- Arvind's Newsletter
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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.India’s Net direct tax collections jump 20.7% to ₹13.7 lakh crore so far in FY24
The net direct tax collection of ₹13,70,388 crore includes Corporation Tax (CIT) and Personal Income Tax (PIT) including Securities Transaction Tax (STT). The total sum of net direct tax consists of CIT at ₹6,94,798 crore (net of refund) and PIT including STT at ₹6,72,962 crore (net of refund).
2.Bhutan King Unveils Plans for Economic Linkages with Assam
Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck on Sunday unveiled plans for a mega city project near the Indian border — the Gelephu Special Administration Region (SAR), spreading across 1,000 sq km. The project will link Bhutan economically with Assam to spur regional and sub-regional integration.
The SAR, positioned as an economic hub for South Asia, will leverage the connectivity between South Asia and Southeast Asia, according to officials in Bhutan. The project will be part of the Sarpang district special economic zone and will include an international airport at Gelephu. India and Bhutan are also planning to put in place a 58-km rail link between Gelephu and Kokrajhar in Assam. The possibility of an 18-km rail link between Samtse in Bhutan and Banarhat in West Bengal is also being explored.
3.Israel faced growing domestic and international pressure over its Gaza war.
The families of hostages held by Hamas demanded officials return to negotiations to secure their release after Israeli soldiers admitted to mistakenly killing three hostages who escaped from their captors. Meanwhile Israeli allies pushed for the country to moderate its offensive or agree a ceasefire: The U.S. defense secretary was due in Israel to press for the former, while the foreign ministers of the U.K., France, and Germany argued for the latter. Israeli officials rejected calls for a ceasefire, while the military displayed a four-kilometer Hamas tunnel beneath Gaza wide enough to fit a car.
The war’s impact also grew abroad, as major shipping companies suspended their use of the Red Sea, with huge consequences for the global economy: The waterway is the route through which Suez Canal traffic must pass, but has become increasingly risky as Iran-backed Houthi rebels have stepped up their attacks on ships, ostensibly in support of Palestinian militants fighting Israel. The U.S. and U.K. have shot down more than a dozen suspected Houthi attack drones, and the Pentagon is considering a direct strike on Houthi targets in Yemen.
The Economist analysis explains how the situation could affect as much as 30% of global container traffic and 12% of global trade by volume. In short, this could be a sign that the Israel-Gaza war is spreading.
4.Garima Arora: How To Win Two Michelin Stars, both before 40 and the second in the year you have a baby
Arora, the first Indian woman to be awarded a Michelin star in 2018 at 33, just became the first Indian woman to be awarded a second Michelin star. It’s the holy grail of fine dining and one that influences eating out decisions across the world. Arora’s is likely one of the few Michelin-starred restaurants where the main course is almost always vegetarian.
Gaa, her eponymous restaurant in Bangkok, is only the third Indian restaurant in the world to have two stars, according to The Indian Express. It’s here that she applies traditional Indian techniques to locally sourced ingredients.
5.In India, There’s an App for Everything. Even Dream Babies reports the New York Times
Want to raise a child with the business acumen of the industrial tycoon Ratan Tata or the concentration powers of the spiritual guru Swami Vivekananda?
For centuries, India’s mothers have practiced garbh sanskar, in which the nurturing of a child, and the creation of an environment conducive to instilling a Indian value system, begins in the womb. Today there is an app for that. Infact there are many. They combine traditional prenatal and postnatal guidance with scientific research, weaving in wellness practices, dietary plans, yoga, meditation, art, story reading and lullabies.
6.Patients with crippling autoimmune disorders were apparently cured with immunotherapy.
CAR-T therapy involves genetically modifying cells from the patient’s immune system so that they attack the targets you want. It’s often used in cancer treatment. But 15 patients with the autoimmune disorders lupus, myasthenia gravis, systemic sclerosis, or idiopathic inflammatory myositis were given CAR-T therapy targeted at another type of cell within the immune system. All 15 have remained symptom-free since treatment, in some cases more than two years. One man who struggled to walk 10 yards now regularly covers six miles: The patients were “spending more time with their doctors than with their friends,” one doctor told Nature, but now “its all gone.”
7.Can India’s Silicon Valley make it as a megacity? Opinion piece by Simon Kuper in Financial Times. Long Read.
The one-time sleepy southern “Pensioner’s Paradise”, where shops opened late, has become “India’s Silicon Valley”. It feels as dizzyingly dynamic as Manchester must have mid-Industrial Revolution. Now Bengaluru has reached a fork in the packed road: will it become a superstar city like New York or a dysfunctional one like Mumbai? Success will require handling the challenges facing all developing cities: tame the traffic, protect the local environment, cope with climate change and allow migrants from different places to live together in peace.
Bengaluru’s history as a tech hub goes back to 1909, when the now world-beating Indian Institute of Science was founded. Countless educational institutions , and today the city’s talent works in start-ups, call centres, the research centres of global companies or the headquarters of Indian tech corporations like Infosys. Each new software developer creates jobs for maids, waiters and delivery riders, so Bengaluru expands, almost daily, through both gated communities and slums.
Migrants change a city, and the city changes them. In a functioning metropolis, new arrivals don’t merely get richer. They fulfil themselves in ways they couldn’t back home. “In Bengaluru, you can weave your way through the traffic and find yourself,” said author Shoba Narayan at this month’s Bangalore Literature Festival, where youthful crowds were another sign of the city’s cultural blossoming.
One young migrant, a woman from Kolkata, told me: “Youngsters make the rules here.” In historically tolerant Bengaluru, they can live in sometimes mixed-gender flatshares, flirt in the bookshops on Church Street, go on dates in the city’s booming pub scene and make their own marriage markets away from their parents. Women here can wear jeans and T-shirts, and go out at night with less fear than in Delhi.
Bengaluru’s problem is liveability. The city is “crumbling under its own success”,write Malini Goyal and Prashanth Prakash in Unboxing Bengaluru. The one-time “garden city” is now often redubbed the “garbage city”. The vast majority of its famous lakes have been built over, threatening drinking water supplies. The rich are cordoning themselves off in new suburbs, diluting what should be the creative alchemy of a great city. These suburbs need to become accessible hubs,so that Bengaluru can acquire multiple centres faster than Paris or London did.
Bengaluru’s advantage is its late expansion. That means it can avoid the blunders of 20th-century megacities, which remade themselves for cars only to find that the endless flyovers ruined liveability and ended up clogged too. Cars can be a solution for small towns, but cities of millions can’t squeeze them in. Bengaluru’s subway only opened in 2011, but it’s expanding fast.
The city needs to construct almost immediately the local rail infrastructure that London built over nearly two centuries. The logical complement would be bike lanes — a return to India’s cycling past — but these now seem unthinkable, as the cars leave no space.
Some great cities won’t survive climate change. Bengaluru starts from a better place than boiling, smog-clogged Delhi or flood-prone coastal Mumbai, but the heat is worsening here. Last year was the city’s wettest on record.
All multicultural cities face another threat: ethnic conflict, especially in Narendra Modi’s Hindu-supremacist India. By 2011, 107 languages were spoken in Bengaluru, the highest number in India. Some Kannada-speaking locals, nostalgic for their lost paradise, grumble about the newcomers, especially poorer migrants from northern India.
Good governance could manage these problems, but good governance isn’t a Bengaluru tradition. It’s probably already too late for the city to become a New York. But there’s still time to do better than Mumbai.