Latest news with #AkashPrakash
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Business Standard
29-07-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: How India is applying new fixes to old wounds
There's a particular discomfort in swallowing the same pill day after day and still feeling no better. At some point, whether it's for a persistent cold or a stubborn fever, you head back to the doctor — not for reassurance, but for a new prescription. Something different. Something that might actually work this time. That's where we are today, as a country, as a region, even as a workforce. Tweaking the dosage. Changing the medicine. Because the old ways aren't healing like they used to. Let's dive in. That shift is clearly visible in TCS's decision to let go of 12,000 employees, mostly from the middle and senior rungs. The reason? AI is becoming the new workforce. Like a treatment that makes older therapies obsolete, automation is reshaping how companies see value. But for India, where jobs are the lifeblood of growth, this change demands a rethink of skilling, education, and labour policy, argues our first editorial. We need a new formulation, and fast. In diplomacy too, there's been a shift in dosage. As tensions with the Maldives threatened to flare up, India quietly switched from confrontation to calibration, replacing troops with technicians, and aid with patience. Our second editorial notes how this non-invasive strategy is yielding a gradual thaw, possibly proving more potent than muscle-flexing. Akash Prakash, on the other hand, shows what the right medicine looks like. India's PLI scheme for smartphones, crafted carefully and administered diligently, has turned Apple into a believer and India into a serious contender in global electronics. The challenge now is to scale that formula to other sectors, with new incentives and coordinated policy muscle. Rama Bijapurkar writes that even the middle class, once thought to be the immune system of a stable economy, is mutating. Today's middle class isn't built on pensions or permanent jobs. It's a patchwork of gig workers, first-gen graduates, and economic tightrope walkers. Aspirations have become modest: not upward mobility but just a break from the grind. We need to redefine what it means to be 'middle class,' before our policies misdiagnose the patient. Finally, in The Trial that Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence, reviewed by Amritesh Mukherjee, Ashis Ray reminds us that sometimes, history turns on a prescription no one expected. His retelling of the INA court-martial is less about law and more about contagion — how a courtroom drama spread outrage like wildfire, igniting mutinies, uniting a fractured country, and hastening the end of British rule. Sometimes, even the most unexpected prescription can trigger a revolution. Stay tuned!
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Business Standard
14-07-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
The margin trap: Why innovation matters more than short-term profits
India needs to get on the innovation cycle - and everyone has a part to play. The government must provide basic funding and strengthen linkages between industry and academia Akash Prakash Listen to This Article One of the clear takeaways when speaking with senior people working with Apple is their disappointment at the lack of willingness among India Inc to step up and make the investments needed to bring the Apple ecosystem into India. While China is putting up obstacles, the profit focus of Indian entrepreneurs is also a stumbling block. Whether it is putting up the component supply chain or making large capital investments for display units, there is a lack of interest on the part of large Indian groups to commit capital. They cite the low margins on offer and the intense scrutiny
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Business Standard
17-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: Plastic battles, dumping wars, and Apple's gamble
Have you ever been in a situation, where there's that sudden flicker while driving through an unfamiliar underpass. The streetlights blink once, then vanish. And at that same time, your headlight, too, dies in silence. You're still moving, but into a tunnel where no signs of exit are visible. You don't know how long this stretch is, or whether you'll come out the other side. The world today feels a lot like that. Let's dive in. Our first editorial explores how global oil markets, rattled by the widening Israel-Iran conflict, are about to turn India's fiscal tunnel pitch dark. Oil prices are up 9 per cent already, with projections nearing $150 a barrel. That could tear through India's trade balance, sink the rupee, squeeze inflation, and force the RBI's hand. If the Strait of Hormuz gets blocked, our headlight, that comforting fiscal projection of 1 per cent CAD, may just vanish. Elsewhere, as our second editorial explains, India is dodging another kind of dark road, a global spotlight on plastics. Nearly 100 countries endorsed the Nice Wake Up Call for a plastics treaty, but India held back, citing jobs and industry. Meanwhile, our $44 billion plastics sector churns out 9.3 million tonnes of waste a year, with only band-aid recycling rules and strained informal networks trying to keep the muck out of rivers and lungs. In the manufacturing corridor, Akash Prakash turns to the Apple-in-China story. The tech giant's vast China bet built a supply chain so dazzling, it lit up the global economy. Now, Apple's pivot to India could offer us a chance, if we don't miss the curve. But unlike China, we've yet to lay the full wiring of component ecosystems, long-term policy, and bold investments. As trade winds shift, Rajeswari Sengupta and Niharika Yadav show how India's ADD (anti-dumping duty) spree, aimed at shielding local firms from cheap Chinese imports, might be casting more shadows than clarity. MSMEs are hurting, solar goals are slipping, and policy unpredictability is turning investors blind. And finally, Neha Bhatt reviews The New Age of Sexism: How the AI revolution is reinventing misogyny by Laura Bates, a searing spotlight on how AI, deepfakes, and the metaverse are not liberating, but retooling patriarchy. Virtual misogyny is no longer fiction. It's coded. Programmed. And it's coming for younger and younger girls. Stay tuned, and remember, when the streetlights go out, the steering must be firmer, the mind calmer!
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Business Standard
16-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Scaling manufacturing power: Apple in China, key lessons for India
One company turned China into a manufacturing powerhouse. Now India must ride the diversification wave to do the same Akash Prakash Listen to This Article I am in the middle of reading this fascinating book, Apple in China – The Capture of the World's Greatest Company. The book has been written by Patrick McGee, a Financial Times journalist based in San Francisco and responsible for covering Apple. The book tells two intersecting stories. First, how Apple moved from being just days away from bankruptcy in 1996 to becoming the most valuable company in the world within a span of 15 years. Second, it traces the contribution Apple has made to transforming China from a third-world, low-skill manufacturing base into the world's largest and most sophisticated
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Business Standard
22-04-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: Fiscal fights, market machines, and policy pain
There's a makeshift wooden ladder outside my building, made out of hollowed bamboo and wedged into the ground like it has no business being there. A mason climbs it daily, with one hand steadying the paint bucket, the other reaching out for support. It wobbles, always. But somehow, he gets to the top. I watched him again this morning, the ladder squeaking as he shifted his weight — and it struck me: that's the world today. Perpetually climbing ladders that rest on shaky ground — fiscal structures, market trends, regulatory balances, old institutions—and hoping it holds long enough to fix the wall. Let's dive in. Take the 16th Finance Commission. Tasked with redistributing India's tax revenues, it is juggling rising state debt, Centre-State friction, and demands for a larger state share in the divisible pool, highlights our first editorial. Add Tamil Nadu's pitch for GDP-based distribution, and you see the ladder tilt: richer states demanding more because they 'contribute more.' But then come the cesses and surcharges. They're like loose pebbles under the ladder's feet, eroding trust. In the markets, the human touch is slipping off the rails. Algorithms now command 54 per cent of trades in NSE's cash market, notes our second editorial. They're calculating, relentless — and often incomprehensible, even to the people who built them. Manual traders are slowly being edged out, like craftsmen watching machines duplicate their life's work. Trading floors aren't buzzing anymore; they're humming quietly, in binary. It is the long-term investors who keep the paint job going despite the ground becoming increasingly wobbly, unlike the day-traders. Akash Prakash highlights another wobbly climb: the US dollar. Still dominant globally, yet overvalued, out of sync with America's real economy. With $25 trillion in foreign-owned assets and rising bond yields, the dollar's grip is loosening. It may remain the world's reserve, but its golden pedestal is built on Wall Street illusions, not Main Street reality. Closer home, Prasanna Tantri explains how gold loan regulations could backfire. The RBI's new draft treats banks and NBFCs unequally, limiting NBFCs' lending while allowing banks more leeway. But banks aren't necessarily safer. This regulatory imbalance may deny underserved communities access to much-needed credit — yet another ladder set on loose ground. And finally, Neha Bhatt reviews Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Realities edited by Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, a book that dissects institutional brutality. It's a stark reminder: even ladders designed to uphold justice can be weaponised when anchored in colonial design. Reform isn't about repainting rungs—it's about rebuilding the ground beneath. Stay tuned!
