- Arvind's Newsletter
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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.As the software content in vehicles is growing, with systems like smart cockpits becoming an integral part of the auto ecosystem, India has become the go-to place to source digital engineering and talent, reports the Economic Times.
With its combination of readily available skilled engineers and ER&D (engineering research and development) hubs that offer low-cost solutions, India has become the destination for auto OEMs or original equipment manufacturers to secure their digital content needs, according to a recent JP Morgan Equity Research report.
The urgency among auto OEMs to move towards EACV(Electric, autonomous and connected vehicle) is pushing them to work with services providers to hasten product development cycles and eventual rollout in the market. Digital technology systems, including advanced driver assistance systems, and software defined vehicles (SDVs) are helping drive this journey, say expert
The uncertain macro conditions have not slowed down auto ER&D spends. One of the growth drivers is EACV, and services providers are winning multi-year deals in this space. This could lead to India’s share in ER&D offshoring rising to 33% by by FY32 from 25% in FY22, according to the JP Morgan report. These tailwinds will benefit auto ER&D services companies.
Leading services providers such as L&T Technology Services, KPIT Technologies, Tata Elxsi and Cyrient.
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2.College pedigree, daddy’s name, BBC accent no longer golden ticket. India has a growing new elite, reports a interesting opinion piece by Shekhar Gupta in the Print.
He writes, “India’s caravan is moving on like a juggernaut pulled by tens of millions of supremely talented Indians that our handful of old elite institutions are too small to have produced.” Some excerpts from his article:
In 2003, Shekhar had written a piece headlined ‘The HMT Advantage’, I had noted the rise and rise of a new kind of elite in India, those coming in from Hindi Medium Type (therefore HMT) institutions. That piece was sparked by the death of astronaut Kalpana Chawla who, we discovered, rose from modest schooling from nondescript Karnal in Haryana to become a NASA astronaut.
It had noted that already the top leadership of our politics, civil services, armed forces, corporates, judiciary, even the media, was no longer the preserve of the old, establishment elites. That it no longer mattered where you came from, how well your daddy had done, what clubs and networks your family was linked to. These had stopped mattering even 20 years ago when that piece was written.
As long as the economy was small and growing slowly, the few privileged institutions sufficed to produce the talent India needed, from corporate boardrooms to the civil services and the judiciary. Now, a rapidly growing economy needed many more talented people and a much larger catchment area. St. Stephen’s/Doon/Mayo/St. Columba’s/St. Xavier’s/La Martinière are still great institutions — they may be India’s finest even now — but they are just too few to meet India’s need for talent.
Track the lists of toppers and rank-holders published by IAS academies when you open our full front pages now, and check if there are any from these old institutions. It is just too hard to compete, and even in the interview process, there is no premium on pedigree.
The biggest, most visible — and audible — change has been how people, especially employers, stopped bothering about how you spoke the English language.
3.Tesla, due to recent deals with other automakers, is likely to dominate the US EV charging market and its supercharger strategy could become a source of competitive advantage.
This week, GM and Tesla announced a deal that will allow GM EVs to get charged up by 12,000 fast chargers in Tesla’s sprawling network of charging stations. The partnership follows a similar agreement reached with Ford last month, making Tesla look like it’s in charge of charging.
Its charger network is vast, boasting 20,000 fast chargers in 1,800 spots in USA, but it wasn’t always a sure thing that Tesla would become the charging standard-bearer.
The company took a major gamble when it decided to make its charging system incompatible with other EVs that use the biggest competing standard, the Combined Charging System (CCS).
But now analysts say other automakers will likely follow in GM’s and Ford’s footsteps and design EVs using Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS).
Tesla’s standard is set to become the industry standard since the deals mean the top three EV producers (which currently account for ~70% of US EV sales) all use it.
Tesla won’t be charging free of charge: The GM and Ford partnerships will help it rake in an additional $5.4 billion in annual revenue by 2032, Piper Sandler estimates. And in more good news for the EV giant, the White House said yesterday that Tesla can receive government subsidies to build more charging stations if they include CCS adapters so other EVs can use them, too.
4.A personality test can’t tell you who you are, opines Allie Volpe in The Verge
People have long been motivated to define the inner workings of their minds, but never quite had the wide array of tools or language to clearly communicate who they are until fairly recently. From Myers-Briggs and Enneagram to love languages and Hogwarts houses, we are sufficiently armed with the means to classify and define ourselves — and with bite-size descriptors in which to broadcast our findings.
These assessments and quizzes and identifiers, though, only tell one side of the multidimensional story that is a human life. Self-reflection has its utility, but a test or a rigid personality type may not provide the answers we’re looking for. The question of whether we can ever truly know ourselves — and whether the means of obtaining that information from a quiz is legitimate — isn’t as important as what we do with that insight
5.How the new generation of weight-loss drugs work, a piece from the Economist. They were intended to treat diabetes. Their other benefits were discovered by accident.
“Weight-loss drugs are everywhere. In newspapers, on social media or by the water cooler, the gossip about injections that can help to melt away 10-20% of one’s body weight is hard to avoid. The real news is getting buried. These drugs offer a powerful new option to treat obesity, which is now widely accepted by doctors as a chronic disease. Being seriously overweight raises a person’s risk of suffering from diabetes, heart disease, strokes and 13 cancers. But there is evidence that, for most people, dieting is not an effective way to lose and keep off large amounts of weight: the body fights attempts to shift more than a little. How might new drugs help?
The history of weight-loss medication is a sorry tale. In 1934 as many as 100,000 Americans were using dinitrophenol to shed excess pounds. It is toxic, causing cataracts and, occasionally, deaths. By one estimate 25,000 people were blinded by the drug; it was banned as a drug for human use in 1938 but deaths continue to this day as people are still enticed to buy it online. Next amphetamines became popular—until the risk of addiction and other side-effects became apparent. Ephedra, a herbal medication which in 1977 was taken by an estimated 70,000 people, was also banned in America after it led to deaths. Two other weight-loss drugs, rimonabant and sibutramine, were withdrawn from sale because of safety concerns.
The new generation of weight-loss drugs, which seem far safer, were discovered by accident. They were developed to improve glucose regulation in diabetics, who suffer from an excess of sugar in the bloodstream. The drugs use short chains of amino acids to mimic the hormones produced naturally by the body after a meal, but which diabetics sometimes produce in insufficient quantities.
The drugs semaglutide (sold as Wegovy) and tirzepatide (to be sold as Mounjaro) imitate the action of glucagon-like peptide-1 (glp-1), one such hormone. This increases the production of insulin (which transports blood sugar into body cells) and reduces the production of glucagon (which releases sugar into the bloodstream from the liver). It also slows down the rate at which the stomach empties, creating a feeling of fullness that reduces appetite. In addition, the drug may increase energy expenditure by changing fat tissue into brown adipose tissue, which is more likely to be burned at rest. These effects not only help diabetics, but also promote weight loss.
There are drawbacks. Side-effects of glp-1 drugs include nausea and vomiting and there are concerns that they may increase a person’s risk of developing thyroid tumours. The drugs certainly should not be taken for cosmetic reasons. They may also need to be taken for a lifetime: when patients stop taking them they regain most of the weight that they had lost. And they are expensive.
But the potential benefits of such drugs go beyond their ability to promote weight loss in individuals. By showing that molecular mechanisms hinder people’s attempts to lose weight, they show that gluttony is not to blame when people remain obese. That should slowly help to eliminate the stigma.
Both weight-loss surgery and drugs are useful tools in the fight against obesity. But by changing the conversation these new drugs may remind health-system leaders that they need to do much more to encourage healthy lifestyles.
More action is ultimately needed because the problem is growing rapidly: more than half of the world’s population will be overweight by 2035, compared with 38% today, according to the World Obesity Federation, an ngo. New weight-loss drugs represent a turning-point in the treatment of obesity. But if governments want to spend less on medication and surgery, they will need to focus on preventing people from becoming obese in the first place.
