Business

Atmanirbhar Bharat & ballooning trade deficit with China

Atmanirbhar Bharat & ballooning trade deficit...

October 20, 2021

India’s overall trade deficit in merchandise trade in the first six months of the current fiscal, from April 1 to September 30, 2021, jumped sharply to USD 78.81 billion, up from USD 25.7 billion last year, a hike of 207 pc, though the deficit stood marginally lower than USD 88...

Read More
156% rise in downloads of Indian health and fitness apps

156% rise in downloads of Indian health and fitnes...

October 13, 2021

With the start of the Covid-19 induced, nationwide lockdown in March 2020, thousands of gyms and sports complexes across India were forced to shut down, some for as long as six months without relief in the worst-affected cities. Even as lockdown restrictions were slowly being lif...

Read More
India joins global craze for NFTs

India joins global craze for NFTs

October 8, 2021

While the global attention seems to be focused on the craze for cryptocurrencies which are again back at new highs, another player is making a quieter but significant surge, riding on the back of one of cryptocurrencies. Meet NFT or Non-Fungible Token. Introduced in 2017, NFT is ...

Read More
India’s slow but steady move to e-vehicles

India’s slow but steady move to e-vehicles

October 2, 2021

The new, tightened air quality guidelines released by the World Health Organisation on September 22 put almost all of India in the ‘polluted’ category. This has further highlighted the country’s dire pollution problem and the urgent need for a phaseout of fossil fuels and a...

Read More
India’s blossoming billion-dollar beauty market

India’s blossoming billion-dollar beauty market

September 27, 2021

Move over fashion and beauty magazines. Tens of millions of Indian women, young and not so young, are looking at their smartphones for the latest hot tips on beauty and make-up as Indian beauty influencers such as Kaushal Beauty, Shreya Jain and Malvika Sitlani have garnered hund...

Read More
The boom of fashion e-commerce in India

The boom of fashion e-commerce in India

September 22, 2021

In the last decade, e-commerce has transformed the business landscape worldwide, recently driven by the almost complete shift to online shopping during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although many fashion retailers, even strong, established brands such as Zara, have experienced a fall in...

Read More
Need to regulate human invasion of Space

Need to regulate human invasion of Space

September 14, 2021

For long, it was the purview of the government to decide who would get to the space. But no longer so. Now, almost anyone who can afford to pay for it seems to be getting a ticket. For instance, in the matter of a few weeks, after Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, another billionai...

Read More
Indian economy: Pandemic recovery long way off

Indian economy: Pandemic recovery long way off

September 8, 2021

On August 31, the Union finance ministry tweeted a self-congratulatory message saying its prediction of a V-shaped, or very rapid, recovery in the Indian economy had come true as the Gross Domestic Product in the first quarter, ending on June 30, 2021, spiked by 20.1 pc over the ...

Read More
Edtech firms ride pandemic waves to dominate Indian education market

Edtech firms ride pandemic waves to dominate India...

September 4, 2021

One of the first successful edtech companies, the non-profit Khan Academy, was launched by an Indian-origin American, Sal Khan. The organisation’s videos have been viewed almost two billion times and later inspired many more edtech startups to come into the market, even winning...

Read More
National Monetisation Pipeline: Backdoor privatisation

National Monetisation Pipeline: Backdoor privatisa...

August 27, 2021

Unveiling the NMP on Monday, Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman was at pains to say that the monetisation plan was not akin to privatisation but “it aims to unlock value in brownfield projects by engaging the private sector, transferring to them revenue rights and not o...

Read More