Arvind's Newsletter

1.India’s Industrial production rises to 5.2% in April to June, while inflation eases to 3.54% in July

The Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation's (MoSPI) Index of Industrial Production (IIP) is at 4.2 per cent for June 2024. The IIP growth rate for the month has increased 0.2 per cent when compared to 4 per cent growth rate in June 2023, according to Ministry data released on Monday, August 12.

India's IIP growth rate has increased 0.5 per cent to 5.2 per cent for the financial year 2024-25, compared to 4.7 per cent in the previous year.

India's retail inflation eased to 3.54% year-on-year in July, according to government data released on Monday, benefiting from a high base effect. The inflation rate has dipped below the Reserve Bank of India's medium-term target of 4 percent for the first time in almost five years.

2.Indian billionaire Sunil Mittal to buy 24.5% stake in UK’s BT group

Bharti Enterprises Ltd. though an overseas subsidiary will acquire 24.5% stake in British telecommunications giant BT Group Plc. for an estimated $4 billion. Bharti Global has reached an agreement to acquire the shares from French telecom tycoon Patrick Drahi-founded Altice UK, the Sunil Bharti Mittal-led company announced on Monday. The deal will make Bharti as the British telco's largest shareholder.

Bharti Enterprises said its international investment arm would buy 10 per cent of BT’s shares from Altice immediately and purchase the remainder after it had secured the necessary regulatory approvals.

Interestingly it is full circle for Bharti-BT group relationship, but with a twist: BT group was a major shareholder in Bharti Airtel Ltd. from 1997-2001, when it owned 21%.

3.Retro Indian motorcycle maker Royal Enfield plans electric foray

Iconic motorcycle brand Royal Enfield is in the “advanced” stages of developing its first electric bike for a launch next year, as global manufacturers scale up investments to try to crack the burgeoning market for high-performance electric bikes.

Founded in the English Midlands in 1901 before moving to India, Royal Enfield bills itself as the world’s longest-running motorcycle brand and has in recent years expanded globally, from the US to Thailand, tapping a cult following for its retro bikes.

B Govindarajan, Royal Enfield’s chief executive, told the Financial Times that falling costs for electric vehicles would allow the company to launch its first model in the next financial year, which starts in April 2025.

4.Coaching centres are a sign of broken-window economics. See how China crushed it all overnight; Shekhar Gupta in The Print

This, in our ridiculous system where it isn’t legal to make profits from education. You run universities, colleges, schools but pretend you make no profits.

The coaching business has no such issue. Many are also either listed on stock markets or headed there. How broken does our governance have to be — and how incredibly touching our hypocrisy — that you can’t make profits from giving young Indians education, but can earn thousands of crores giving the same graduates of the same tuition?

One way of figuring out how big the coaching business is and how fast it’s growing is to just look at the GST the Centre has been collecting from them. As the figures in this fine story by Mrinalini Dhyani on ThePrint show, in 2019-2020, the GST collected at the rate of 18 percent was Rs 2,240 crore. Five years later, it has already gone up by about 150 percent to Rs 5,517 crore. It is estimated that it’ll go up to about Rs 15,000 crore by 2029. Read on.

5.NIRF 2024: IIT Madras tops engineering, IISc best university, IIM-A leads management

IIT Madras has once again been recognised as the best engineering college, marking the ninth consecutive year of its dominance in this category. Additionally, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru has been ranked as the best university in the country.AIIMS New Delhi also retained its position as the best medical college in India.

6.India’s diamond industry is reeling from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

More than 90% of the world’s rough diamonds are cut and polished in India, but the industry is facing a recession as both Russia and Israel — major sources for India’s rough diamond imports — are embroiled in conflict, according to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.

Several companies in India’s diamond hub of Surat, including the world’s largest manufacturer of natural polished diamonds, are pausing operations later this month due to falling prices and  exports, the Hindustan Times reported.

7.Chinese authorities unveiled plans to accelerate the country’s energy transition, including efforts to change its taxation, consumption, and energy regulations to bolster cleaner sectors of the economy. 

The latest announcement, which was quickly followed by China’s central bank saying it would extend a programme of cheap lending for emissions-reduction projects, underlined the speed at which China — the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter — is deploying clean power and the extent to which it has made itself a central node of the global green transition: China already dominates the global solar-panel and battery markets, and is fast making inroads into the production of wind turbines, including in markets with entrenched incumbents such as Europe.

8.Hybrid working is changing norms around taking sick days. A mild illness that would have prevented someone from coming into the office might not stop them from working from home. It’s a “new age of ambiguity,” one executive told the Financial Times: “Are you well enough to work? Are you ill enough to take time off? Who decides?” The lack of clarity for the “ill-ish” could mean that more people are doing their jobs while unwell, potentially avoiding lost working hours, but raising concerns that they will take longer to recover. “Being truly sick has gone the way of being truly on vacation,” the executive said.

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