Arvind's Newsletter

1.Tata group bets on UK for gigafactory ahead of India

Tata Group announced its foray into EV battery manufacturing with a plan to set up a 40-gigawatt battery cell gigafactory in the U.K. The investment of over £4 billion, will deliver electric mobility and renewable energy storage solutions for customers in the U.K. and Europe.

The largest-ever gigafactory in Europe is expected generate over 4,000 jobs, and it positions the country as the most attractive place to build electric vehicles, said U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in a statement. Gigafactory is a generic term referring to facilities that produce batteries for electric vehicles on a large scale.Luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover and its parent Tata Motors will be the primary customers, with supplies commencing from 2026.

2.Even as heavy rains batters many parts of North and Western India, the rest of the world is baking under extreme heat.

Tokyo smashed a 150 year old heat record. Rome recorded its hottest temperature ever. Phoenix hit 110 degrees F—for the 19th straight day.

The world is burning up under extreme heat waves turbocharged by man-made global warming. June was already the hottest on record—and 10 of the hottest days of the year were in July. Wild weather patterns—from flooding in the Eastern US to extraordinary wildfires in Greece, Switzerland and Canada underscore the life-threatening seriousness of a dangerously changing climate.

In Europe, where the temperatures have made conditions dangerous for low-income workers, news outlets are calling the heat wave “Caronte,” after the ferryman in Dante Alighieri’s poem “Inferno.” Heat waves are increasingly deadly as they become more frequent and longer. Last year’s heat wave in Europe killed 61,000 people according to one study.

3.A new drug for Alzheimer’s disease was hailed as “a turning point,” although some warned that its clinical impacts were modest and its side effects severe.

Donanemab, an experimental drug produced by Eli Lilly, removes clumps of amyloid protein that appear in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains — 80% of patients saw significant reductions. But it only slows cognitive impairment slightly, noted Stuart Ritchie in the i, and that is what actually matters. Nonetheless it gives hope for better treatments in future.

4. Threads unraveling ? 
Daily active Android users of Threads, Meta’s Twitter rival, dropped by more than 50% after an initial surge. The social media site made a strong start, attracting 100 million signups in five days, and Android user stats show that 49 million people used the site on 7 July. But a week later, the latter figure was down to 23.6 million.

Average daily usage dropped from 21 minutes a day to six minutes. Apple statistics are not yet available. Similarweb reported that while Threads “briefly captured a big chunk of Twitter’s market,” the initial rush of excitement wore off. Threads’ Instagram link and a steady decline in Twitter user retention leaves plenty of room for optimism on Meta’s part, though. Lets see how this develops.

5.Western leaders are making a “sensible bet” in allying with India, Martin Wolf Chief Economics commentator of the Financial Times argues in his opinion piece. 

The country’s economic and population growth and its role as a counterweight to China are attractive to major Western powers. The piece — shared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official smartphone app — came as two dozen Indian opposition parties formed a coalition to battle Modi’s dominant Hindu-nationalist bloc in elections next year. Wolf noted that India has failed to generate sufficient jobs for its people and, unsurprisingly, the opposition alliance said it would focus its policies on rising unemployment and inflation.

Some excerpts from Wolf’s article:

“India is an obvious location for companies following a “China plus one” strategy. It also has the advantage over obvious competitors of a large home market. Nevertheless, India has repeatedly failed to exploit opportunities for fast growth of exports of manufactures over the last 75 years. Suspicion of open trade always gets in the way.”

“India’s gross savings rate, though not as high as China’s, is high enough, particularly given the possibility of importing capital, to finance a growth rate of at least 5-6 per cent. India also has reasonable macroeconomic stability. Entrepreneurship is abundant and infrastructure is improving. India will definitely not suffer from labour shortages, but the opposite. As Ashoka Mody notes in India is Broken, the inability to generate sufficient good jobs is a great failure. Yet another is the inability to educate the population to a high standard: human capital is likely to prove a far tighter constraint than physical capital.”

“It is also a young country, with a grossly underemployed labour force, potential for improving the quality of that labour force, a reasonably high savings rate and increasingly widespread hopes of greater prosperity. A great deal of adaptation will be required to meet the climate change challenge, given the failure to bring global emissions down. But the energy transition also offers huge opportunities to India. On balance, I judge that India should be able to sustain growth of GDP per head at 5 per cent a year, or so, up to 2050. With better policies, growth might even be a bit higher, though it could also be lower.”

“It is, in sum, quite reasonable to assume that India will become a great power. It is not that hard to imagine that its economy will be of a similar size to that of the US by 2050. Thus, western leaders are making a sensible bet on an alliance of convenience with India. But will India also be a liberal democracy?”