Arvind’s Newsletter

1.High net worth Indians are making a beeline for residence-through-investment programmes in the U.S., Portugal, Australia, Malta, and Greece

In 2022, over 2.25 lakh Indians renounced Indian citizenship, the highest ever since 2011, according to data tabled by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in Parliament on February 9. The data reflects how Indians, especially high net worth individuals (HNIs) are moving westward with new passports, in search of better opportunities, healthcare, quality of life, and education, among several other factors.

2.China’s courts are invalidating western tech patents. In a bid to give its own businesses a leg up reports the Wall Street Journal.

China has striven for years to develop cutting-edge technologies, in part through heavy spending on research. Now, according to Western officials and executives, it also has mobilized its legal system to pry technology from other nations.

Officials in the U.S. and European Union accuse China of using its courts and patent panels to undermine foreign intellectual-property rights and help Chinese businesses. They say China is focusing such efforts on industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals.

3.Venture capital (VC) firms are having a harder time raising funds. The amount of money raised in new funds in the fourth quarter of 2022 in USA was the lowest total for that quarter since 2013. The number of VC funds invested by fund backers during the quarter was the fewest for that quarter since 2012, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported citing figures from Preqin.

These totals were down from those recorded a year earlier. The amount of money raised was 65% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2021, while the number of VC funds plunged from 620 during the last three months of 2021 to 226 in the same quarter of 2022, according to the report.

The trends driving the decline in VC funds are the same ones that impacted tech startups last year — fewer sellers going public through initial public offerings (IPOs), stocks and valuations falling, and interest rates and inflation rising, the report said.

4. Uber Technologies said it will introduce electric vehicles (EVs) in India for ride-sharing, its first move to adopt clean cars amid a government push for greater electrification of public transport and shared mobility.

With plans to introduce 25,000 EVs over three years, Uber is stepping up competition with local rival BluSmart an electric mobility start-up backed by BP's venture fund, which has taken the lead in India's electric taxi space. Uber's fleet partners will buy the EVs from Tata Motors, India's biggest electric carmaker.

Even with 25,000 EVs, electric cars will still be a fraction of Uber's current overall active fleet of 300,000 vehicles in India. Uber has set a 2040 target for 100% of its rides to be in zero-emission vehicles, public transport or with micro-mobility, including in India.

5.The genius of Leonardo: Long before Galileo and Newton used superior mathematics to study a fundamental natural force, Leonardo calculated the gravitational constant with surprising accuracy, reports William Broad in the New York Times.

“When Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting a masterpiece or dreaming up flying machines, he was pondering the mysteries of gravity. The Renaissance thinker considered himself as much a man of science as an artist and spent untold hours exploring how the “attraction of one object to another” could affect such things as the flight of birds and the fall of water.

Now, scientists have discovered that Leonardo did detailed experiments that sought to illuminate the nature of gravity a century before Galileo and some two centuries ahead of Newton’s making its investigation an exact science. The scientists’ study of his gravitational ideas and experimentation was published earlier this month in the journal “Leonardo.””