1.Reliance to commission first solar giga-factory in 2024 says Mukesh Ambani; 5 key highlights from AGM
1) Reliance board to consider issuing 1:1 bonus shares on September 5
2) Reliance is transforming itself into deep-tech company: Mukesh Ambani 
Reliance is transforming itself into a deep-tech company, Chairman Mukesh Ambani said while addressing the AGM, describing AI as a transformative event in the evolution of the human race that is opening up avenues to address complex problems facing mankind. RIL's telecom arm Jio today stands as a true deep-tech innovator, he noted.
3)Jio-AI cloud launched; welcome offer to provide 100 GB free storage
Kiran Thomas, President of Reliance Jio, announced the launch of Jio TvOS, a fully home-grown operating system designed for the Jio Set Top Box. Jio TvOS promises an upgraded viewing experience with support for Ultra HD 4K video, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos, ensuring a richer and more immersive home entertainment system.
4)Jio Phonecall AI, Jio Brain launched; Jio Home IoT advanced
"To streamline AI adoption, Jio is developing a comprehensive suite of tools and platforms that span the entire AI lifecycle. We call this Jio Brain," said Ambani.
5) Reliance to commission first solar giga-factory in 2024
Chairman Ambani said the first train of 20GW solar PV (photovoltaic) manufacturing "will commence production" by the end of this year.The solar giga factory will include the manufacturing of PV modules, cells, wafers and ingots, polysilicon, and glass at a single location.

2.Foreign investors pull out of frothy Indian equity market; Financial Times

Foreign institutional investors have turned net sellers of India-listed shares in August, with net outflows of more than $1bn, according to data from Bloomberg and the Securities and Exchange Board of India. Year-to-date inflows stood at $2.6bn, well below the $22bn recorded last year.

The MSCI India index has advanced 52 per cent in the past five years, dwarfing the 11 per cent climb of the MSCI Emerging Market index in the same period. But global investors are warning over its lofty valuations as retail investors have piled into the market.

“This cycle is locals rather than foreigners — the previous cycles were always the other way around,” said Aashish Agarwal, India country head at investment bank Jefferies. Sat Duhra, a portfolio manager at asset manager Janus Henderson, said domestic investors had been shifting bank deposits into the market, particularly through mutual funds.

Since 2022, a net $70bn of domestic retail money has flowed into Indian equities, said Australian bank Macquarie in a recent note.

3.Indian startups raised $6.3bn between January and July this year, through 672 venture capital (VC) deals.

This is almost a 43% rise in funding compared to the same period last year, according to data and analytics company GlobalData. The growth came even as VC investors remain cautious. Some of the notable deals this year include quick commerce firm Zepto raising $665 million funding, e-commerce startup Meesho getting $300 million, and online pharmacy PharmEasy $216 million.

4.Gautam Adani And Family Top 2024 Hurun India Rich List

Gautam Adani, 62, and his family have secured the top position on the 2024 Hurun India Rich List. Adani's wealth has surged by 95% over the past year, reaching an unprecedented Rs 11.6 lakh crore. This rise propels Adani from the fourth position in 2020 to the number one spot in the latest Hurun India Rich List.

For the first time, the Hurun India Rich List has surpassed 1,500 entrants, reflecting a 150% increase from seven years ago. The cumulative wealth of Hurun India Rich List members now exceeds Rs 159 lakh crore, surpassing the combined GDP of Saudi Arabia and Switzerland.

India now has 334 billionaires in dollar terms, marking a six times increase since the list's inception 13 years ago.

A record 1,008 individuals, or 65% of the list, are self-made billionaires. This includes 64% of the new faces this year. Notably, Radha Vembu of Zoho remains the richest self-made Indian woman.

The youngest billionaires include Kaivalya Vohra of Zepto, aged 21, and Aadit Palicha, 22. Razorpay founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, both 33, also made it to the list.

5.Why India needs its proposed greenfield deepwater port at Vadhavan now more than ever; Economic Times

India’s ports sector is expanding to create new capacity. But India’s USD4 trillion economy also needs new mega ports that can call the biggest container ships of the world, which could help cut logistics costs for exporters and importers. Is Vadhavan the answer? 

Vadhavan Port, which was approved by the Union Cabinet in June this year, will be India’s 13th major port and its largest. Designed to have a total cargo handling capacity of 298 million tonnes per year, the port can call ships as large as those carrying 24,000 twenty-foot containers (TEUs), as opposed to most ports in India that can handle ships with less than 18,000 TEUs. 

In phase 1, the port is expected to handle approximately 6.85 million TEUs by 2030. This capacity will be expanded to 23.2 million TEUs by the completion of phase II in 2040. A TEU or Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit is a unit of cargo capacity for ports and shipping.  On completion, Vadhavan is expected to rank in the top 10 ports of the world. 

6.Why do Australians live so long? The Economist

THE AVERAGE Australian will live around two years longer than the average Briton. With Americans the gap is four. While the English-speaking world shares some similarities, Australians appear to outlive their Anglophone peers by a significant margin.

A paper published on August 13th in BMJ Open, a journal, found that since the early 1990s, Australian life expectancy has overtaken that of Canada, and is now higher than that of America, Britain, Ireland and New Zealand . What explains Australia’s growing lead among this group?

The study suggests that Australians are healthier than a lot of their peers. Older age groups are also less likely to die from chronic diseases such as circulatory problems and heart disease. Cancer mortality rates are lower in Australia than they are in all other Anglophone countries, except among American men aged over 65. And Australians are also less likely to die in road accidents than other countries with high driving rates, such as America and New Zealand. Taken together, these differences amount to 1-5 years of additional life expectancy.

The authors state that lower rates of tobacco use could explain some of these differences, as could Australia’s health-care system. Treatment is free via a universal health-insurance scheme, but many Australians are also privately insured, taking pressure off the public system.

Beyond the English-speaking world, however, Australia’s longevity is somewhat less impressive. Compared with 14 other high-income countries it ranks fourth for men and sixth for women. Japan, Switzerland and Spain, all longtime longevity leaders, top the list.

7.Narendra Modi faces a new threat: his Hindu-nationalist patrons (The RSS);The Economist opines.

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, likes to do yoga to relieve stress. He might have had to do some extra asanas following India’s general election result in June. With his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now bereft of its majority in parliament, he has had to cut deals with coalition partners to remain in power. To appease young voters frustrated by under-employment, he has hurriedly recalibrated his budget to boost spending on job creation. And he recently suffered a big foreign-policy setback with the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, a close ally, as prime minister of Bangladesh.

If that was not enough to unbalance his chakra, Mr Modi is also grappling with an unusually public rift between his party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu-nationalist organisation from which it grew. After weeks of testy exchanges, the two sides held talks on August 11th to repair relations ahead of an annual RSS conclave in Kerala between August 31st and September 2nd. The agenda for that meeting is expected to include the general election result, attacks on the Hindu minority in Bangladesh and, perhaps most importantly for Mr Modi, the future leadership of the BJP.

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, likes to do yoga to relieve stress. He might have had to do some extra asanas following India’s general election result in June. With his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now bereft of its majority in parliament, he has had to cut deals with coalition partners to remain in power. To appease young voters frustrated by under-employment, he has hurriedly recalibrated his budget to boost spending on job creation. And he recently suffered a big foreign-policy setback with the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, a close ally, as prime minister of Bangladesh.

If that was not enough to unbalance his chakra, Mr Modi is also grappling with an unusually public rift between his party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu-nationalist organisation from which it grew. After weeks of testy exchanges, the two sides held talks on August 11th to repair relations ahead of an annual RSS conclave in Kerala between August 31st and September 2nd. The agenda for that meeting is expected to include the general election result, attacks on the Hindu minority in Bangladesh and, perhaps most importantly for Mr Modi, the future leadership of the BJP.

The first clear sign of a schism emerged in May when J.P. Nadda, the BJP’s president, suggested in an interview that his party, which was founded in 1980, no longer needed the help of the RSS, which celebrates its centenary next year, in elections. “In the beginning, we would have been less capable, smaller and needed the RSS,” he told the Indian Express, a newspaper. “Today, we have grown and we are capable. The BJP runs itself.”

His remarks touched a nerve with the leaders of the RSS, who see themselves as custodians of the Hindu-nationalist, or Hindutva, movement. The organisation claims not to engage directly in politics: it focuses on promoting ideology through 73,000 cells, or shakhas, which meet daily for communal exercises, songs and discussion, often on nationalist themes. But it set up an affiliated political party after briefly being banned following the assassination in 1948 of Mahatma Gandhi, the independence leader, by a former RSS member. That party became the BJP.

For most of the years since, the two organisations have worked closely together. Most BJP leaders—including Mr Modi and Amit Shah, his closest associate, home minister and electoral strategist—started as RSS volunteers. Indeed RSS officials are seconded to senior BJP posts and, under Mr Modi, people associated with the group have taken leading roles in educational and cultural institutions. Lately, however, the balance of power in the Hindutva movement has shifted towards Mr Modi and Mr Shah as they have become increasingly unreceptive to advice or criticism.

The election result gave Mohan Bhagwat, the 73-year-old RSS chief, a chance to strike back. Addressing a gathering of members six days later, he said that a true public servant never displayed arrogance. He called for urgent action to stabilise the north-eastern state of Manipur, where Mr Modi’s government has struggled to quell months of deadly unrest. And he said that “decorum was not kept” in the heated rhetoric of the election campaign.

Two other senior RSS figures weighed in the following week. Ratan Sharda, a veteran writing in the organisation’s magazine, criticised the BJP’s election strategy. He accused it of “not listening to the voices on the streets”. Indresh Kumar, a senior RSS official, then suggested in a speech that Lord Ram, a Hindu deity, had punished the BJP for its arrogance by limiting it to 240 parliament seats. The organisation’s student wing took its frustration to the streets later in June when it joined opposition protests against a government-run national examination body, following widespread corruption allegations.

This is not the first spat between the BJP and its ideological mothership. As India’s first BJP prime minister in the early 2000s, Atal Bihari Vajpayee clashed repeatedly with RSS leaders over ministerial appointments, coalition management and foreign policy. Still, this appears to be the worst rupture since then. And repairing it will be an urgent priority for Mr Modi.

One reason is that he needs the help of the Hindu-nationalist foot soldiers when campaigning for four regional elections in the coming months: in the states of Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and in the union territory of Jammu & Kashmir. The BJP is expecting a tough battle to retain control of Maharashtra and Haryana. The newly energised opposition is also likely to mount a challenge for the poll in Jammu & Kashmir, which is the first since Mr Modi scrapped the Muslim-majority region’s semi-autonomous status in 2019.

A second factor is that the RSS is likely to reassert its influence in selecting a replacement for Mr Nadda, whose term ended in June. Although power within the party still resides predominantly with the prime minister, the BJP’s president is technically its leader. One frontrunner is the current BJP general secretary, Sunil Bansal. Smriti Irani, who just lost her parliament seat, could also become the first woman to lead the party. But a delay in the appointment suggests a lack of consensus.

Third, the RSS could complicate Mr Modi’s plans to choose a like-minded successor. His preference, and the favourite in opinion polls, is thought to be Mr Shah. But the candidate closest to the RSS is Nitin Gadkari, the roads minister, whose relations with Mr Modi have been rocky. Mr Modi, who is 73, is expected to serve a full five-year term. He could even stand again in 2029. Still, he needs RSS backing to do either. And it could try to clip his wings by pressing him to appoint one of its loyalists as deputy prime minister.

Leaders of the RSS have played down the discord. Some observers think it is overblown too. Yet Mr Modi’s government made a significant concession to the organisation in July when it lifted a 58-year-old ban on civil servants being members of it. That will give it far greater influence in the bureaucracy. Mr Bhagwat’s security detail has also been upgraded to the same status as Mr Modi’s and Mr Shah’s.

And there are signs that the RSS and its affiliates are carving out a bigger role in shaping government policy. For example, before releasing the government’s budget on July 23rd, Nirmala Sitharaman, the finance minister, consulted economists including a leader of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the economic wing of the RSS. It criticised last year’s budget but praised this year’s, which incorporated some of its proposals to support smaller businesses. Ms Sitharaman also conferred with other RSS affiliates, including its labour union and farmers’ body, which have been critical of recent government policies.

The RSS has reason not to prolong the friction. While frustrated by Mr Modi, it wants him in power for now and worries that further electoral setbacks could harm the Hindu-nationalist movement. But if tensions flare anew or the BJP fails in the coming state polls, the RSS might well flex its muscles again. In politics, as in yoga, Mr Modi should watch his back.