is that every other damn thing is not better,” says Vivek Raghavan, a co-founder of Sarvam. AI, he reckons, “has the ability to flatten that, if everything became easier to do”.

AI could also help in areas such as education and health. One study in 2022 found that less than half of Indian students in year five could read at the level of year two. The health-care system, too, is in dire shape. Cheap, mass-scale personalised tutors could start tackling the crisis in learning. Systems that help in interpreting lab results, assist in diagnoses, or take on administrative work could free up doctors to see more patients. The sclerotic justice system could be sped up by automating some of the procedural tasks that take up as much as half of judges’ time.

Many of these challenges exist across the developing world. With a few notable exceptions, non-European languages are poorly represented online. India’s advantage will come not from pushing at the boundaries of AI, but from solving chronic, basic problems of the sort rich countries no longer think about. India has a unique perspective that could enable it “to build out the next set of AI-led companies in many more categories than exist,” says Dev Khare of Lightspeed Venture Partners.

All this echoes the country’s approach to “digital public infrastructure”, its name for technology platforms backed by the government and built upon by private companies. India has invested in identity systems, digital payments, data management and open protocols, all built at a low cost. The success of these efforts at home has prompted the government to promote their use abroad as a means of winning goodwill and projecting power. If Indian techies can find ways to train and run AI systems frugally, that expertise, too, will be attractive to other developing countries.

India’s AI success is by no means guaranteed. Some are sceptical of the government’s 10,000-chip plan: the state has a poor record of using its research-and-development resources effectively, and the idea that bureaucrats would decide which projects are worthy is unappealing to many. The use of small models to solve big problems remains untested. And even if India lines up the ingredients, recipes and power it needs, it still faces a severe shortfall of chefs. According to the Takshashila Institution, a think-tank in Bangalore, 8% of the world’s top AI researchers are from India. The proportion of them that actually work in India rounds to zero.