Arvind's Newsletter-Weekend edition

1.Apple aims to make a Quarter of the World’s iPhones in India, reports Wall Street Journal

Apple and its suppliers aim to build more than 50 million iPhones in India annually within the next two to three years, with additional tens of millions of units planned after that, according to people involved.

If the plans are achieved, India would account for a quarter of global iPhone production and take further share toward the end of the decade. China will remain the largest iPhone producer.

Apple has gradually boosted its reliance on India in recent years despite challenges including rickety infrastructure and restrictive labor rules that often make doing business harder than in China. Among other issues, labor unions retain clout even in business-friendly states and are pushing back on an effort by companies to get permission for 12-hour work days, which Apple suppliers find helpful during crunch periods.

Apple and its suppliers, led by Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, generally believe the initial push into India has gone well and are laying the groundwork for a bigger expansion, say people involved in the supply chain.

2.India is poised to become the next big travel market in the world, projected to hit the fifth rank in outbound travel with spends of $89 billion in 2027 as compared with the current 10th position with $38 billion in 2019. In outbound travel, India will be behind only the US, China, Ger­many and the UK, but ahead of Ita­ly, South Korea, Australia, Can­ada and France, to name a few.

The projections are in a report by Bernstein that tries to identify the potential big markets for travel.

In terms of tourist inflows, India is projected to become the third largest domestic market by 2027 with spends of $174 billion, up from the $127 billion spent in 2019 when it was in fifth place. This places India behind only the USA and China, and well ahead of Brazil, Italy, Australia, Japan, Germany, France and Mexico.

3.The World’s Fastest-Sinking Megacity Has One Last Chance to Save Itself, reports Bloomberg.

“Venice is sinking. So are Rotterdam, Bangkok and New York. But no place compares to Jakarta, the fastest-sinking megacity on the planet. Over the past 25 years, the hardest-hit areas of Indonesia’s capital have subsided more than 16 feet. The city has until 2030 to figure out a solution, experts say, or it will be too late to hold back the Java Sea.

Parts of Jakarta are subsiding at unprecedented speed. The longshot fix rests with noodle billionaire Anthoni Salim ... If Salim can help ... deliver on the plan to bring water to every Jakarta household, experts say the city has a chance — and the company will rake in billions of dollars. If it fails, it’s likely that chaos will reign in the world’s second-biggest metropolis. Unabated sinking, combined with intensifying storms and rising sea levels, will be more than Jakarta’s seawalls can withstand, said JanJaap Brinkman, a flood expert at Dutch water research institute Deltares: 'There will be so sea water rushing in, it will never stop. There will be no escape.'

4.From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money, reports New York Times.

After staving off collapse by cutting costs, many young tech companies are out of options, fueling a cash bonfire.

WeWork raised more than $11 billion in funding as a private company. Olive AI, a health care start-up, gathered $852 million. Convoy, a freight start-up, raised $900 million. And Veev, a home construction start-up, amassed $647 million.

In the last six weeks, they all filed for bankruptcy or shut down. They are the most recent failures in a tech start-up collapse that investors say is only beginning. Read on

5.A global test showed an “unprecedented” decline in academic scores across the world due largely to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 Results of the PISA test, which is carried out every three years by the OECD, a club of mostly rich nations, showed that global average math scores fell by 15 points — equivalent roughly to the loss of three quarters of an academic year. Reading and science scores fell by the equivalent of half a year. Although test scores fell sharply in Europe and the U.S., overall students in Asia continued to make progress: Singapore led the overall rankings.

The Economist, opined in weekly leader that, “Covid 19 was disaster for world’s schoolchildren.”

Every three years for the past two decades analysts at the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, have asked pupils in dozens of places to take tests in reading, maths and science, the better to compare the quality of their schools. No one was expecting the latest round of exams, sat a year late in 2022 after years of pandemic-induced disruption, to bring good news. But the results, released on December 5th, are still a blow. An average teenager in the rich world is found to have fallen about six months behind in reading and nine months behind in maths, compared with peers who sat similar tests in 2018. In several rich countries 15-year-olds are performing at levels that back then would have been expected of learners a full year younger.

These findings are all the gloomier because of the discouraging trends that preceded them. Years of international testing suggest that, when the pandemic struck, typical teenagers in the rich world were no more numerate than those schooled some 20 years earlier. In reading and science, average scores have been drifting down for a decade, according to the oecd’s yardstick, even though spending has been going up. So there are good reasons to think that grades in the latest exams (often known as the PISA tests) might have slipped even without the turmoil of covid-19

The sombre school report should rally governments to accomplish two tasks. The first is to renew pandemic “catch-up” programmes, for which energy and funding is beginning to flag even though the job is far from complete. Data released in July by a big test-provider suggest that in the most recent academic year many pupils in America made no faster progress than was normal before the pandemic. This month’s pisa results suggest that America’s scores may have fallen back a bit less than in lots of other places—but that means nothing to the millions of youngsters who are nonetheless approaching the end of their school days with yawning gaps in their skills.

A priority of any revamped catch-up schemes should be to bring down absenteeism. In both America and Britain 20-30% of pupils miss at least one lesson in ten, and often many more. This is roughly double the rate before the pandemic. As for pupils who are regularly coming to class, schools could be offering them more lessons than usual. Providing more learning time—in holidays, at weekends and after school—is perhaps the simplest way of getting youngsters back up to speed. But in many places extra hours have been given only a minimal role in catch-up plans; they are expensive because teachers would have to be paid more, or more teachers hired. And the children are not keen.

Governments’ second task is to turn around the disheartening long-term trends. International tests offer clues about what works and what does not. Cutting class sizes is often a waste of money; having high-quality teachers matters more. Education budgets could be better focused. Across rich countries, disadvantaged pupils put up with less qualified staff and make do with fewer books. Changing much of this means taking on powerful lobbies, including teachers’ unions and wealthy parents. In theory the crisis offers a big opportunity to make such reforms.

All the more reason to regret that politicians are focusing their energies elsewhere. Britain’s government has painted its pupils’ performance in the pisa tests as a triumph (like America it has drifted up the league tables, but only because its scores collapsed a smidgeon less than the average). The Labour Party, which will probably come to power next year, plans to get tougher on private schools by making them pay tax; they cost the government nothing and get excellent results, but taxing them will probably force some parents to increase the burden on the public sector. In America, meanwhile, the past few years have seen much energy wasted on fiery but mostly fruitless battles about the teaching of history, gender and race. Never-ending disruptions during the pandemic were bad for learning. Schoolchildren must not be let down once again.