Latest news with #Guha
Business Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Times
US tariffs put spotlight on industrial S-Reits' upcoming H1 earnings
[SINGAPORE] Market watchers remain cautious on the performance of industrial Singapore-listed real estate investment trusts, or S-Reits, ahead of the sector's upcoming financial results – given uncertainty around the impact of the US administration's global tariffs. 'Rental growth in the industrial sector may ease in the current tariff-related uncertainty,' said Xavier Lee, an equity analyst from Morningstar. The US administration has set an Aug 1 deadline to conclude tariff negotiations with other countries. After that, exports to the US from these countries will face new tariffs, starting at a baseline rate of 10 per cent. However, Krishna Guha, analyst at Maybank Securities, said that the impact on the industrial sub-sector could be cushioned by the 'front-loading' of inventory – where suppliers stock up on inventory early – to mitigate changes in tariffs. Industrial S-Reits posted mixed figures in their most recent results. While Mapletree Logistics Trust saw its Q4 FY2025 distribution per unit (DPU) fall 11.6 per cent, CapitaLand Ascendas Reit posted a 3.2 per cent rise in its FY2024 H2 DPU. The reporting season for S-Reits kicks off on Jul 23 with Sabana Industrial Reit reporting its H1 business update after market close. Others include Digital Core Reit on the same day, as well as Suntec Reit on Jul 24. A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU Tuesday, 12 pm Property Insights Get an exclusive analysis of real estate and property news in Singapore and beyond. Sign Up Sign Up More counters will report their H1 financial results the following week, including Keppel Pacific Oak US Reit on Jul 29, Keppel Reit on Jul 30 and Capitaland Integrated Commercial Trust on Aug 5. S-Reits under the Frasers and Mapletree groups will be reporting their Q3 and Q1 results, respectively. Mapletree Industrial Trust will release its results on Jul 28 while Frasers Centrepoint Trust will report on Jul 24. Besides the industrial sector, Morningstar's Lee said that leasing demand for office S-Reits could also fall given the economic uncertainty from ongoing trade tensions. But unlike the industrial sector, the tight office supply in Singapore could offset weak demand for office spaces, he added. For the hospitality sector, Maybank's Guha was of the view that it may see some positive impact from recent concerts, although the US tariffs could weigh down business and leisure travel. Guha added that Singapore-focused S-Reits will have a 'home advantage' as they are sheltered from the impact of the broader growth slowdown due to trade tensions. More S-Reits to post DPU growth Overall, more S-Reits are likely to report growth in their DPU as they benefit from year-on-year interest cost savings, said Darren Chan, senior research analyst at Phillip Securities Research. He noted that S-Reits are benefiting from last year's US Federal Reserve rate cuts, which lowered borrowing rates by 100 basis points. The three-month Sora, an interest-rate benchmark for Singapore dollar loans, has also fallen below 2 per cent – its lowest level since 2022. 'Looking ahead, S-Reits are expected to enjoy further interest cost savings as more rate cuts are anticipated later this year,' said Chan. On the other hand, Morningstar's Lee believes that US Fed rate cuts may have limited impact on S-Reits this year. This is because most of these Reits have a larger share of fixed-rate debt, which is less sensitive to rate changes than floating-rate debt. Among the S-Reits covered by Morningstar, the proportion of fixed-rate debt ranges from 58 to 83 per cent of total debt. 'However, the lower interest rates should start becoming meaningful in the subsequent 12 to 18 months as S-Reits refinance expiring debt,' said Lee. Nevertheless, he agreed with other analysts that the majority of S-Reits will post positive DPU growth of between 1 and 7 per cent for FY2025. This will mainly be driven by a mix of organic improvements to S-Reits' portfolio and acquisitions, rather than interest cost savings, said Chan. Maybank Securities maintains its positive view of S-Reits on the back of falling interest rates and 10-year yield. These factors should support these Reits' distributions and valuation even if there is pressure on their revenue, said Guha. Maybank Securities prefers, in the following order: retail, office, industrial and hospitality sub-sectors.
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
Hereditary principle in Congress today would have been repugnant to Ambedkar: Ramachandra Guha
'Dr. B.R. Ambedkar would have been opposed to political parties being family firms and to a single family claiming the hereditary principle,' said historian Ramachandra Guha, who delivered the first Justice Ahmadi Distinguished Lecture on 'What would Dr. Ambedkar have made of the Republic of India today', in the city on Saturday. The lecture was organised by the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, in collaboration with the Ahmadi Foundation. Quoting Ambedkar, who had said, 'Parliamentary government means negation of hereditary rule. No person can claim to be a hereditary ruler', Mr. Guha said: 'Let me be blunt, the hereditary principle in the Congress party of today would have been absolutely repugnant to Ambedkar.' Many other parties like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Samajwadi Party, and Shiv Sena had also become family parties, he said. Mr. Guha began his lecture recalling how Kannada writer Devanur Mahadeva's speech in Manipal in 1994 inspired him to study Ambedkar. 'It is perfectly possible to pervert the Constitution without changing its form by merely changing the form of the administration and to make the administration inconsistent and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution,' Ambedkar had said while presenting the draft of the Constitution to the Constituent Assembly on November 4, 1948, Mr. Guha recalled, and said, 'A quarter of a century later, in the early 1970s, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did precisely that'. He said, 'Arguably, these ideas have been taken further by the government now in power, which has sought to rig the civil services, the police, the investigative agencies, the regulatory bodies, and the judiciary and make them subject to its political agenda.' Mr. Guha then drew attention to two warnings Ambedkar gave in his speech on November 25, 1949: personality cult and equality in politics and inequality in social and economic life. 'Bhakti in religion may be a route to the salvation of the soul. Bhakti, or hero worship, in politics is a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship,' Mr. Guha quoted Ambedkar.
Scroll.in
3 days ago
- Health
- Scroll.in
Indian women are shouldering a gruelling double shift
Indian women disproportionately bear the burden of unpaid domestic and care work, and this burden is especially acute for urban women, with domestic responsibilities clashing with 'corporate burnout', work-related stress and mental health concerns. This is exacerbated by the inequality in employment trends and due to limited access to essential infrastructure such as healthcare and childcare, data show and experts say. India's 2024 Time Use Survey showed that on average, an Indian woman or girl, six years and above, spent 426 minutes each day on unpaid care and domestic work for household members, nearly the same amount of time as in 2019. They also spent 341 minutes a day on employment-related activities (343 minutes in 2019). But urban women spend more time on employment-related activities (391 minutes a day) while spending almost the same time on domestic and care work (427 minutes a day). This implies a higher double burden – defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Gender Studies as the workload of people who do both paid work and unpaid domestic work – on urban women than on rural women. In January 2024, IndiaSpend reported that married working women in India spend significantly less time in self-care, leisure, socialising and religious activities than married working men. Need to compensate A study by the Centre for Economic and Data Analysis at Ashoka University shows that the increase in labour force participation between 2017-'18 (51.5%) and 2023-'24 (60.5%) was primarily driven by the doubling of female labour force participation in rural areas from 23.5% to 42.8%. But this increase has come from self-employment and casual work, says Puja Guha, an Associate Professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Of the proportion of women employed, regular wage employment made up 16% in 2024, down from 21% in 2017-'18. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey data for 2024, women working in their own-account (working in their own businesses) or home-based enterprises made up 73.5% of women's work in rural areas in 2024, compared to 42.3% in urban areas. In a study with her team, Guha observed that women in rural areas tend to be more engaged in self-employment and unpaid work when there is highly 'gender-insensitive' infrastructure based on the gender-sensitivity index. 'The gender-sensitivity index is based on data from four domains – the gender sensitivity of governance-related infrastructure, physical infrastructure, education-related infrastructure, and health-related infrastructure,' the study states. They found that self-employment and unpaid work were positively correlated with gender-unfriendly infrastructure, such as proximity to infrastructure for banking, electricity etc, and to education and healthcare infrastructure. This is because salaried work mostly requires women to step out of the house, difficult if the infrastructure for it is inadequate. The benefit of self employment is that it provides 'temporal flexibility in terms of when one can work and spatial flexibility in terms of where one can work', said Rosa Abraham, another Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University. In a 2024 study with Vijayamba R, Assistant Professor, NLSIU, and Srinivas Raghavendra, Associate Professor, Azim Premji University, Abraham found that there was a 4.2 minute decrease in time spent on unpaid work, ie, domestic and care work within the household, with one hour of time spent in employment for a rural self-employed woman with 'fairly high' levels of education. In contrast, time spent in unpaid work increased by 6.6 minutes with an hour of salaried work for an urban graduate woman. Abraham said that this could be because urban women in salaried work feel the need to compensate for their absence from home. This could result in them compromising on other activities such as self-care. Besides, women with high levels of education may spend more time in childcare by teaching children at home and helping them with academics after school, she added. Double burden A review of studies, published in 2021, noted that several studies have linked unpaid care work to mental health issues. For instance, they wrote, a systematic review comparing health outcomes of unpaid caregivers and non-care givers from Africa, Asia, and South America found that unpaid caregivers had higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms than non-care givers. Similarly, a study from the US found that inequities in the division of housework and women's disproportionate share contributed substantially to sex differences in depression, the authors noted. A 2024 study by researchers based in the United States and Japan found that an additional hour of caregiving per day reduces the probability of Indian women reporting median level life satisfaction by 26 percentage points and good physical health by 15 percentage points, indicating the adverse impacts of a high double burden on women's health. Policy solutions Public provisioning of domestic and care work is essential to reduce the double burden on women, especially in urban areas, said Ashwini Deshpande, Professor of Economics at Ashoka University. This, she said, must begin with recognition, reduction, and redistribution of invisible work that is undertaken within the household. In urban areas the quality of private healthcare and childcare is highly uneven and inaccessible and thus an improved anganwadi system (which provides nutrition and early education to young children) could help women. Guha added that public policies are largely intended to benefit only rural regions. As a result, she said, health and care infrastructure in urban areas is led by private players who offer better quality infrastructure but exclude a significant chunk of the population who cannot afford these services. Abraham suggested that it might help if public childcare institutions like creches function for longer hours, especially for urban women. Besides, she also mentioned that maternity benefits largely penalise women's work as they are a cost to enterprises. To make it easier for firms to bear the cost, she suggested the government should create a public fund, to which firms also contribute, that can be used to cover maternity benefits for employees.
Time of India
5 days ago
- Health
- Time of India
Scientist Who Runs at Night: Film on dreamer-innovator at S Asia fest
Kolkata: Padma Shri Sujoy Kumar Guha was an electrical engineer who developed RISUG, the world's only reversible male contraceptive drug. But Indian Council of Medical Research turned down his plea to conduct clinical trials for a drug, developed by a person without a medical degree. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Undaunted, Guha taught at the IIT at 7 am, then attended medical school at University College of Medical Sciences at 8 am. 'The Scientist Who Runs at Night'—a documentary exploring the life of this octogenarian — is one of the most compelling entries competing at the 8th South Asian Film Festival. Guha's achievements have been widely documented about how he developed the one-time, minimally invasive injection with negligible side effects that is effective up to 15 years. "Despite successful clinical trials on more than 2,000 humans, he still faces challenges. He's up against the international pharma lobby and the $30 billion contraceptive market. He is now guiding the RISUG project through the last bureaucratic hurdles but will he realize his dream and obtain final approval and a licence to manufacture the drug for the global market? But Guha refuses to give up. Every night, he goes for a jog to clear his mind," said director Mithun Pramanik. What sets this film apart from many others is its avoidance of becoming an extensive series of scientific lectures, which may have risked alienating average viewers. "A challenge of making a documentary on such a personality is the abundance of interview footage. Having been interviewed multiple times, Guha anticipates the questions and delivers almost identical answers in most interviews. I requested Mithun to film him in his personal space with his family backstory from Patna and his daily conversations with his wife, rather than just within the confines of labs and lecture rooms. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now I was willing to accept even 'NG (no good)' shots without proper lighting and lapel mics, knowing it would reveal various dimensions largely overlooked in his other documentation," said editor Saikat Sekhareswar Ray. The film offers a glimpse into the role of a spouse, who adapts to the quirks of supporting a scientist husband, who transforms one room of his home into a lab, the loneliness of an ageing couple, their children being away abroad, and the composure of receiving a call from the PMO about the Padma award while calmly continuing a meal. What finally emerged is a balance of Guha's professional and personal lives making the film cinematic without sacrificing its essential character.
Time of India
21-06-2025
- Time of India
Kol cops arrest 3 Zimbabwean nat'ls from Mohali for cyber fraud
Kolkata: After a dramatic cross-country chase between cyber fraudsters from Africa and Kolkata Police, three Zimbabwean nationals were arrested from Mohali in Punjab for allegedly orchestrating a sophisticated cyber fraud that duped a senior pharmaceutical company official of over Rs 1.1 crore. The accused — Tinashe Gadzikkwa Praise (22), Malvern Matumgamire (25) and Nyamhunga Lenon Kudakwashe (23) — were held from different locations in Mohali's Kharar area early on Saturday following a brief chase involving the cops, helped by Punjab Police. The arrests, by Kolkata Police's cyber cell, came following a complaint by Sandip Guha (53), a resident of New Town, this May. The suspects allegedly created fake email addresses and documents bearing the letterhead of a top UK pharmaceutical company and the World Health Organization to lure Guha into a fraudulent kola nut trading scheme. Kola nut is used in medicines that are used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The scammers expanded their communication to WhatsApp, using multiple international numbers, primarily from the UK. They introduced Guha to alleged kola nut sellers from northeast India, and, to gain his trust, also "delivered" small quantities of the same. "Convinced by these initial transactions and the professional appearance of the operation, Guha transferred a total of Rs 1,10,41,250 through multiple RTGS transactions to various Indian bank accounts," recalled an officer. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Adidas Three Combo Short With 60% Discount So Hurry Up! Shop Now Original Adidas Shop Now Undo Guha alleged that the fraudsters orchestrated a two-week-long scheme using forged documents. Joint CP (crime & traffic) Rupesh Kumar said: "The accused rented a flat in the Golf Link area in Mohali. A total of six mobile phones, one laptop, some bank documents and other documents were seized. The arrested individuals will be produced before the jurisdictional court concerned for transit remand." "The arrests are significant as it exposes an international cyber fraud ring operating from Indian soil," said Kumar. "We are investigating possible links to other similar cases across the country," he added. The accused would be brought to Kolkata for further investigation and more arrests were likely, an officer said. The case had been registered under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act and BNS, including sections related to fraud, impersonation and cybercrime.
