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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.Toxic Smog engulfs Delhi
The air quality index in the capital of New Delhi veered into "hazardous" territory Friday, reaching a level of 640 at one point and topping a real-time list of the world's most polluted cities. The haze forms every winter as a result of lower temperatures and lack of wind trapping pollution from vehicles, smoke, and burning crops.
2.Economics Nobel And How It Relates To India’s Qualified, Underpaid Women
Claudia Goldin showed that more women join the labour force as a country develops economically, except under certain conditions, reports Nushaiba Iqbal in India Spend. Some excerpts from her insightful article, which worth reading.
“More women than men were enrolled in higher education in India in 2020-21, as per a Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation report. Yet, the labour force participation rate (LFPR) among women with secondary education or higher was 29.2%, less than half that of their male peers (73.1%), as per the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report for 2022-23.
The reasons for this apparent contradiction were explained by Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from Harvard University. In a 1994 working paper(https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w4707/w4707.pdf), she pointed out that married women’s labour moves from the farms into offices with an increase in education of women, causing the LFPR to trace a U-shaped curve as education (or GDP) increases.
As per her results, the female LFPR will rise as the country transitions from middle- to high-income, but only if well-paying formal sector jobs are available, explained labour economist Farzana Afridi, a professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi and research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labour Economics.
Goldin’s most famous result--the U-shaped LFPR curve for women--holds for India: We are in the middle portion of the curve, which explains the declining LFPR, according to Afridi. “Even though gender gaps in education have closed dramatically in the last few decades in India, fewer women are participating in the labour market because the social cost (stigma) associated with working in the mostly low status jobs available is still high in India,” she explained.”
Read on
3.Elon Musk releases new AI chatbot ‘Grok’ in bid to take on ChatGPT
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI has released its first AI model, as the tech billionaire looks to take on OpenAI, Google and Meta with a sassy chatbot that is tightly integrated with X, formerly Twitter.
Grok, the new AI system, has “real time access” to information from X, the social media platform Musk bought for $44bn a year ago, he said in a post on Saturday night, giving it a “massive advantage over other models” that have largely relied on older archives of internet data. The chatbot “loves sarcasm” and responds with “a little humour”, Musk added, hoping that giving Grok more personality will allow it to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.
“It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems,” xAI said as it announced a “very early” testing version of Grok.
So-called generative AI companies — whose technology can create humanlike text, code and imagery in seconds — have raised billions of dollars this year as investor pile in to an industry that proponents say could be as transformative as the internet.
Others, however, fear a new tech bubble is inflating, as commercialisation of the technology remains at an early stage. xAI’s ability to release a capable model with what it says was just two months of training shows how new entrants are beginning to eat away at the huge lead established by OpenAI, which released its breakthrough chatbot ChatGPT almost a year ago.
4.How ‘Chawl’ Tenements Helped Mumbai Become a Megacity, reports Ronojoy Mazumdar in Bloomberg.
For more than a century, the chawls of Mumbai have acted as one of the city’s most important forms of affordable housing. Large tenement complexes built during Mumbai’s industrial boom from the 1850s through the first half of the 20th century, chawls once housed workers from the sprawling ports and textile mills of what was then called Bombay.
In a city bounded by water on three sides where land has long been scarce, these hulking complexes always presented challenging conditions, built to three floors or more to conserve valuable land and typically housing entire families in just a single room without private washing facilities. The chawls nonetheless offered generations of low-income arrivals in Mumbai a foothold in India’s “city of dreams” and succeeded in becoming hives of community activity while offering homes that were close to workplaces.
But while hundreds of chawls remain, housing many tens of thousands of residents, they are due to be swept away and replaced by high-rise residential towers in one of the most ambitious urban renewal plans the city has ever seen.
5.China's EV giant BYD is slowly closing its profit gap with Tesla
Last year, Chinese EV champion BYD dethroned Tesla as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles, counting both full-electric and plug-in hybrid cars.
Now, the two companies are neck and neck for the number of fully electric cars sold—but sales volume isn’t the only metric that has Tesla watching its back
In terms of how much profit each company is making per car, BYD is gradually eating into Tesla’s lead. BYD has been fattening profit margins at the same time as Tesla’s profit per car is slipping, though it’s still making more money per car than any of its global competitors.
6.Saudi Arabia keen to pad up for cash-rich IPL
Saudi Arabia has expressed interest in buying a multi-billion-dollar stake in the Indian Premier League (IPL), international cricket’s most lucrative event, following a string of investments that have upended professional sports, including football and golf.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s advisers have sounded out Indian government officials about moving the IPL into a holding company valued at as much as US$30 billion (S$40.6 billion), in which Saudi Arabia would then take a significant stake.
Under plans discussed at the time, the kingdom proposed investing as much as US$5 billion in the league and helping to lead an expansion into other countries, similar to the English Premier League or the Champions League, the people said.
Even as United Arab Emirates is considering investing as much as $50 billion in India, its second-largest trading partner, as part of a broader bet on the world’s fastest-growing major economy.The countries have been seeking to bolster ties over the past decade, and aim to increase non-oil bilateral trade to $100 billion.