Seasonal Magazine - FY'24 Performers

Seasonal

Managing Editor

Jason D Pavorattikaran

Editor

John Antony

Director (Finance)

Ceena

Associate Editor

Carl Jaison

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Jacob Deva

Senior Correspondent

Bina Menon

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Bijohns Varghese

Photographer

Anish Aloysious Office Assistant

Alby CG

Correspondents

Bombay: Rashmi Prakash

Delhi: Anurag Dixit Director (Technical)

John Antony

Publisher

Jason D Pavorattikaran

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HOW TO MAKE ALL INDIANS BENEFIT FROM THE INDIAN EQUITY MARKET

This July 24, India marks the 33rd anniversary of the economic liberalisation program that changed India’s growth trajectory forever. It was on July 24, 1991, that Dr. Manmohan Singh, the then finance minister, presented the landmark budget that ended the licence raj and ushered in the fresh air of economic growth through a never before attempted liberalised framework.

In the months running up to this budget, the BSE Sensex was hovering around 770 levels, and today it is over 77,000. This translates to 100X wealth creation within these last 33 years, just on the basis of this large cap index. But the real total wealth creation by India Inc has been much higher.

To understand this, we just have to look at listed Indian companies’ market capitalization then, and now. Before 1991’s liberalisation launch, India’s total market cap was just around Rs 1 lakh crore. Today it stands in excess of $5 trillion, or more than Rs 400 lakh crore, which translates to at least a 400X wealth creation by Indian listed companies during these 33 years.

In fact, India has become one among the only five nations or markets in the world that have surpassed this $5 trillion mark. Previously, only the US, China, Japan & Hong Kong have achieved this feat. But when it comes to per capita incomes and living standards, India still has a long way to go compared with these other nations / regions.

But this is something that shouldn’t discourage us, as India’s socioeconomic challenges are much bigger than any of these nations or regions. India has a much bigger population than Japan or Hong Kong and far

fewer natural resources than the US or China. Besides this, India has to work things out in the framework of a democracy unlike autocratic China or a two-party democracy like the US.

However, our world-beating population as well as our vibrant democratic norms can be put to good use, if only we start thinking innovatively - maybe like how no nation has ever done before - for uplifting the living standards of all Indians, or at least for all Indians who are in dire need of it, by leveraging the wealth creation potential of our own equity market.

Even with the dramatic rise in indices like Sensex and Nifty, and the even higher rise in Midcap and Smallcap indices, only around 10% of Indians have a demat account to invest directly into stocks. Mutual Funds in India have been on a high growth trajectory since the 2009 World Economic Crisis and the stock market rout, but still there are only a little over 3% of Indians who have invested in mutual funds.

Interestingly, India is perhaps the only country in the world where there are more demat account holders than mutual fund holders! This is attributed to two aspects - one, the relative immaturity and under penetration of the mutual fund industry, and two, the affinity for India’s upper class segments to invest directly into stocks.

But this will change eventually as more and more Indians realise that equity investing is best left to professional investment firms like mutual funds. But whether this happens or not shouldn’t concern us, as the pressing need of the hour is to bring the benefits of equity market investing to more and more people who need it the most.

As a first step towards this, just like how Jan Dhan bank accounts were started for over 50 crore Indians for direct benefits transfer and other facilities, there needs to be a

mechanism whereby crores of needy Indians are gifted with mutual fund accounts. These can be zero-cost demat accounts, provided there is enough depth and variety in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and/or if more fund houses support storing mutual funds in demat accounts.

Since both these scenarios are not yet here on a sensible scale, the more popular mode of mutual fund investing, that is through folios, can be relied upon for this purpose. All mutual fund houses, especially those MFs promoted by public sector entities like SBI, other PSU banks, LIC etc can be asked to take the lead in this exercise.

If you are still wondering where the actual investments would come, the answer is simple. The Central Government has been paying Rs 6000 per year to each landholding farming family in India, since 2018 as income support under the PM-Kisan scheme. Similarly, many state governments have been paying various kinds of pensions to economically weaker sections of the people, like senior citizens, widows, disabled people etc, which are often much higher or comparable to the farmer payouts.

If the central and state governments can come together to provide at least Rs 500 as a monthly assistance to needy families for their savings by investing into mutual fund SIPs, that alone can elevate the Indian living standards into developed nation territory, as a monthly Rs 500 investment into an average performing mutual fund SIP of 15% CAGR would create a corpus of over 1.5 crore rupees for each family within a 40 year period, which is the most crucial time frame for families as a young couple moves from their 20s to their 60s.

The beneficiaries of such a savings payout can be limited by the same mechanisms used to limit the farmer payouts, like limiting it to non income-tax payees, non-employees of government & public sector, non-holders of constitutional posts etc. But at the same time, all citizens should be encouraged to take part in such a scheme, from their own pockets.

Such a move would also bring in unprecedented inflows into the Indian corporates, which would be flush with capital for not only competing effectively with global majors, but for lessening our dependence on overseas capital and for scaling up our production and service capabilities for the whole world, and in the process creating higher paying jobs for the next generations of Indians.

While the Indian market may appear overvalued for now with the market-cap to GDP ratio crossing the 100% mark, two things offer comfort for the long term growth prospects of our equity markets - one, there are equity markets like that of the US that is trading at over 155%, and two, we are the nation that is growing the denominator of this ratio, that is the GDP, faster than any other, for now.

John Antony

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

PERMA+, A PSYCHOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR HEALTH, HAPPINESS & WELLBEING

TOP PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES

Higher education campuses across India are innovating creatively for the benefit of their students, even as they wait patiently for the campus placements momentum to return.

The pursuit of happiness is one that humans have been working toward since the beginning of time. Yet the concept of “happiness” is often hard to accurately define. Living the good life, flourishing, self-actualization, joy, and purpose are words that come to mind with happiness. Is it possible to experience any of these in the middle of a chaotic world and

HOW TO AVOID 5 BIG MISTAKES WHEN APPLYING FOR A JOB

Keep firing out CVs and getting zilch back? You might be making one of these five common job application mistakes.

SATHYABAMA IS GOING STRONG EVEN AMID A TOUGH SCENARIO

Chancellor Dr. Mariazeena Johnson has made the performance of Sathyabama Institute of Science & Technology (SIST) a tour-deforce in India’s higher education

5 PRODUCTIVITY HACKS FROM STANFORD

Stanford professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao are the authors of ‘The Friction Project’, and here they share 5 friction-busting mindset shifts to fast-track productivity.

BEWARE, AI SCIENTISTS THEMSELVES CAN’T EXPLAIN AI’S STUNNING FEATS ANY MORE

Will Douglas Heaven is the senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review, and himself a PhD in computer science from Imperial College London who has earlier

DOES MORE JOY LIE IN GOOD THINGS OR ANTICIPATION OF GOOD STUFF?

How can you change your life for the better today? Learn not just to appreciate happiness –but to anticipate it.

BANK OF INDIA’S PERFORMANCE OVERCOMES ALL CHALLENGES

Under the strategic leadership of its MD & CEO Rajneesh Karnatak, Bank of India is firing on all its cylinders with its stock soaring over 125% during his first year in office. Like most of its peers, Bank of India had faced many challenges

JSS AHER IS UPSHIFTING TO GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

After firmly establishing its national leadership in health sciences education & research, Mysuru headquartered deemed-to-be university JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research (JSS AHER) is spreading its wings globally. This upshifting was visible when JSS AHER recently won the global first rank in UK

GALGOTIAS UNIVERSITY IS SOARING AHEAD ON

Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, based Galgotias University is widening its lead with peer universities despite its young age, under the visionary leadership of its dynamic young leader Dr. Dhruv

7 WAYS TO LOWER THE SILENT KILLER HYPERTENSION WITHOUT MEDICATION

While plenty of health conditions make you painfully aware of their presence via any number of impossible-toignore symptoms, high blood pressure (a.k.a. hypertension) can be a sneakier beast. You can literally walk around all

The Dark Side of the Obsession With Focus

The New York Times bestselling author and contrarian self-help writer Oliver Burkeman talks to host and ace podcaster Derek Thompson about his new audio essay series on work, focus, and interruptions - and how, too often, our emphasis on eliminating distractions ironically takes us away from the most important things in life. What do we get wrong when trying to eliminate all distractions and interruptions while working? And why it can be harmful to categorize all interruptions to your focus as problems.

erek Thompson: I want to talk about two audio essays that you recently recorded on the Waking Up app that really hit me in a very deep way. I have written and read and podcasted so much about productivity, and for most of my writing and reading and podcasting career, maybe the most persuasive idea in the space of productivity that I keep coming back to again and again is this: If you want to get anything worthwhile done, you need deep focus, deep work, deep attention, and that means that it is, above all, essential to minimize what is sometimes called “context switching,” bouncing between tasks and shedding precious focus in the act of switching. These principles of eliminating interruption, eliminating distraction are so commonly repeated that they’re almost obvious to the point of being trite, and that’s why I was stopped in my tracks

by the persuasiveness and the wisdom of your recent audio essay, which said, “No, there is actually a subtle problem with these pieces of ancient wisdom.” So tell us, what is the problem with living life with a strong emphasis on eliminating interruptions?

Oliver Burkeman: I find it very appealing to be contrarian about these things, but I also want to make sure I’m being truthful about them, so I feel like I have to say, I don’t think that this is false, the idea that context switching imposes this drain on focus and attention. But I think that the subtle problem that underlies all of this is that the more you go through your day with a very clear, conceptual, intellectual plan for how it should go, for what the boundaries of your time are, for what you’re doing for the next three hours and what will be a problem if you get interrupted or blown off course, the more

you bring that to your day, the worse it is when you are interrupted. Because reality collides with this brittle overlay that you are placing on top of it. And even more subtly, perhaps, more things end up getting defined as interruptions and as problems.

Thompson: Can you give me an example of this idea that we are quietly driving ourselves crazy by over-defining interruptions as problems?

Burkeman: If I’m working from home and it’s the afternoon and it’s part of the day when my arrangement with my partner that day is that I’m working and she is hanging out with our 7-year-old son, if he bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that happened to him at school that day—as he may do in the middle of this podcast recording, just as a warning—there may be contexts where I can’t entertain that interruption, but I don’t want to be deliberately signing up to an approach to productivity that, first of all, defines that lovely moment as a bad thing because it doesn’t fit my scheme when I’m someone who does have the good fortune and the privilege to be able to entertain that interruption. Obviously, if I was not working at home or working for a terrible boss who would fire me the moment I was distracted, I couldn’t do that, but I can, and I risk this self-imposed desire to turn it into a problem because I’ve got my little schedule drawn up, and it contradicts that schedule.

I was just going to say, alongside that, there’s always been this question in my mind when the costs of task switching, costs of interruption are discussed, often with reliance on neuroscience and stuff. I’m always wondering, Why is the conversation always about responding to that situation by trying to eliminate task switching and never about getting better at task switching? I mean, if all this stuff about neural plasticity is where it’s at, then maybe we ought to be able to get a little bit better at moving between tasks in that fashion.

(Credit: Derek Thompson)

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

BANK OF INDIA’S PERFORMANCE OVERCOMES ALL CHALLENGES

UNDER THE STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP OF ITS MD & CEO RAJNEESH KARNATAK, BANK OF INDIA IS FIRING ON ALL ITS CYLINDERS WITH ITS STOCK SOARING OVER 125% DURING HIS FIRST YEAR IN OFFICE. LIKE MOST OF ITS PEERS, BANK OF INDIA HAD FACED MANY CHALLENGES INCLUDING HIGHER CREDIT COSTS, RESULTANT MARGIN PRESSURES AND A TENDENCY FOR HIGHER SLIPPAGES IN SOME SECTORS. HOWEVER, THE LEADING MUMBAI BASED PUBLIC SECTOR BANK HAS EMERGED A WINNER BY ACHIEVING A HEALTHY GROWTH OF 7% IN BOTH NET INTEREST INCOME AND NET PROFIT ON THE BACK OF A SHARP IMPROVEMENT IN BOTH GROSS & NET NPAS.

Mid-sized PSU lender Bank of India (BOI) has demonstrated resilience and strategic agility in the face of economic challenges it faced in Q4 and most of FY’24. In the fourth quarter, Bank of India’s net profit grew by a healthy 7% on a year-onyear basis, reaching Rs. 1,439 crore compared to the Rs. 1,350 crore BOI had achieved in Q4 of FY 2023. This healthy growth was impossible in Q4 except for the Mumbai based bank’s effective risk management and operational efficiencies that got enhanced under the first year tenure of its MD & CEO Rajneesh Karnatak. Notably, the public sector bank’s stock has had a remarkable 125% surge during this first year under Karnatak. The bank’s operating profit

for Q4 FY 24 stood at Rs. 3,557 crore, demonstrating sustained strength in its operational performance, while it could maintain its Core Net Interest Margin (NIM), despite the headwinds seen in Q4. For the whole of FY 24 too, Bank of India performed impressively with its net profit surging significantly by 57% YoY, reaching Rs. 6,318 crore compared to Rs. 4,023 crore in the previous full fiscal. Unlike many of its PSU peers, Bank of India is adequately capitalised with a robust Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) of 22.26%, ensuring adequate capital reserves for risk mitigation as well as for meeting credit growth opportunities. BOI also has a Tier 1 capital ratio of 20.11%, that guards against any potential dilution in equity due to fund raising

in the short to intermediate term. Like most of its peers, the main headwind faced by Bank of India during Q4 and much of FY’ 24 was balancing its yield on advances with its cost of funds. This task it achieved remarkably under the guidance of CEO Rajneesh Karnataka by optimising its lending portfolio which resulted in a yield of 10.82%. At the same time its cost of deposits was contained remarkably at 4.48% with overall cost of funds at 4.74% through effective liability management and resource allocation. As a public sector bank, BOI is always aware of its obligation to further financial inclusion and spur economic growth in the country. At the same time, being a listed entity with a diversified shareholder base, including major institutional

investors, the bank is following a diligent balancing act, where profitability and return ratios cannot take a back seat. Towards this, BOI has unleashed a slew of strategic initiatives that include digital transformation, risk diversification, and customer-centric services. BOI has invested in modernising its digital channels, including internet banking, its VYOM mobile app, UPI, ATMs and SMS banking. These platforms allow customers to perform transactions, check balances, and access services conveniently from their devices. BOI has also implemented robust cybersecurity measures to protect customer data and prevent fraud, so that its customers can sleep peacefully.

RAJNEESH KARNATAK MD & CEO

Regular security audits, encryption, and multi-factor authentication are part of the bank’s strategies in this regard. The bank has also implemented Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry, reconciliation, and account verification. This improves operational efficiency and reduces manual errors. For its risk diversification and mitigation, the bank is keeping a laser focus on its asset quality, liquidity management, and capital adequacy. BOI along with its peer banks have been urging the banking sector regulator, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to ease the current liquidity coverage requirements, which will free up more funds for lending, thereby stimulating economic growth in the country. Bank of India is also participating with peer

banks to implement PerformanceLinked Incentives for employees, much like in private sector banks. Employees also stand to win as this includes a five-day banking week, in addition to the 17% salary increase they recently had. As a mid-sized bank, BOI is poised to grow further from the over 5100 branches in India spread over all states/ union territories including specialised branches. The bank also has 69 Zonal Offices and 13 FGMO Offices. Rajneesh Karnatak who assumed charge as Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Bank of India on 29th April, 2023, is a veteran banker who was earlier Executive Director in Union Bank of India, and before that Chief General Manager of Punjab National Bank. Karnatak’s diverse experience in these much bigger banks will help BOI to grow to much higher levels in the years and decades to come.

P R RAJAGOPAL, ED

SUBRAT KUMAR, ED

M KARTHIKEYAN, ED

RAJIV MISHRA, ED

YES BANK SURPRISES IN Q4, PAYTM INTEGRATION IMPRESSIVE

Private sector lender Yes Bank, which has been on a repair path, surprised the market by a 123% rise in net profit in Q4, despite only a 2.3% rise in Net Interest Income. The performance was driven by a strong show in Non Interest Income which was up by over 56%. The bank has so far integrated the Paytm merchant accounts coming in impressively, and the bank’s deposits, CASA, NPAs and RoA are all on a steady mend.

MANKIND PHARMA POSTS STRONG Q4,

EYES RS 7500 CRORE FUND RAISE

Emerging star in the pharmaceutical space, Mankind Pharma has achieved an over 65% YoY jump in net profit in Q4. The performance is remarkable as it comes on both revenue expansion at 19% and EBITDA margin expansion from 20.3% to 24.2%. Mankind Pharma, which had gone in for its over Rs 4326 crore IPO via a pure OFS route by promoters and early investors, is now mulling a major expansion spree with its board approving a fund raise of Rs 7,500 crore, which may include a qualified institutional placement (QIP).

PURAVANKARA IN OVERDRIVE, DESPITE QUARTERLY LOSS

Bengaluru headquartered real estate development major, Puravankara Limited, has achieved a remarkable 112% year-onyear increase in net revenue to Rs 947 crore. Despite incurring a net loss of Rs 7 crore for Q4 of FY24, this has helped maintain the realty major’s momentum in its geographic markets as well as the capital market. Earlier, Puravankara had reported a 90% year-on-year increase in pre-sales, reaching an impressive Rs 5,914 crore for FY24. This significant surge is attributed to new project launches and sustained demand from homebuyers.Its sales value stood at Rs 1,947 crore, marking a 93% year-on-year growth, while its sales volume came in at 2.35 million

sq ft, representing a 94% year-on-year increase. Sales realisation remained high and stable at Rs 7,916 per sq ft. Though it is still saddled with significant debt of Rs 2,151 crore with a net debt-to-equity ratio of 1.14, Puravankara is coping more than adequately with a strong collection of Rs 1,094 crore in Q4, which is up 66% year-on-year. Demonstrating impressive geographic diversification, Puravankara has secured redevelopment rights for three projects in Mumbai, with a potential gross development value of Rs 3600 crore, while its 12 recent launches with a saleable area of 9.47 million square feet, are tapping high-potential micro-markets.

POWER GRID POSTS FLAT Q4 ON HIGH BASE, STOCK MAY OFFER CHANCES FOR SAFER ENTRY

Due to last Q4’s exceptional performance, Power Grid was already expected to come up with a flat performance in revenue and profits in this Q4. With the PSU power connectivity major keeping up to that expectation with just a 2.5% fall in year-on-year revenue and 3.6% fall in net profit, the stock’s negative reaction in the market is likely to be short lived. Sitting on an 80% price appreciation during the last 12 months, this temporary correction may offer a chance for investors who missed the bus so far to get invested in this power sector monopoly.

SOUTH INDIAN BANK’S FY’24 STRONG,

FOCUS IS ON QUALITY CREDIT GROWTH

South Indian Bank has achieved a 38% growth in net profit in FY’24 even though its Q4 net profit dipped YoY. Under the leadership of its new MD & CEO PR Seshadri, a banking sector veteran, the bank followed its operational strategy of ‘profitability through quality credit growth’ and could achieve growth in almost all key verticals including Corporate Loans, SME, Auto Loans, Credit Cards, Personal Loans and Gold Loans, even while bringing down its gross & net NPA levels.

WHY BANK OF BARODA MIGHT OUTPERFORM GOING FORWARD

BANK OF BARODA’S PERFORMANCE IN Q4 MAY SEEM MODEST WITH BOTH NET INTEREST INCOME AND NET PROFIT GROWING BY ONLY 2.3%, BUT THIS WAS DESPITE THE BANK ACCOMMODATING THE IMPACT OF ADDITIONAL PROVISION ON ACCOUNT OF RETIRALS IN Q4. GIVEN ITS STRONG PERFORMANCE IN GROWTH AND ASSET QUALITY UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF ITS MD & CEO DEBADATTA CHAND, THE BANK’S ATTRACTIVE VALUATIONS AT JUST 7.5 TIMES TTM P/E AND JUST 1.15 TIMES P/BV MAKE THE PSU BANKING STOCK ATTRACTIVE, ESPECIALLY IF THE BANK CAN LOWER ITS LOAN-DEPOSIT RATIO (LDR) AND KEEP THE QOQ MARGIN UPTICK STABLE.

Debadatta Chand Managing Director & CEO

Though Bank of Baroda’s stock had a recent sharp fall of over 17% from its 52 Week and All Time Highs, owing to the market fear of a fractured mandate in the elections, this was much in line with its banking sector peers as well as large cap PSU stocks. Things are back to normal even more swiftly, with BoB stock now just over 9% away from its All Time High that was set recently. The reason for this kind of market outperformance reflects its fundamentally strong performance. In the fourth quarter of FY24, the staterun lender has achieved a standalone net profit of Rs. 4886 crore and Net Interest Income of Rs. 11,793 crore. While both of these figures mark only 2.3% year-onyear rise, there have been specific reasons for the same. The second largest public sector bank had to accommodate the impact of a significant wage revision in Q4. Going forward, BoB is expected to perform much better fundamentally and on the bourses, under the visionary leadership of its MD & CEO Debadatta Chand, for several reasons. A hint of this was visible during the run up to the election results, when the Indian stock market and especially the Bank Nifty outperformed. Bank of Baroda stood out among the gainers during this period, and contributed the most to Bank Nifty crossing the historic 50,000 mark. The fourth quarter also witnessed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), allowing Bank of Baroda to resume onboarding new customers through its mobile app, BoB World. The restriction was lifted after just six months, based on Bank of Baroda’s swift action in correcting and allaying the banking sector regulator’s concerns. This has come as a shot in the arm for BoB as more and more retail deposits and loans are digitally originated these days. On the asset quality front, the Vadodara, Gujarat headquartered lender is expected to achieve significant improvement in the current fiscal year. As cautionary provisions get reversed and retail loans continue to expand, BoB stands to gain by way of both topline and bottomline growth. A specific case in point was the recent debt settlement of the Ludhiana Toll Road project, which had faced significant delays and had become a major non-performing asset (NPA)

for a group of banks led by Bank of Baroda. Now with these lenders recently approving the National Asset Reconstruction Company Limited’s (NARCL) offer of Rs 270 crore to settle the debt, this long-standing issue stands resolved and the ground is now set to revive the project, which may even end up as a major performing asset for BoB in the years to come. The bank has guided for 1214% credit growth, with over 1% Return on Assets (RoA), and around 3.15% Net Interest Margin (NIM). Personal Loans are expected to grow at a more brisk pace, with 3035% growth possible in the ongoing fiscal. Most analysts concur with this view with their consensus estimates on BoB’s revenue growth being 8.2%, on profit growth being 4.7%, on EPS being 4.4%, and with Return on Equity staying around 14.6%. BoB has plans to introduce floating rate deposits linked to MIBOR for High Networth Individuals HNIs, Ultra HNIs and institutional investors, as well as to issue green bonds. The bank has exhibited remarkable resilience and growth from its humble beginnings in 1908, to its nationalisation in 1969, to its merger with smaller PSU banking peers Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank in 2019, to the Covid pandemic, and to its newfound resurgence which is symbolised aptly by its state-of-the-art, high-rise and iconic Baroda Corporate Centre in Mumbai. Bank of Baroda has also been India’s premier presence in international banking. As of Q4 end, the second largest PSU lender’s domestic branch count is 8243, its ATM and cash recyclers are 11,033, and its employee count is around 75,000 and growing. This banking giant offers a full gamut of banking services including commercial, personal, and corporate banking solutions, along with appraisal, merchant, and correspondent banking, cash management, and treasury services to meet diverse financial needs. The bank is in a friendly yet neck-to-neck competition with the third largest PSU lender Punjab National Bank (PNB). While in revenues they are almost similar, when it comes to profitability and dividend yield, BoB is way ahead. At the same time, almost like an anomaly, BoB’s valuations are much lower than PNB by way of both P/E & P/BV, which has rendered their market capitalisations to be similar, which is one additional reason why the market is most bullish on BoB from the PSU pack.

Lalit Tyagi Executive Director

Sanjay Vinayak Mudaliar Executive Director

Lal Singh Executive Director

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

HAL’S Q4 REVENUE & PROFIT SOAR, YEARLY ORDERS WINS MOST IMPRESSIVE

Leading defense PSU Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) has achieved a 52% YoY growth in net profit on the back of a healthy 18% growth in revenue. While the sequential performance was even higher by way of revenue and profits, it was due to the seasonally weak Q3. The order wins were the most impressive factor for HAL, with fresh orders for FY’24 amounting to Rs 35,000 crore. Despite a significant Offer-For-Sale of its shares in Q4, the HAL stock continued its northward climb and is now trading at its all time highs.

IRFC GROWS DESPITE ITS HUGE SIZE, EYES A RS 50,000 CRORE FUND RAISE

Indian Railway Finance Corporation (IRFC), a unique NBFC working under the Ministry of Railways, has achieved a 34% jump in its net profit in Q4 on account of steadily improving income and lower expenses, despite its huge balance sheet size. A capital hungry operation due to the huge extra-budgetary funding requirements of the Indian Railways, IRFC is now mulling a Rs 50,000 crore fund raise, which will predominantly be through a mix of various bonds, which comes as a relief to its equity investors many of whom are sitting on 10X gains from its IPO days in 2021.

CITY UNION BANK’S Q4 HEALTHY, OPERATING EXPENSE SHOOTS UP

City Union Bank’s Q4 was healthy on most counts with a 17% YoY rise in net profit on the back of a 6% YoY rise in its Net interest income (NII). Its asset quality improved significantly in the fourth quarter with both its Gross and Net NPA ratios getting into safer zones. However, due to a sharply higher cost-toincome (CIR) ratio on the back of additional manpower and IT infrastructure for implementing its digital lending process, the Tamil Nadu based bank had to suffer a short-term setback in operating profit which fell by 16% in Q4.

V-GUARD INDUSTRIES’ Q4 ROBUST, STOCK BREAKS OUT IMPRESSIVELY

Kochi headquartered V-Guard Industries has achieved an impressive set of growth figures for the fourth quarter of FY’24, with its revenue growing nearly 18% to touch Rs 1,342.77 crore. The diversified player in electrical appliances, wires, electronic goods, consumer durables and cooking appliances, performed even better on the profits front, with its net profit surging nearly 45% to reach Rs 76.17 crore. While electricals segment that contributes over 20% to its revenues grew 10.7%, its electronics segment grew 18.9%. V-Guard’s consumer durables division grew 27.9%, its newly acquired Sunflame family of products grew 28% during this quarter. The VGuard stock has decisively

broken out from its long-term trading range, and this is mainly driven by its resurgent overall performance as well as the margin-accretive synergies with Sunflame products in various categories, which may result in operating margins improving, going forward. V-Guard’s stock performance in the last 12 months is above par by its own standards in recent years, with it surging from Rs 275 levels to Rs 450 levels now. Despite this surge and its rich valuations by P/ E and P/BV now, V-Guard continues to be a reasonably sized company with its market capitalization hovering around the 20,000 crore mark, which shows its growth potential if the momentum in fundamental performance is maintained.

SONA BLW’S PERFORMANCE AT ALL TIME HIGHS, VALUATIONS PEAK

Sona BLW Precision Forgings is on a roll with all its core metrics - revenue, EBITDA & net profit at all time highs, with strong support from the EV sector. But its sky high valuations of nearly 74 times TTM P/E and 16 times P/BV signal rangeabound action in the stock for now.

AU SFB HITS SPEEDBREAKER IN Q4 BUT LONG TERM OUTLOOK PROMISING

AU Small Finance Bank’s stock which had fallen sharply in the early part of Q4 was widely expected to pick up steam again on Q4 results, but the 13% fall in net profit in Q4 has again played spoilsport. But the long term story remains intact with most other metrics improving, and the integration of smaller rival Fincare into itself successfully completed.

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

SPANDANA SPHOORTY AT PEAK PROFIT, LOW VALUATIONS MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE

Spandana Sphoorty Financial has achieved its highest ever annual profit level in FY’24, which has also gone down in history decisively as its turnaround year. However, its stock has corrected significantly from its annual high, rendering its valuations attractive compared to peers, especially if it can sustain its Q4 growth momentum that saw its core metric of net interest income growing by 41% and net profit by 22%, while its asset quality improved further.

KEI INDUSTRIES EXTENDS

DREAM RUN, CAPEX MOST IMPORTANT, GOING FORWARD

KEI Industries, one of India’s fastest wealth creator stocks continues its dream run, as the leading wire & cables company grew its revenue by 19%, EBITDA by 21% and net profit by 22% in Q4. The KEI stock has grown 100X from Rs 40 levels to Rs 4000 levels during the last 10 years, but going forward a major capex that KEI is executing will be key to sustain this momentum, and to effectively tap the demand which continues to be strong in the sector.

MAZAGON DOCK SHIPYARD’S Q4 STELLAR, NAVARATNA STATUS GAME CHANGER

Prominent defence player, Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL), has witnessed both a revenue and profit surge in Q4 with net profit skyrocketing by 101%, to Rs 662.97 crore, compared to Rs 326.19 crore in the same period last year. This was despite the naval player incurring a tax expense that shot up five fold over the previous year. The PSU major which has since then been upgraded to Navaratna status, is also in a strong financial position with its total income surging by 49% over the previous year’s corresponding period. With the company’s performance exceeding expectations, it is well positioned for future growth too. Achieving Navratna status is by no means an easy feat, as a PSU company must meet strict financial criteria over three

consecutive years for this, which includes a net profit exceeding Rs 5,000 crore annually, an average annual turnover of Rs 25,000 crore, or an average annual net worth exceeding Rs 15,000 crore. There are only 18 PSUs with Navaratna status, and it accords Mazagon Dock has the authority to make investments up to Rs 1,000 crore without requiring prior approval from the central government, as well as invest up to 30% of their net worth within a year, as long as it does not exceed Rs 1,000 crore. It also gives MDL the privilege to form joint ventures, alliances, and establish subsidiaries abroad, providing them with greater flexibility and autonomy in their business operations. These Navaratna features are sure to elevate MDL’s growth to a new orbit.

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

GARDEN REACH TRIPLES IN VALUE, STILL MARKET CAP ONLY 70% OF ORDER BOOK

Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers’ (GRSE) recent achievements, financial performance, and strategic partnerships demonstrate its commitment to innovation and growth in the shipbuilding industry. Under the visionary leadership of its Chairman & Managing Director, Cmde PR Hari, IN (Retd.), the GRSE stock has more than tripled in value, but still has a long way to go with its market cap only Rs 15,686 crore, which is only 70% of its current order book of Rs 22,653 crores.

Kolkata based defence sector shipbuilder, Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers (GRSE), has crossed the crucial Rs 1000 crore quarterly revenue run rate for the first time in Q4, while its EBITDA has tripled and its net profit has doubled to reach Rs 112 crore on a year-onyear basis. Investors had cheered GRSE’s Q4 results announcement with the stock price soaring over 18% after the results were published, and taking the stock to a new all time high. The GRSE stock has had a stellar run in the bourses during Q4, rising over 70% during the past three months. On a yearly basis too, the stock has seen remarkable growth, having more than tripled in value from its 52-week low which was recorded in May 2023. But going forward, the PSU firm should achieve major order wins for this momentum to continue, which the company is confident of, at this stage. Reflecting

GRSE’s commitment to excellence in shipbuilding and engineering, major manufacturing orders and maintenance works have been pouring in from its main two clients, Indian Navy and the Indian Coast Guard. Apart from in-house designed warships, such orders have so far included in-house designed AntiSubmarine Warfare Shallow Water Crafts (ASWSWCs), Survey Vessels and Patrol Vessels for the Indian Navy and Coast Guard. However, in recent quarters, GRSE has also been proactively signing MoUs with foreign companies to develop hydrogen fuel cell ferries as well as to provide sales and service of medium-speed engines. As on March 31, 2024, GRSE’s order book stood at Rs 22,653 crores. This order book primarily comprises orders from the shipbuilding sector, including key projects like P-17 Alpha, Survey Vessel Large Project, ASWSWCs, and

Ocean Going Patrol Vessels. The P17 Alpha Project involves the construction of three warships. While all three ships have been launched, the first ship is currently at 70% physical progress, the second ship at 60% progress, and the third ship at 47%. GRSE aims to deliver the first ship by mid-2025 and complete the entire P-17 Alpha Project by August 2026. GRSE’s Survey Vessel Large Project on the other hand is a fourship project, with the first ship already delivered to the Indian Navy. The ship was commissioned during Q4 on February 21, 2024, and is now fully operational. The Anti-Submarine Shallow Water Craft Project has been a key one for GRSE since the past few years and is valued at Rs 4,886 crores. Similarly, the Next Generation Ocean Going Patrol Vessel Project that GRSE is executing is valued at Rs 3,359 crores. The current fiscal of FY’25 is key for GRSE as the firm is expected to complete as many as five major vessels in this year. While the GRSE stock is now richly valued at nearly 44 P/E and 10 P/BV, this is a reflection of the high growth trajectory the company is in. But what most investors may miss is the crucial fact that GRSE has a long way to go with its market cap still in small cap territory at just Rs 15,686 crore, which is only 70% of its current order book of Rs 22,653 crores. The stock also has a reasonable dividend yield of 1.30% which may remain steady or even go up in the future due to its PSU nature.

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

IOB ACHIEVES HIGHEST EVER PROFITS, SLIPPAGE CONTROL MOST IMPRESSIVE

Chennai headquartered public sector lender, Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) has achieved its highest ever quarterly profit of Rs 808 crore in Q4 on a 24% rise in net profit. Under the visionary leadership of its MD & CEO and IOB veteran Ajay Kumar Srivastava, the bank also achieved a 50% improvement in Gross NPAs, a sharp uptick in CASA deposits, and one of the lowest slippages at just 0.87% of its performing advances.

ULTRATECH Q4 IS ROBUST, BUT FUTURE IS CHALLENGING WITH LOOMING PRICE WARS

Ultratech Cement’s Q4 couldn’t be better with revenue rising by nearly 10% and profit surging by 35%, but the immediate future looks tough with price hikes rolled back, and an impending price war between the biggies.

KVB CONTINUES STELLAR SHOW IN Q4, CREDIT COST DIPS UNLIKE IN MOST PEERS

Karur Vysya Bank continued its stellar show in Q4, with its net interest income up by over 11% and net profit jumping by 35%. Under the leadership of its MD & CEO Ramesh Babu B, its asset quality continued to improve, while the bank pulled a surprise by managing to reduce its credit costs further even amid a tough scenario in attracting low cost deposits. KVB stock also continued its outperformance and is trading near all-time-highs despite reasonable valuations.

COAL INDIA’S REVENUE GROWTH SLOWS, BUT STRONG DEMAND & DIVIDENDS SUSTAIN IT

State owned PSU giant Coal India has managed to maintain its profit growth in Q4 with net profit rising 26%, but the revenue growth was lower than expected. However the market is taking it as a temporary blip, as nobody expects the demand for coal to go down in the near future in a high growth country like India, while Coal India’s high dividend payout protects its share price from sharp falls.

CAN FIN HOMES Q4 ROBUST, BUT STOCK STAYS RANGE BOUND

Mid-sized home loan provider Can Fin Homes is continuing its steady year-on-year growth with a 21% increase in revenue and 26% rise in net profit in Q4. Valuations also remain undemanding, but the stock continues to be range bound as the market gets weary about its slowing quarter-on-quarter growth momentum.

L&T FINANCE’S DISBURSEMENTS STRONG, ASSET QUALITY & PROFIT NEED TO IMPROVE

Leading NBFC L&T Finance has much to cheer for its Q4 and FY’24 with retailisation momentum strong and disbursements at all time high, but the gross NPAs need to come below the guided target range and profits need to grow sequentially too.

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

INDUSIND BANK’S Q4 HEALTHY, OUTLOOK MIXED ON

EXPANSION

IndusInd Bank, the leading mid-sized private sector lender has achieved a healthy performance in Q4 with net profit rising 15% on a robust loan growth of 18%. The bank is also on a major 2-year expansion spree from 2800 branches to 3500 branches, which is a long-term positive for the stock, but a short to intermediate term negative, with over 11,000 new employees being taken in during FY’24 and operating expenses already swelling by 24%.

CENTRAL BANK OF INDIA’S Q4 HEALTHY, EYES RS 5000 CRORE FUND RAISE

Leading PSU lender Central Bank of India has achieved a healthy 41% increase in Q4 profit, but it was largely due to decline in provisions towards NPAs and standard assets. However, the bank is now eyeing a Rs 5000 crore fund raise to augment its overall lending business.

BANK OF MAHARASHTRA’S Q4 HEALTHY, EYES HIGHER GROWTH UNDER NEW MD

Mid-sized home loan provider Can Fin Homes is continuing its steady year-on-year growth with a 21% increase in revenue and 26% rise in net profit in Q4. Valuations also remain undemanding, but the stock continues to be range bound as the market gets weary about its slowing quarter-on-quarter growth momentum.

STAR HEALTH ACHIEVES PEAK PROFIT, BUT PROFIT MIX & COMPOSITE LICENCE TROUBLING

Star Health & Allied Insurance, Health & Allied Insurance, Star Health & Allied Insurance, Health & Allied Insurance, Health the leading standalone health leading the leading standalone health leading leading insurer has achieved its all time insurer achieved all time achieved all high annual profit level in FY’24, annual level in in but relying more on investment but relying on investment on income. While it has fared better income. While has fared income. While it has fared better income. While has fared income. While it has fared better than peers in falling underwriting peers falling than peers in falling underwriting peers falling profits, the upcoming composite profits, the composite profits, the upcoming composite profits, the composite licence model is a risk for Star model is a for Star a Star Health’s unique model.

PROMISING PERFORMERS IN FY’24

AXIS BANK TURNS AROUND TO PROFIT IN Q4, STOCK AT ALL TIME HIGH ON PEAK VALUATION

Axis Bank has decisively turned around from losses to profits in Q4, and the market is also cheering the agile way in which it has embraced opportunities like Citi and PayTM, but valuations are running ahead, with its P/BV at 2.74 times and the stock trading at all time high levels.

POONAWALLA FINCORP’S Q4 IMPRESSIVE, BUT RICH VALUATIONS REIN IN ITS STOCK

New generation NBFC Poonawalla Fincorp continues to impress investors with exceptional performance which saw its AUM crossing Rs 25,000 crore and PAT crossing Rs 1,000 crore in Q4, but the stock is challenged by its high valuation with P/BV of around 5.5 times.

MANAPPURAM FINANCE’S Q4 STRONG, GETS SEBI NOD FOR ASIRVAD IPO

Diversified non-banking financial company, Manappuram Finance Limited, has achieved a profit surge in Q4 with the company’s consolidated profit after tax (PAT) coming in at Rs 564 crore, marking an impressive growth of 35.7% compared to the same quarter in the previous year. This leading NBFC’s total revenue also surged, increasing by 32.19% year-on-year (YoY), reaching Rs 2,330.31 crore for Q4. Manappuram’s Assets Under Management (AUM) grew by 18.7% YoY and 4.2% sequentially, totaling to Rs 42,070 crore. The Thrissur, Kerala, headquartered company’s stock,

has since then broken free from its long term trading range and is hovering near its all time high. Most analysts covering the stock has either a ‘strong buy’ or ‘buy’ recommendation on the stock due to its strong fundamental performance, high dividends, upcoming IPO of subsidiary Asirvad Micro Finance and its recent breakout. Manappuram Finance’s robust performance under the visionary leadership of its ex-banker MD & CEO VP Nandakumar, underscores its resilience and growth trajectory in the NBFC sector, based on its long-term diversification strategy.

COCHIN SHIPYARD SEEKS A GLOBAL PARTNER TO MAKE

ITS SHIP REPAIR FACILITY

WORLD CLASS

Under the visionary leadership of its CMD Madhu S Nair, Cochin Shipyard’s stock has surged 8.4 times in value within the past 12 months, and is all set to operationalise its International Ship Repair Facility (ISRF) with the world’s first ever stepped dry dock to repair vessels of various sizes simultaneously. CSL is now seeking a global partner who is expected to not only market the facility globally, but establish a supply chain and service provider chain for ISRF like how major repair facilities in Singapore & Middle East operate.

PNB Q4 NET PROFIT ZOOMS 160%, SEQUENTIAL GROWTH ALSO HIGH

Punjab National Bank has achieved a 160% surge in its net profit in Q4 on a YoY basis, on the back of strong loan growth with total retail credit increasing by 12.6%.

While its Gross & Net NPAs are steadily improving by each passing quarter, PNB has further room for improvement in asset quality compared with peers. A notable highlight of this quarter for PNB was its net profit zooming by 35% even on a quarteron-quarter basis. The bank also performed well on the deposits front, including in the crucial CASA deposits.

REC CONTINUES ITS HIGH RUN RATE, BUT INVESTORS SHOULD BRACE

FOR CORRECTIONS

Rural Electrification Corporation, the near monopoly PSU NBFC powering the country’s electrification push continues to amaze the sector by its revenue and profit run rate of over 25% and 33% respectively, but the stock is at all time highs and unchartered territory and its investors need to brace for sharp temporary corrections despite its attractive valuations.

CHOLAMANDALAM

Q4 NUMBERS STRONG, BUT VALUATION IS OUTPACING PERFORMANCE

There was no serious dent to be concerned about in Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company’s Q4 numbers with revenue surging by nearly 45% and profits growing robustly at nearly 25%. The stock has been positively re-rating to the delight of its investors, but it has entered pricey ranges now with a P/BV of nearly 8 times and a TTM P/E of over 32 times, which is pricier than even the sector leader.

AVANTI FEEDS’ Q4 & FY’24 HEALTHY, STOCK SOARS,

DIVERSIFICATIONS KEY

Avanti Feeds Ltd, the leading fish and shrimp feed company, as well as a shrimp exporter, has achieved healthy net profit growth in both Q4 and FY’24, despite its revenues growing only modestly. The company’s profit after tax (PAT) for Q4 came in at Rs 104.07 crore, which is a 43.61% growth over the same period last year. The fish feed major, which has also diversified into shrimp exports in association with east asian major Thai Union, achieved a Q4 EBIT margin of 11.48%, and a net profit margin of 7.88%. For the full fiscal of FY’24, Avanti Feeds achieved a PAT of Rs

357.14 crore, which is a 28.16% growth over the previous year. These profit numbers are despite Avanti Feeds’ total revenue for FY’24 growing only by 6.30% and by 2.57% growth over the same period last year. This shows the improving efficiencies of Avanti Feeds under its visionary Chairman & MD, A Indra Kumar. Two key diversifications will guide Avanti’s future - one its strengthening of its shrimp exports and the other its pet foods foray.

IDBI BANK’S Q4 ROBUST,

DESPITE MARGIN PRESSURE

IDBI Bank has achieved a 44% jump in Q4 net profit on a YoY basis on the strength of a 12% rise in net interest income and sharply falling provisions, despite pressure on its relatively high metrics of Net Interest Margin (NIM) and CASA deposits ratio. The bank currently owned by LIC and Government of India, with management control by LIC, is actively looking for a new promoter, and is considered an attractive buy with international suitors including Canada based Fairfax, that already owns CSB Bank, in the fray.

NEW INDIA ASSURANCE HAS A SOLID Q4 ON MOST COUNTS

General insurance leader of the country, New India Assurance (NIA), has achieved a nearly 213% surge in EBITDA and over 146% jump in net profit in the fourth quarter on a year-on-year basis, on the back of a nearly 15% YoY rise in revenue. The only listed PSU in its sector, the firm specializes in auto, health, fire, building & corporate insurance, and its stock is now poised to take on its all time high levels if this kind of quarterly run rates in revenue and profit are sustained.

SBI Q4 SOARS ON STRONG LOAN GROWTH, PROVISIONS HALVE, GNPA AT DECADE LOW

Country’s largest bank by total business, State Bank of India, has achieved a surprisingly strong 24% rise in net profit on strong loan growth of over 15% and growth in interest earned amounting to 19%. The overall provisions of SBI nearly halved to Rs 1,609 crore from Rs 3,315 crore in the year-ago period, while it achieved its best GNPA ratio of last 10 years at 2.24%. The bank is bracing to reprice infra sector loans if the need arises due to new RBI norms.

INDIAN BANK’S Q4 PERFORMANCE

STRONG, RETURN RATIOS IN PRIVATE BANKS’ LEAGUE

Apart from its healthy growth of 9% in net interest income and its strong growth of 55% in net profits, almost all metrics including deposits, advances and NPAs saw improvement. However, what is improving most impressively is its Return on Equity and its Return on Assets, which are now entering private banks’ range.

FEDERAL BANK ACHIEVES RECORD INCOME, EYES SMOOTH LEADERSHIP CHANGE BY Q2

As a testimony to the leadership of its outgoing MD & CEO Shyam Srinivasan, Federal Bank has achieved its highest ever net interest income in Q4. While it would be difficult to fill the big shoes of Shyam Srinivasan who transformed the bank and quadrupled investors’ wealth during his 14year old leadership, the advantage with Federal Bank is that it has enough internal candidates who can be promoted to the corner office, as well as impeccable credentials to attract external candidates.

UNION BANK OF INDIA’S

MD’S VISION TO BREAK

Union Bank of India, the fourth largest public sector bank in India has continued its stellar performance on most counts in Q4 including a 14% rise in its core net interest income, a 19% jump in its net profit, better asset quality and a sharp decline in loan loss provisions. The results are in-line with MD & CEO

A. Manimekhalai’s vision to elevate Union Bank to be the third largest public sector bank by 2025.

Union Bank of India is at a sweet spot when it comes to its relative positioning among the Top 10 public sector banks of the country. Now at the fourth position by size, the Mumbai headquartered lender is not too small to compete effectively with the Top 3 PSU Banks, and not too big to be agile like the smaller banks.

While the earnings recovery cycle post the easing of the NPA crisis in PSU banks is still ongoing since the last couple of years, in larger banks like State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Punjab National Bank, it has largely peaked. But in mid-sized lenders like Union Bank, the earnings recovery cycle is still expected to go on for the next two fiscals at least, which can generate surprisingly strong results in FY’25 and FY’26.

There are other factors too that make Union Bank’s positioning very dynamic among its peers. Despite the promoter stake in the bank - held by Government of India - coming down by around 10% during the last fiscal, Union Bank still enjoys one of the largest promoter holdings among large sized PSU banks at nearly 75%.

This leaves much room for large sized investors like Foreign

Q4 CONTINUES INTO TOP-3 PSBS

Margin (NIM) has been on a steady rise during the past two fiscals with it now standing at a healthy 2.63%.

Similarly, its core return ratios of Return on Assets (RoA) and Return on Equity (RoE) have been surging ahead during this period with RoA now at 0.98% and RoE at 14.15% at the end of FY’24.

Institutional Investors to invest further in the stock, as and when the Government divests, or new shares are issued as part of a fund raise. This flexibility is increasingly missing from bigger peers like State Bank of India and Bank of Baroda.

And wonder of wonders, despite the bank and its promoter GoI opting to reduce the promoter stake by as much as 10% during the past fiscal, the market has not only absorbed the massive amount of new shares that came into the market without a price fall, but even sent the Union Bank shares soaring, with its value doubling over the past year.

There are several fundamental reasons for this strong performance of Union Bank at the bourses. During the past two fiscals, the bank’s total income has grown by over 47%, while its net profit has zoomed by over 2.63 times. This is a far cry from a bank which was in the red just four years back, with its FY’20 bottomline posting an over Rs 3000 crore loss.

This emphatic turnaround performance under MD & CEO A Manimekhalai was not just in the headline numbers or quantity, but in quality too. The bank’s core profitability ratio of Net Interest

This is despite the bank, as a responsible PSU lender, has continued to fulfil all its responsibilities in socioeconomic upliftment. It is highly proactive in lending to priority sectors including agriculture, MSME and educational segments and experiencing robust growth in these verticals. Union Bank is one of the largest educational loan providers to students, and is famed for offering the most affordable interest rates for educational loans up to Rs 50 lakhs.

At the same time, Union Bank is witnessing a sustained momentum in the most lucrative verticals including retail, corporate and overseas lending segments. In the corporate segment, which was the bank’s mainstay in the past decades, the bank is seeing a resurgence. Currently, the bank has sanctioned around Rs 40,000 crore in corporate loans which are ready for disbursement, while it has a robust pipeline of corporate loans worth Rs 30,000 crore under discussions.

Union Bank has been highly selective in choosing projects in risky segments like real estate development, with it preferring mostly signature projects. A case in

point is its recent funding of Rs 250 crore to Hyderabad based real estate major Navanaami Group for their flagship super luxury housing project, Megaleio.

A one of its kind project in the country, the 150 super luxury apartments in Megaleio at Hyderabad will each have areas ranging between 8,888 sq ft to 11,111 sq ft with prices starting at Rs 8 crore per home. Targeted at Ultra HNIs, HNIs and NRIs, the total project cost for the twin tower, 50storeyed, 4.1 acre project is expected to be Rs 800 to Rs 900 crore with sale value at Rs 1200 crore.

Apart from the loan of Rs 250 crore that Union Bank has extended, the rest of the investment will come from the promoter company’s internal accruals. From a banking perspective, the project symbolises Union Bank’s emerging ambition to be a part of high-ticket projects that are usually taken up by the likes of

At the same time, Union Bank of India is carefully monitoring the impact from RBI’s new project finance draft as and when it is implemented. The bank’s MD & CEO A Manimekhalai has recently expressed confidence that it can very well manage the impact from RBI’s new move.

While the newly proposed norms are quite stringent when compared to

the current scenario, UBI’s MD is confident of this challenge as only 28% of its corporate loan book is made up by project finance, out of which around 68% are already completed projects with very visible cashflows.

The bank had significant challenges in Q4 including an impact from wage revision and higher tax expenses. However, Union Bank could tide over it with support coming from higher interest income, sharply high treasury income and reversal of loan loss provisions.

Union Bank could achieve a 19% year-on-year growth in its net profit to Rs 3,311 crore in the fourth quarter, with the support of better asset quality and increase in interest income which grew 19.75% year-onyear to Rs 26,350 crore. Also contributing to Q4 profit growth were steady margins, strong noninterest income and modest provisions.

The bank’s asset quality continued its improvement drive, with gross non-performing asset (GNPA) ratio of the bank improving to 4.76%, from the 4.83% it was a quarter ago, and 7.53% it was in the corresponding year ago period. Similarly its Net NPA ratio improved to 1.03% in the fourth

HDFC Bank or SBI.

Nitesh Ranjan, EDRamasubramanian S, ED

Sanjay

quarter, from the 1.08% it was during the third quarter, and 1.70% it was during last fiscal’s Q4.

While fresh slippages were slightly higher in Q4, going forward the slippages are likely to be modest as most of the stress has already been recognised, including from the legacy corporate loan book, which frees the bank to pursue higher profitability.

Overall, Union Bank is guiding for a credit growth of 10-12% in FY25, supported by strong credit demand. It has room by way of funds to power this growth as the bank has also guided for its deposit base to grow healthily at a rate of 9-11%, especially by way of retail deposits including CASA and retail fixed deposits.

In fact, with a credit deposit (CD) ratio of just 71%, the bank has definitive plans to further improve loan growth, aiming for a CD ratio between 75-77%. Thanks to its high promoter stake, the bank is also ahead of the curve in periodically raising funds, with Q4 witnessing a successful Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP) that raised Rs 3000 crore with less than 2.25% dilution in promoter stake.

Such periodic measures have helped

the bank to keep holding an excess reserve of Rs 70,000 crore over and above the Statutory Liquidity Ratio (SLR), which can meet any suddenly emerging opportunity in credit demand.

Union Bank, which has a significant and growing overseas business, is also raising funds successfully for the same. Recently it raised its maiden syndicated term loan at an overseas centre. The Dubai Branch of Union Bank at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) successfully raised $500 million (about Rs 4,200 crore), of which it has already drawn $100 million to fund the emerging overseas credit opportunities.

On the technology front, Union Bank of India continued to move up to higher orbits, with it recently modernising its risk management systems in association with global leader SAS Institute of USA, which is a leader in AI based data analytics. With this move, Union Bank has joined an elite league of international majors, as SAS Institute is renowned for serving most of the Fortune 500 companies with data analytics based risk management systems.

SAS solutions that have been implemented at Union Bank will help the lender to enhance and streamline its risk operations and

reporting through advanced model risk management solutions. The new system also meets RBI’s regulatory requirements for credit and operational risk while obtaining an enterprise view of the bank’s risk exposure throughout the risk management life cycle.

This modernisation resulted in significant credit risk RWA (Risk Weighted Assets) and capital savings with a single integrated system for RWA computation. This standardised system enabled rapid RWA generation for large volumes of data within just a few hours. In addition to RBI compliance across reporting, risk computing, and audit functionality, the project also provided a 360-degree view of operational risk with automated Key Risk Indicator (KRI) monitoring and trend analysis.

On the bricks-and-mortar front too, Union Bank continued its modernisation drive. Already the fourth largest public sector bank in the country, with a network of over 8,400 domestic branches, over 8,900 ATMs, over 75,800 employees and over 18,900 business correspondent touch points, the bank under the visionary leadership of its MD & CEO A Manimekhalai is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to be the third largest PSU bank which is also thoroughly modernised. As part of this drive, Union Bank has recently inaugurated its new Zonal Office at Malleswaram, Bengaluru, started its first branch in tourist hotspot Lakshadweep and several of its branches across the country are getting a renovated face lift this year.

Rudra, ED

Pankaj Dwivedi, ED

HIGHER EDUCATION

JSS AHER IS UPSHIFTING TO GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

Jagadguru Sri Shivarathri Deshikendra Mahaswamiji

After firmly establishing its national leadership in health sciences education & research, Mysuru headquartered deemedto-be university JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research (JSS AHER) is spreading its wings globally. This upshifting was visible when JSS AHER recently won the global first rank in UK based Times Higher Education’s (THE) Impact Rankings for UN’s Sustainable Development Goal - 3 (SDG-3) of ‘Good Health & Well Being’. Also on display in the SDG rankings was JSS AHER’s emerging leadership in other domains like renewable energy, environmental sciences, water conservation, sanitation, humanities, economics, poverty alleviation and more. The university promoted by JSS Mahavidyapeetha, also achieved ranks within the Top 100 for 6 out of the 9 SDGs that they participated in. JSS AHER is collaborating with the renowned Yale School of Public Health of the US for furthering its public health research initiatives and is also improving its lead in pharmacy education and research through various programs including a recent three-day international conference. Such world-class efforts will achieve full fruition in 2027 when JSS AHER will also move to its upcoming 101-acres world-class campus at Varuna, near Mysuru, which is being built at a cost of Rs 1200 crores. JSS AHER is led by JSS Mahavidyapeetha’s Head Sri Shivarathri Deshikendra Swamiji of Suttur Mutt, JSS Mahavidyapeetha’s Executive Secretary C.G. Betsurmath, JSS AHER’s Pro-Chancellor Dr. B. Suresh and its Vice-chancellor Dr. Surinder Singh.

As the world races to the 10th anniversary of the United Nations promoted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) coming into force, one thing is becoming painfully clear. Worldwide governments, non governmental organisations, corporate companies, and higher educational institutions which were expected to further the 17 SDGs, are falling short by a big margin.

This is no surprise really, as for all these entities, the introduction of SDGs on January 1st 2016, was an additional challenge to overcome in the way of doing their business. The unprecedented Covid-19 made the pursuit of these 17 SDGs all the more difficult, even while the pandemic proved that the health related SDGs needed to be even more aggressive.

It is on this backdrop that the London based educational ranking service provider Times Higher Education (THE) embarked on their initiative of Impact Rankings under Sustainable Development and Social Impact. THE set out to rank universities across the world on each of the 17 SDGs as formulated by the UN in 2015-16. It was expected to be a tough fight, as only the world’s best universities could be the winners.

For this year’s rankings, JSS AHER, the Mysuru headquartered deemed university participated in 9 out of the 17 SDGs. And surprising most domestic and international observers, JSS AHER has achieved ranks within the Top 100 for 6 out of those 9 SDGs that they participated, and came within the overall rank band of 100-200 in a ranking exercise that saw thousands of the world’s best institutions pitted against each other.

C.G. Betsurmath, Executive Secretary

SEASONAL MAGAZINE

JSS AHER won the global 78th rank for SDG-12 which is about ‘Responsible Production & Consumption’, and in SDG-6 pertaining to ‘Access to Clean Water & Sanitation’ it fared even higher at the global 60th rank. This Indian university also came within the Top 50 ranks in SDG-15 related to ‘Life on Land’ with a 49th global rank. However, it was on SDG-1 on ‘Ending Poverty’ and SDG-7 on ‘Affordable & Clean Energy’ that JSS AHER delivered even better performances with Top 25 positions. While on ‘Ending Poverty’ it won the 21st global rank, for ‘Affordable & Clean Energy’ the university won the 12th rank worldwide.

Still, the real stunner achievement was in JSS AHER’s core competence domain of SDG-3 dealing with ‘Good Health & Well Being’, where the university scaled to the very top of the world with the global first rank! While JSS AHER’s portfolio of courses have been spreading to more

and more domains with each passing year, it is still regarded more as a health sciences leader. Now this will change, as JSS AHER is proving beyond doubt that it is not just a leader in health sciences, but in other core domains like renewable energy, environmental sciences, water conservation, sanitation, humanities, economics, poverty alleviation and more.

The credit for the world beating performance from JSS AHER in SDGs across six core domains directly goes to JSS Mahavidyapeetha’s Head Sri Shivarathri Deshikendra Swamiji of Suttur Mutt, JSS Mahavidyapeetha’s Executive Secretary C.G. Betsurmath, JSSAHER’s Pro-Chancellor Dr. B. Suresh, its Vice-chancellor Dr. Surinder Singh and its Registrar Dr. B. Manjunatha. This committed team of leaders have guided the JSS AHER family to continually excel and to always shoot for the moon.

One most important fact that many may miss in JSS AHER’s world class

Dr.B.Suresh, Pro Chancellor JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research

rankings in SDGs is that these ranks are not just about the quality of their courses in these domains. For instance, their global No.1 rank in SDG-3, ‘Good Health & Well Being’ is based on parameters like translational research, tribal health outreach programmes and affordable health services for the needy, apart from high quality health education. Similarly, in their global 12th rank in SDG-7 pertaining to ‘Affordable and Clean Energy’, JSS AHER was recognized for its efforts to promote affordable and clean energy solutions, energy efficiency drive, and sustainable practices in this domain. And for its global 49th rank in SDG15 dealing with ‘Life on Land’, it was ranked based on its initiatives in environmental conservation, biodiversity preservation, and sustainable land management, which highlighted its efforts to safeguard terrestrial ecosystems and to promote sustainable development.

This kind of community outreach and development activities that the university undertakes is what differentiates the exposure a JSS AHER student gets vis-a-vis from many peer institutions. Faculty, research scholars and students are proactively encouraged by the institution to participate in such activities, with the pleasant side effect that students graduate from JSS AHER with not just classroom knowledge but practical, socially relevant and industry ready knowledge in their respective domains.

Rather than resting on its laurels of winning across six core SDGs, especially the first rank win in its core domain of health sciences, JSS AHER is moving fast to widen and improve its courses in health and allied sciences. The deemed university’s School of Public Health (SPH) has started offering the Master of Public Health (MPH) program to create Public Health professionals, which is one of the most widely recognized emerging roles in healthcare.

JSS AHER’s MPH program caters to the increasing demand for Public Health professionals in Indian and overseas governments, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), the public & private sectors, and various health research institutes. This MPH program aims to provide highquality education to empower and enable all students to apply their acquired competencies to be worldclass leaders in public health by transforming the health and wellbeing of people locally and globally.

This is not just a lofty aim, but backed by JSS AHER’s impressive and global initiatives in public health education,

research and practice. The university has recently tied up with the renowned Yale School of Public Health and the University of Arizona’s Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health to launch a program to build leadership among public health scholars from India’s underrepresented groups. The Public Health Research Institute of India (PHRII) has also contributed much to introduce this Research Leadership Program.

The program is modelled on similar successful programs by Yale School of Public Health in South Africa, Sudan and Chad. It seeks to empower researchers and foster a more equitable global health research landscape. Its aim is to prepare scholars to become effective research mentors within a nurtured leadership network.

In addition to building a first cohort of research scientists from underrepresented minority groups in India, the goal is to establish a programmatic infrastructure for mentoring and leadership-skill development to promote career advancement of scientists from underrepresented communities of the country, well into the future.

This program creates opportunities for scholars from historically marginalised groups to become the ones generating the scientific evidence, to become the ones taking on leadership roles, and the ones fostering the next generation of scholars. Towards this, 15 junior-tomid-career scholars from JSS AHER were selected for the certificate program, which so far has included

two in-person sessions in January & March, a virtual session in February, and practical career development assignments to build mentorship and leadership capacity.

The curriculum is designed around four pillars: one, building skills for mentorship, coaching, and professional development; two, building skills for effective leadership in research teams and organisations; three, fostering an understanding of global and national health system research priorities; and four, developing a professional network for sustained research leadership.

India is the world leader in population with 1.4 billion people, and its minorities and women are still greatly underrepresented in higher education and research. The program cohort from JSS AHER comprises 13 women and two men, with 11 participants identifying as being from a scheduled caste, other backward class, or from a rural aspirational district.

Beyond the four core partners of this program, panel discussions by thought leaders from across India have challenged and encouraged the course participants to take risks and learn from failure to accelerate their research careers. The program is funded by the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Global Health Equity Scholars program.

Apart from its Master of Public Health (MPH) program, JSS AHER also has an MBA program in Hospital Administration. This is an MBA program that is AICTE-approved and NAAC-accredited and equips

SEASONAL MAGAZINE

candidates to master the art of hospital and health system management, for a dynamic and fast growing career in the buzzing field of healthcare management.

Other specialised programs from JSS AHER include two post-doctoral oneyear fellowship programs in Pain Medicine. Of these, the Fellowship in Interventional Pain Management (FIPM) is awarded by JSS AHER, while the Fellow of Indian Academy of Pain Medicine (FIAPM) is awarded by the Indian Academy of Pain Medicine (IAPM). The duration of these courses are 1 year, eligibility is Post MD / DA / DNB in Anesthesiology, and admission is based on an entrance examination.

JSS AHER faculty, research scholars and students continue to prove their mettle in national level selections. The Department of Health Research (DHR), under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India, had recently selected 19 candidates for a funded training course on ‘Human Disease Models: Approaches, Advances and Applications’. Among them were Dr Ranjitha Shankaregowda of JSS Medical College and Hospital, JSS AHER, who rubbed shoulders with stalwarts from premier public sector medical colleges AIIMS, AFMC etc, and various leading government and private sector medical colleges.

The JSS AHER community also benefits greatly from the frequent industry interactions, professional workshops and national and international level conferences. Recently, there was a three-day International Conference on ‘Global Collaboration in Pharmaceuticals, Bridging Borders, Breaking Barriers’ (ICGCP4B-2024) at the JSS College of Pharmacy at Ootacamund (Ootty) in Tamil Nadu. The conference was organised by the JSS College of Pharmacy in cooperation with JSS AHER, along with the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology under the Union Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India.

The three-day scientific conference reviewed the progress and development of pharmacy education in India after the introduction of the Pharm D programme in 2008, which was an initiative spearheaded by Dr. B Suresh. While there were keynote speeches by Pro Chancellor Dr. B Suresh and Vice Chancellor Dr. Surinder Singh, the inaugural session was presided over by Dr. CG Betsurmath, Executive Secretary of JSS Maha Vidya Peeth (JSS MVP), with Prof. SP Manjunath, Secretary of JSS MVP and Dr. B Manjunatha, Registrar of JSS AHER as special invitees.

The international conference also witnessed speeches of globally accredited academic experts, pedagogues of pharmacy, institutional heads and educators in different areas of pharmacy and allied sciences. The chief guest of the inaugural function was the vice-president of the Vellore Institute of Technology, Dr. Sekhar Viswanathan, while the guests of honour included the district collector of Nilgiris, M Aruna, and the former cricketer, Javagal Srinath.

The conference also had a special event - an Indo-Australian symposium on ‘Pharmacy Practice for Improved Patient Care - Global Perspectives for Regional Practices’. This symposium addressed the Pharm D graduates who had passed out from various Indian pharmacy institutions. More than 30 international and Indian speakers and over 1,000 Pharm D graduates and aspirants participated in this symposium.

Across its seven scientific plenary sessions, nine keynote addresses and five panel discussions, the conference discussed several pressing topics

The new JSS AHER campus will integrate studies, research, and development in engineering, and health care sector including medical education with focus on future health technologies.

including Global Collaboration in Pharmaceuticals, Pharmacy Education in the Changing World, Pharma Industry - Institution Interface, Next Generation Therapeutics, Challenges and Opportunities of Pharmaceutical Entrepreneurs, Digital Influence on Pharma Value Chain, Pharmaceutical Regulatory Challenges, Bridging Borders and Breaking Barriers in Pharmaceutical Research, Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery and Development, and Natural Products and Traditional Medicines in Modern Healthcare.

While such initiatives of JSS AHER are attracting global eyeballs, the university is also rapidly building its

Dr. Surinder Singh, Vice Chancellor JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research

Dr. Manjunatha B, Registrar JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research

new global campus at Varuna, which is less than 15 kms and half an hour drive, from Mysuru. This new global campus that spans 101 acres is being built at an estimated cost of Rs 1,200 crore, and will be completed in 2026, with its functioning expected to commence from 2027.

The new JSS AHER campus will integrate studies, research, and development in engineering, and health care sector including medical education with focus on future health technologies. Towards this, the campus will have an integrated research centre, an incubation centre, and infrastructural facilities for startups in various health technologies.

On the academic front, the new campus will offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in health and technologies including digital health technologies, hospital management technologies, integration of clinical research and technologies etc. JSS AHER is planning big to attract global talents to the campus, especially research scholars. The campus will house over 15,000 students, 2,000 teaching faculty and 4,000 research scholars.

The new global campus is being developed in line with the world’s best universities, and is coming up under the visionary guidance of JSS Mahavidyapeetha’s Head Sri Shivarathri Deshikendra Swamiji, JSS Mahavidyapeetha’s Executive Secretary C.G. Betsurmath, Prof. SP Manjunath, Secretary of JSS MVP, and JSS AHER’s Pro-Chancellor Dr. B. Suresh.

Yale Mentors With JSS AHER Public Health Researchers.

GALGOTIAS UNIVERSITY IS

SUPERIOR INFRASTRUCTURE

Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, based Galgotias University is widening its lead with peer universities despite its young age, under the visionary leadership of its dynamic young leader Dr. Dhruv Galgotia. Achieving NAAC A+ accreditation in its first cycle, the university offers a wide array of over 200 programs across 20 Schools, spanning Polytechnic, Undergraduate, Postgraduate, and PhD courses. Since its founding in 2011-12, Galgotias University has grown as a home to over 30,000 students, providing a world-class education and producing graduates poised for success in their chosen careers via industryleading placements and startup incubation. Consistently ranked among India’s top universities, Galgotias University is also recognized for its innovative approach, achieving and maintaining the Highest 4-Star Rating by Central Government’s Ministry of Education Innovation Cell (MIC), for promoting Innovation and Start-ups in Campus, for the last four years. The GU campus has incubated over 200 startups till now, thereby encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit among its students. Also a research powerhouse, Galgotias University has recently secured 3rd rank among the top 10 Indian applicants for patents from academic institutions and universities, and it has also secured a place in the top 5 Indian applicants for patents in the field of information technology. The university’s research contributions include over 14,000+ publications and 2000+ patents, and GU is also a leader in funded research. Recently, in tune with the global healthcare field’s momentous move towards preventive medicine, the university strengthened its health sciences foray by inaugurating its Diet Out Patient Department (OPD). GU also continues to be a leader in meaningful industry tieups with recent examples being its tie-up with Telecom Sector Skill Council (TSSC) and Huawei to establish a Telecom Centre of Excellence, and its tie-up with Delta IT Networks & HP for an AI Learning Lab. However, the most momentous among such recent moves have been the setting up of an iOS Development Centre at Galgotias University in partnership with tech leviathan Apple. Galgotias Group too is forging ahead under Dr. Dhruv Galgotia’s leadership, as an inspiration to its students and faculty, with a mega development plan in Ayodhya that includes a a 5-star hotel, a well-equipped hospital, a sprawling mall, and a mega housing project.

SOARING AHEAD ON

AND INITIATIVES

Greg Joswiak was in India earlier this year and was amazed at the app development abilities of students at Galgotias University. As Senior VicePresident for Worldwide Marketing at Apple, Greg had come visiting to inaugurate the iOS Development Centre at Galgotias University.

A cutting-edge facility, the iOS Development Centre at Galgotias University is established in collaboration with Apple and is primarily designed to foster innovation and nurture the next generation of iOS developers from India. The Centre is equipped with unique and formidable infrastructure including 100 iMacs, providing Galgotias students with the opportunity to engage in hands-on learning and practical applications of iOS development principles.

During the inauguration, Greg engaged with the students of Galgotias University, discussing their startup journeys and exchanging ideas on entrepreneurship. The iOS Development Centre at GU has hit the ground running as Galgotias students are already working on a variety of innovative apps that leverage the capabilities of the iOS ecosystem including their first two apps, Sakhi and VibroPlay.

While Sakhi is an app designed to aid women in tracking their menstrual cycles and addressing the related health concerns, VibroPlay is a music learning app specifically created for individuals

At just 32 years of age, Dr. Dhruv Galgotia is the youngest CEO in the Indian formal education sector.

with hearing impairments, allowing them to experience music through vibrations.

The iOS Development Centre at Galgotias University represents a significant milestone in the university’s journey, under the visionary leadership of its CEO Dr. Dhruv Galgotia, towards

providing world-class education and fostering innovation in technology education.

While the Centre is seen as a hub for cutting-edge innovation, by encouraging a learning environment that integrates the latest advancements in iOS technology, the university also decided on establishing this Centre as the learnings from the iOS Development Centre are expected to have a farreaching impact beyond the boundaries of the Centre, specifically in the teaching-learning pedagogy of the entire university.

Going even beyond, the Centre is expected to make significant societal contributions too. For instance, the Sakhi and VibroPlay apps reflect the Centre’s focus on creating practical applications that can have a positive impact on society. The iOS Development Centre provides students with the resources and guidance needed to turn their innovative ideas into socially relevant applications.

Some of the key features of the Sakhi

app include Menstrual Cycle Tracking, Health Tips, Reminders and Safety Features. It allows women to track their menstrual cycles, predict ovulation, and monitor related health patterns, even while offering health tips and reminders for important health check-ups and medication. Its safety features include alerting contacts in case of emergencies.

Sakhi aims to address the various concerns related to women’s health and empowerment, contributing to the fulfilment of UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5) which calls for gender equality and the elimination of violence against women. The development of Sakhi reflects Galgotias University’s commitment to social responsibility and the practical applications of technology for societal benefit.

The iOS Development Centre is by no way a singular achievement at Galgotias University. This leading private university based at Greater Noida in UP is already noted for its superior academic, research and industry-ready

facilities. The university has already established several Centres of Excellence that focus on interdisciplinary research, providing state-of-the-art equipment and resources.

These Centres of Excellence include the School of Computing Science & Engineering Labs, the Central Instrumentation Facility (CIF), the 3D Printing and Fabrication Lab, Healthcare Research Facilities, Applied Sciences and Humanities Labs and Animal Research Facility Centre, to name just a few.

The School of Computing Science & Engineering Labs at Galgotias University includes over 30 state-of-the-art general

and domain-specific labs, with many of them sponsored by industry leaders including IBM, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and Microsoft. These labs support research in areas like computer networks, software engineering, digital image processing, wireless sensor networks, cloud computing, big data, machine learning, deep learning, robotic process automation, and edge computing. In tune with the times, Galgotias University has also tied up with Delta IT Networks & IT giant HP to commission its AI Learning Lab by investing Rs 10 Crore in acquiring specialised AI Machines from HP.

GU has also recently partnered with the SEASONAL MAGAZINE

Telecom Sector Skill Council (TSSC) and the global telecom giant Huawei to establish a Telecom Centre of Excellence which will bring the latest telecom technologies and international standard skilling programs in the telecom sector to the Galgotias campus.

In the field of healthcare research, Galgotias University has three state-ofthe-art laboratories for student training in optometry, and for providing advanced instrumentation and equipment for practical exercises. The University which already has a noted foray into healthcare and medical research is expected to go full steam ahead in medical education and public healthcare facilities in the years to come.

Recently, in tune with the global healthcare field’s momentous move towards preventive medicine, the university strengthened its health sciences foray by inaugurating its Diet Out Patient Department (OPD), while it

Dr. Dhruv Galgotia appreciates PM Narendra Modi for encouraging young CEOs under the 'Champions of Change' program of NITI Ayog, which he feels will take India on the path to development.

is already home to a Physiotherapy OPD.

A Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University that deserves a special mention is its Central Instrumentation Facility. The CIF is a state-of-the-art facility designed to support multidisciplinary research in emerging domains such as material sciences, biosensors, organic photovoltaics, medical & drug research and other such sunrise fields.

The CIF houses many sophisticated and general instruments essential for research in basic and applied sciences including Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) used for chemical analysis, quality control, quantifications, and verification of raw materials; and High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) with Manual Injector that is used to analyse advanced traditional small molecule drugs and supports various research areas like medicinal chemistry, bioanalysis, drug metabolism, and pharmacokinetics.

The Central Instrumentation Facility at Galgotias University also has a UVVisible Spectrophotometer with UVProbe which is used for measuring the intensity of light as a function of the colour of light and is usually seen only in clinical laboratories for quantitative analyses, kinetics, spectrum scanning, and multiple components of DNA/ protein testing.

The CIF is an integral part of Galgotias

University’s commitment to excellence in teaching and research, providing faculty, research scholars, and students with the necessary tools to carry out globally competitive research. It was established under the visionary leadership of CEO Dhruv Galgotia with a mission to enrich resources on a shared basis to promote research and development across various science disciplines.

The CIF aims to strengthen the technical infrastructure for advanced research, organise short-term courses and workshops on the use and applications of various spectroscopic and analytical techniques, develop new measurements & analytical methods, and also allows outside users to utilise its high-tech equipment for their research and testing purposes on a nominal payment basis.

Such extensive Centres of Excellence and other such matching infrastructure forms the bedrock for Galgotias University’s significant achievements in the research and development field within a short span of time. Also a leader in funded research, it has received funding for over 1,135 projects, which facilitates advanced research and development across various disciplines. Galgotias University has recently secured 3rd rank among the top 10 Indian applicants for patents from academic institutions and universities, with a notable 1089 patent applications being filed as reported by the Office of the Controller General of Patents for the year 2022-23. Additionally, Galgotias

University stands out for its leadership in academic innovation too, with 209 applications filed, and it has secured a place in the top 5 Indian applicants for patents in the field of information technology, highlighting its role as a leader in academic innovation. The university has so far delivered a strong research output with over 14,000 publications and significant citation numbers, reflecting the impactful research conducted by its faculty and students. The university’s research scholars have won over 2000 intellectual property rights, including patents, and the university also takes care to protect the intellectual contributions of its community.

Galgotias University offers a wide range of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programs across various disciplines including in most streams of Engineering, most of the Basic Sciences, Mathematics, Biochemistry, Microbiology, Health Sciences like Optometry, Pharmacy & Physiotherapy, Clinical Research, Medical Biotechnology, Clinical Nutrition & Dietetics, Psychology, and Humanities & Social Sciences including English, Political Science, Economics, Sociology, Law, Management, Mass Communication, Education, Computer Applications, and Agriculture.

The eligibility criteria for admission to

the Ph.D. programs generally include a Master’s degree or a professional degree equivalent to a Master’s degree with at least 55% marks in aggregate or a CGPA of 6.0. Candidates with a valid score in NET/JRF/SLET/GATE/Teacher Fellowship Holder or those who have passed M.Phil are exempted from the Ph.D. Entrance Test (PET).

Due to its leadership in industry-ready infrastructure and research capabilities, the university continues to set new records in nationally benchmarked admissions. This year, Galgotias University set a new record by receiving 7.26 lakh applications through the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for its undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

This is a formidable achievement for Galgotias University considering its youngness and size. The university has been rapidly growing in student intake too with the last Convocation Ceremony for the Class of 2023, witnessing a total of 3,906 students graduating.

Under CEO Dhruv Galgotia’s vision, the university has gone to extraordinary lengths to create one of the most impressive faculty among comparable peer institutions. Thanks to it, GU today boasts of a diverse and accomplished faculty, with members hailing from prestigious institutions across the USA, Europe, and Asia.

This impressive panel of accomplished

Galgotias University Student Saurav Gurjar Secures Silver In AIU Wushu Games 2023-24

teachers includes both seasoned academics and experienced industry professionals who are committed to providing high-quality education and fostering research excellence. They are actively involved in research and scholarly publications, contributing to thought leadership in their respective fields.

In its undergraduate and postgraduate departments Galgotias University offers a wide range of courses across various disciplines. The university is structured as 20 distinct schools offering undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

Galgotias University’s School of Computing Science & Engineering offers programs like B.Tech and M.Tech in various specialisations, whereas its School of Computer Applications & Technology offers courses like BCA and MCA.

Its School of Engineering offers B.Tech and M.Tech, in all conventional and innovative engineering branches, while Galgotias’ School of Business provides

BBA, MBA, and other business-related programs.

GU’s School of Law offers LLB, LLM, and integrated law programs and its School of Liberal Education includes a variety of arts and humanities courses. Other GU Schools include School of Media & Communication Studies, School of Hospitality & Tourism and the School of Biological & Life Sciences.

Galgotias University also offers several other programs including in architecture, design, commerce, pharmacy and more, with degrees including B.Sc (Hons), B.Des, B.A (Hons), B.Pharm, BPT, and more.

Galgotias University has taken care to balance rigorous admission standards with flexibility for students coming from various backgrounds.Towards this, GU accepts a variety of entrance exams for admission into its various programs. These include Galgotias’ own department specific tests as well as nationally benchmarked tests.

GU’s own entrances are heavily attended and includes Galgotias Engineering Entrance Exam (GEEE) for B.Tech admissions, Galgotias University Management Aptitude Test (GUMAT) for MBA admissions,

Galgotias University Law School Admission Test (GULSAT) for admission to Integrated BA LLB (Hons.) and BBA LLB (Hons.) and the Ph.D. Entrance Test (PET).

Additionally, Galgotias University accepts students who have scored high in national entrance tests like Common Universities Entrance Test (CUET), Joint Entrance Examination (JEE Main), Common Management Admission Test (CMAT), Management Aptitude Test (MAT), Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), NMAT by GMAC, National Aptitude Test in Architecture (NATA), Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) for LLB (Hons.) and LLM.

SATHYABAMA IS GOING STRONG EVEN AMID A TOUGH SCENARIO

Chancellor Dr. Mariazeena Johnson has made the performance of Sathyabama Institute of Science & Technology (SIST) a tour-de-force in India’s higher education sector on all counts that matter. The Chennai based Category-1 deemed-to-be university is second to none whether it is futuristic courses, scholarships for the meritorious underprivileged students, campus placements, basic & applied research, patents, technology transfers, startup incubation, international tie-ups, centres of excellence and lots more. Also a philanthropist with a heart of gold, Dr. Mariazeena is using her Anbu Foundation and her friendship with top-notch social influencers including actresses Nayanthara and Samantha Ruth Prabhu to bring about societal change and women’s empowerment.

SATHYABAMA'S CAMPUS RECRUITERS THIS YEAR INCLUDE HEAVYWEIGHTS LIKE ACCENTURE, TCS, COGNIZANT, DELOITTE, HITACHI, HCL, NATWEST, BNY MELLON AND MORE SUCH MNCS AND DOMESTIC MAJORS.

Dr. MARIAZEENA JOHNSON, Chancellor

Even while most universities are facing a lull in placements, Chennai based deemed to be university, Sathyabama Institute of Science & Technology (SIST) has recently achieved 2,545 job offers from 312 companies for over 93% of its students who had applied for campus placements.

Among the recruiters are heavyweights like Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, Hitachi, HCL, TCS, Natwest, DevRev, Tredence Analytics, Virtusa , Tejas Network, Athena Health, JSW Steels, Sona Comstar, UnoMinda, Genpact, BNY Mellon, Godrej and Zoho. Also, among this year’s recruiters are 72 new companies, proving that Sathyabama continues to enlarge its footprint in India Inc, even in this tough year for placements.

Sathyabama’s success in placements was directly due to this deemed university’s various Centres of Excellence working in close collaboration with several global majors including ServiceNow and PwC that resulted in bridging the industryacademia gap effectively.

Demonstrating its mindshare across India and the world, this year’s recruited students from Sathyabama hail from 32 states & union territories of India and 15 countries across the globe. The highest salary package this year also remained strong at nearly Rs 50 lakhs, while average package was Rs 5.40 lakhs.

The power of Sathyabama’s sectorleading full scholarship program was also on display, as 115 students who had studied on full scholarship were among those successfully placed this

Dr. MARIE JOHNSON, President

year. In academic placements too, Sathyabama students proved their mettle with 15 final-year students getting qualified for MTech through the national level Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE).

Sathyabama is a powerhouse in research with the output of its research scholars attracting over 13,0000 citations in Scopus, and over 6,500 in Web of Science.

Around 300 students also obtained admissions in various prestigious national and international universities for their higher studies. Proving that the Sathyabama campus is also among the best for physically challenged students, five visually challenged students from Sathyabama have been admitted to programmes in the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).

Unknown to many in the public, one factor that has been helping this university’s students in garnering top placements year after year has been the contributions of its vibrant Sathyabama Alumni Association (SAA). Sathyabama was established as Sathyabama Engineering College in 1988, and had

achieved deemed university status in 2001 as Sathyabama Institute of Science & Technology.

During these nearly four decades of existence, Sathyabama has produced global leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and managers, across India and the world. The Sathyabama Alumni Association (SAA) brings all these outstanding people and their collective wealth of knowledge and experience together on a single platform.

While the Sathyabama Alumni Association has been contributing to the university and the community around it in diverse ways, one of the most effective means has been how the Sathyabama Alumni have been helping the university get connected with their employers. Most such companies have ended up as regular recruiters from Sathyabama, as they realise the efforts that the university and SAA have been

taking in grooming the newer batches of students.

For instance, there are specific and formal programs that Sathyabama has created in collaboration with SAA like Alumni Lecture Series, Alumni Mentorship Program and Mock Interviews by Alumni, that directly help the current batches of students by guiding them to placement and career success.

Alumni with proven expertise and indepth knowledge in specific domains have been made part of Sathyabama’s Board of Studies, so that they have a voice in including futuristic subjects in Sathyabama’s frequently updated and contemporary curriculum.

Sathyabama openly acknowledges and celebrates its Alumni for not only their contribution to the university, but to their domain and society at large. Such Alumni who have made prominent contributions in the fields of academics, research, corporate careers, entrepreneurship, and social development are honoured with the ‘Distinguished Alumni Award’ every year.

Earlier in the last academic year, Sathyabama got a shot in its arm when the higher education regulator of India, the University Grants Commission (UGC) elevated the institution to the status of a Category 1 Deemed to Be University with greater autonomy to start departments, courses and off campus centres without prior approval.

To put this achievement in perspective, the venerable public sector institution Madras University that was established way back in 1857 also obtained Category 1 status in the same year as Sathyabama, that is, in 2023. The Category 1 status is usually bestowed on institutions that have achieved a 3.51 or above score by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).

Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology can be proud that it could attain the coveted Category 1 status within 23 years of it getting recognised

Sathyabama excels in applied research, technology transfers and startup incubation with 850+ patents filed, 525+ patents published, 300+ patents granted, and 22+ technology transfers.

as a deemed to be university. The institution has also been ranked in the 51st position by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2023 and this has been the eighth consecutive year that Sathyabama has been ranked among the Top 100 Universities of India.

Sathyabama is a powerhouse in research with the output of its research scholars attracting over 13,0000 citations in the leading citation database Scopus, and over 6,500 in the other leading database, Web of Science, which is a great achievement for a university in the private sector that is yet to celebrate its 25th anniversary as a university.

This deemed university’s researchers

also excel in applied research as well as development of intellectual property, with over 850 patents filed, over 525 patents published and 300 plus patents granted to the institution and its researchers. Also a leader in startup incubation, Sathyabama has so far made 22 plus technology transfers to entrepreneurs, startups and companies.

Sathyabama is increasingly strengthening its health science courses, and this initiative is backed by the Sathyabama Hospital that provides healthcare services across multiple departments including general medicine, general surgery, cardiology, endocrinology, diabetology, obstetrics & gynaecology, paediatrics, dental sciences, dermatology, ENT, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, urology, and nephrology.

Recently, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology launched a new initiative on women empowerment titled Anbu with an aim to safeguard women’s health. The launch event, which saw actress Samantha Ruth Prabhu as the guest of honour, also saw Chancellor Dr. Mariazeena Johnson distributing Sathyabama’s Anbu health cards to women staff, girl students and women in public life.

Women and girl students can use the

Anbu health card to access various health examinations typically needed by women such as mammograms, blood tests, screenings for diabetes, eye care, oral health, abdominal scans, and haemoglobin counts at Sathyabama Hospital.

Sathyabama’s health science courses are spread across seven of its departments which includes its School of Pharmacy, School of Nursing, School of Paramedical Sciences, School of Dental Sciences, School of Allied Health Sciences, School of Science & Humanities that houses its BSc and PhD in Psychology, and its School of Bio & Chemical Engineering that houses its BSc, BTech, MTech & PhD courses in biotechnology among other courses in Biochemistry, Biomedical, Microbiology, Bioinformatics etc.

However, Sathyabama’s largest student

Sathyabama

offers 7 BE

Degrees

in Computer Science & Engineering with 7 futuristic specialisationsAI, IoT, Data Science, AI & Robotics, AI & ML, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity.

contingents continue to be in its earliest engineering departments, including its School of Computing, School of Electrical & Electronics, School of Mechanical, and School of Building & Environment. Sathyabama’s School of Management Studies, School of Law and School of Science & Humanities are also noted for their long-standing excellence and relatively large number of courses and student intakes.

Among all these departments, Sathyabama’s School of Computing deserves a special mention as it offers seven Bachelor of Engineering (BE) Degrees in Computer Science & Engineering with seven futuristic specialisations - Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Data Science (DS), AI & Robotics, AI & Machine Language (ML), Blockchain Technology and Cybersecurity.

During last year’s Convocation, which was also its 32nd, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology had awarded over 4,000 degrees. It was AICTE Chairman TG Sitharam who awarded degrees to 3,504 graduates, 551 postgraduates, and 104 PhD scholars. 7 students also received their Diploma in Pharmacy, while 47 students from all streams also received gold medals for their performance in academics and in various fields.

Chancellor Dr. Mariazeena Johnson is not only a towering edupreneur but a noted philanthropist with a heart of gold. She is the moving force behind Anbu Foundation which is also affiliated with Sathyabama Institute of Science & technology (SIST). The Foundation extends additional support to scholarship recipients by providing food and hostel accommodations.

Under her guidance, SIST has also introduced the Anbu Scholarship Scheme to support underprivileged students in pursuing their higher education. The scheme grants scholarships to students identified by NGOs, as well as children of Indian defence personnel, destitute women and war widows, children of prison inmates, and meritorious wards of Sathyabama’s non-teaching staff. The screening process evaluates factors such as family background,

performance in qualifying exams, and a test conducted by the institution before awarding the scholarship.

Earlier in the year, Sathyabama launched the ‘Madugai’ scheme for girl students in government run schools, under which health & hygiene kits are distributed to them. Madugai means strength in Tamil language and the scheme has won the heart of leading actress and entrepreneur Nayanthara who has since then been acting as the institution’s brand ambassador.

A champion of women’s empowerment, Dr. Mariazeena Johnson feels that it is more difficult for women to come up in life, but that they can surely come up on the strength of their resolve and society’s support. As someone who walks her talk, she has made sure that

Sathyabama is strengthening its health science courses, and this initiative is backed by the Sathyabama Hospital that provides healthcare services across multiple departments.

85% of administrative posts and 70% of faculty positions in Sathyabama are occupied by women. Under her guidance, Sathyabama has also adopted several village schools in the suburbs of Chennai, in a concerted effort to bring them up on all counts.

NURTURING ITS STUDENTS & FACU BE GLOBAL WINNERS LIKE NO OTHE

ICFAI Group, especially its flagships IFHE & IBS Hyderabad, stand a notch above its peers when it comes to nurturing its students and faculty to be global winners. This has been so even when the faculty and students have been from non-IIT & non-IIM backgrounds, with the best example of this phenomenon being the global case study legend, the Late Prof. Debapratim Purkayastha, who not only rubbed shoulders with his peers from renowned institutions including Harvard, INSEAD & IMD, but edged past them to be the top ranked business case study writer in the world for 8 years running. Death could snatch him tragically by age 44, but not before IFHE & Prof. Debapratim ensured that a formidable team of

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six business case writers have emerged in the Global Top 50 list of case writers. The distinct advantage for IBS Hyderabad students is that these globally award winning cases are taught by their own authors who are their own teachers! This nurturing attitude at IFHE traces its roots to its founder Late NJ Yasaswy, who was a national first rank holder for five national level exams including his CA & ICWA intermediates and finals! Even more importantly, Yasaswy was an edupreneur par excellence who fought indomitable challenges from both India and abroad to establish the ICFAI Group. This flame is today carried on by leaders including its Chancellor and renowned economist Dr. C Rangarajan, Vice Chancellor Prof. (Dr.) LS Ganesh, IBS Hyderabad’s Director Prof. Venu Gopal Rao KS, its Dean Prof. (Dr.) Sindhuja PN, and other top ranking academic leaders of IFHE.

N. J. Yasaswy

One of the most often raised concerns regarding college graduates and post graduates, be it in India or abroad, is the huge disconnect between what they master in the classroom and what is actually happening in the real world companies where they hope to be employed as soon as they pass out.

Different professions tackle this in different ways, like how hospitals manage it through house surgency for fresh doctors, or how engineering industries tackle it through training and probation periods. But there are certain professions where this disconnect is too great to be bridged easily.

The best example for such a challenging career is business management, where textbook level knowledge is woefully inadequate to equip MBA aspirants for what really awaits them at their dynamic workplaces driven by rapid innovation and tech led paradigm shifts.

Perhaps the only way this academicindustry disconnect can be bridged in B-schools is by including ample real world case studies in the curriculum. And that is what the best B-schools, right from Harvard and Stanford, to our own IIMs and other leading institutions do.

To cite some dynamic examples with buzzing or turnaround companies across the world like IKEA or Fitbit or X/Twitter or Blackberry, there are numerous challenges faced by them currently that have evolved into top ranking business case studies.

IKEA is in an ethical dilemma while expanding in Russia, Fitbit is leveraging its X/Twitter data for business insights, and Blackberry has been plotting a turnaround plan to regain relevance in the smartphone market which it once ruled.

All these dynamic case studies are

current bestsellers and taught across leading B-schools across the world including in Hyderabad based ICFAI Business School (IBS), a constituent of the ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education, a leading deemed-to-be university.

But IBS students have a distinct advantage while these case studies are being taught, as they have been written by their own teacher, V Namratha Prasad, Assistant Professor, ICFAI Business School, who also teaches them the same! These case studies won for Prof. Namratha, the 34th rank last year in the case study ranking by UK based The Case Centre, arguably the biggest repository of global business case studies.

Prof. Namratha is not an exception

at IBS, nor are her students. In fact, IBS Bangalore Director Prof. GV Muralidhara is a prolific and award winning business case study author, who won the 16th rank in last year’s rankings by The Case Centre, for his case studies on post-Brexit Britain’s prospects, on the Chinese fintech major CreditEase’s financial inclusion strategies, as well as for his contributions for the IKEA-Russia case study from IBS itself.

Another stalwart from the ICFAI Business School stable who made his mark in last year’s Case Centre rankings was Prof. Sanjib Dutta, Associate Dean in charge of the Case Research Centre at IBS. Prof. Dutta bagged last year’s 12th bestselling rank from The Case Centre, UK, for his case studies including those on

Prof. (Dr.) L. S. Ganesh, VC

the digital transformation underway at Starbucks, Motorola’s China leadership strategies and Nokia’s fall from leadership and how it is fighting back for a market share.

The IBS case writers in last year’s Top 50 authors rubbed shoulders with research scholars from prestigious global B-schools including Harvard Business School, INSEAD, Columbia Business School, IMD, Newcastle University, Penn State Harrisburg, Georgetown University, University of

Virginia, University of Bath, London Business School, HEC Paris and many others.

In fact, apart from Harvard that produced maximum winners, followed by INSEAD and IMD, the maximum number of top ranked case writers last year were from IBS, Hyderabad. Apart from the names already discussed, the IBS Scholars included the 11th rank winner Prof. Jitesh Nair whose case studies were on Microsoft & Automattic, the 7th rank winner Prof. Syeda Maseeha Qumer whose case studies were on HBO’s Game of Thrones, Body Shop & ZTE Corporation, and the 2nd rank winner Prof. Indu Perepu whose case studies were on Airbnb’s Design Thinking, and on international clothing brands Under Armour and Zara.

While these case studies by IBS scholars will greatly enrich the global case study approach at thousands of B-schools across the world, IBS students are greatly fortunate to learn these case studies from their own authors, who happen to be their teachers too!

But they will greatly miss that one case study author who began this revolution at IBS, and elevated IBS’ stature globally among all B-schools.

He is none other than the one and only Prof. Debapratim Purkayastha, the former Director of ICFAI Business School. But the legend lives on, as despite his unfortunate and untimely passing away due to Covid in May 2021, the UK based Case Centre selected Prof. Debapratim himself as last year’s No. 1 rank holder among all best selling case study authors!

And it couldn’t be otherwise, as before his untimely death at age 44, Prof. Debapratim had proven himself as one of the most prolific case writers, with The Case Centre, UK, database itself holding 531 cases authored or co-authored by him. By the time of his death, his cases had been used at 1,595 B-schools across

Prof. Venu Gopal Rao K S Director, ICFAI Business School

Prof. (Dr.) Sindhuja P N Dean, ICFAI Business School

95 countries to teach over 2,33,900 students. And ever since The Case Centre began publishing its Top Bestselling Case Authors list in 2016, the first rank has been won by this IBS scholar, year after year.

But two other factors truly differentiate the success of Prof. Debapratim and IBS. One is that both this unique professor and this unique university made sure that his skill in

Debapratim Purkayastha

Indu Perepu

case writing doesn’t end with him, but is taught to other emerging scholars too. That is how IBS dominated last year’s list too, just behind global giants Harvard, INSEAD & IMD, with 6 top ranking scholars apart from Prof. Debapratim in the global Top 50 authors.

Secondly, this whole success story of ICFAI Group with regard to its ICFAI Business School (IBS), was narrated

to illustrate a unique trait displayed by this higher education group from its day one to until now, and is designed so as to perpetuate endlessly. This unique trait - of talent identification and development - in both faculty and students permeates across ICFAI Group’s 11 Universities, 9 B-Schools, 7 Tech Schools and 9 Law Schools across the country.

And this talent nurturing trait that originated from ICFAI Founder, Late NJ Yasaswy, has grown from strength to strength over the past 35+ years, and continues across the Group and in its flagship deemed university IFHE Hyderabad under its Chancellor and renowned economist Dr. C Rangarajan, Vice Chancellor Prof. (Dr.) LS Ganesh, IBS Hyderabad’s Director Prof. Venu Gopal Rao KS, its Dean Prof. (Dr.) Sindhuja PN, and other top ranking academic leaders of IFHE. Apart from ICFAI Business School, IFHE is home to its engineering and technology school, IcfaiTech School, ICFAI School of Architecture and ICFAI Law School.

In a higher education system where educational labels like IITs, IIMs, IISc, ISB etc are deemed more important than their actual achievements, ICFAI Group and especially the ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education (IFHE) has excelled in its own, by attracting and nurturing non-IIT / nonIIM talents too to global levels of

Syeda Maseeha Qumer

Jitesh NairSanjib Dutta

GV Muralidhara

V Namratha Prasad

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excellence. Forget IITs/IIMs, this deemed university and its businessschool have made global academic winners out of people coming from non-academic or industrial background.

The best example for this phenomenon is Late Prof. Debapratim Purkayastha himself. Coming from a non-IIT / non-IIM background, with his degree from Gauhati University, MBA from Utkal University & PhD from KITS, Debapratim was basically from an industries background, especially in sales, sales force management and product management at pharma companies including Torrent, Zydus Cadila, Themis & Hetero, before switching over to academia at IBS Hyderabad.

And there was no looking back, as his new home - IBS - instantly recognized his innate talents and assigned him to the then fledgling initiative of case study creation. It was a perfect match between a talented human being and a nurturing organisation, and that is how Debapratim Purkayastha from an industries background became Prof. Debapratim Purkayastha, a globally renowned thinker and case study author.

Under IFHE’s nurturing culture, Prof. Debapratim could also train and inculcate other leaders who carry on this IBS flame in industry interactions and case studies to greater heights. Prof. Debapratim led over 70 inspirational case method workshops for research scholars, faculty members, and business executives; and he worked in various leadership roles for renowned case study journals including Case Folio, Case Focus, Case Research Journal and Case Journal. Even the week before his unfortunate demise, he was leading a case workshop at Jaipuria Institute of Management, Jaipur.

This unique trait of IFHE & IBS, which Prof. Debapratim imbibed perfectly, speaks for itself today in the achievements of leaders like

Professors GV Muralidhara, Sanjib Dutta, Indu Perepu, Syeda Maseeha Qumer, Jitesh Nair, V Namratha Prasad and many others. It couldn’t have been otherwise as they have great role models in ICFAI’s all past and present leaders including its Founder, Chancellor & Vice Chancellor.

ICFAI Group Founder Late NJ Yasaswy was the first rank holder for five exams - BCom, CA Inter, CA Final, ICWA Inter & ICWA Final, apart from being the recipient of the Basu Foundation Award for the Best Student of the Year from both The Institute of Cost and Works Accountants of India and The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. Also a legendary edupreneur, Yasaswy fought seemingly indomitable challenges from both India and abroad to establish this sprawling higher education empire.

IFHE Chancellor Dr. C. Rangarajan needs no introduction in India, as this renowned economist and thought leader has served as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, as the Governor of Andhra Pradesh State, as the Chairman of Economic Advisory Council to Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, as Chairman of the Twelfth Finance Commission and as Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha.

Though IFHE has nurtured great winners out of non-IIT & non-IIM faculty and students, this nurturing attitude has invariably resulted in attracting top talent from these premier engineering and management institutes of India that are globally renowned. The topmost leader that exemplifies this phenomenon now at IFHE is none other than its current Vice Chancellor, the one and only Prof. (Dr.) LS Ganesh, endearingly known as Prof. LSG wherever he has led the academics.

Before assuming the role of VC at IFHE on September 1 2022, Prof. LSG was Professor, Department of Management Studies, and Dean, of IIT Madras. With over three decades of experience spanning teaching, research, and intellectual services, Prof. LSG has also been a Visiting Professor at University of Passau in Germany, IIM Bangalore, IIM Kozhikode, ISB Hyderabad and NIT Trichy, among others. Prof. LSG has over the years also lent his expertise to international organisations including World Bank and UNDP, and national organisations including ISRO, MHRD, AICTE, NBA, CII, FICCI, and MMA.

With such leaders with deep industry connect at the helm, there is no wonder IFHE has been bettering its standing in academics, research and placements year after year.

DOES MORE JOY LIE IN GOOD THINGS OR ANTICIPATION OF GOOD STUFF?

HOW CAN YOU CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR THE BETTER TODAY? LEARN NOT JUST TO APPRECIATE HAPPINESS –BUT TO ANTICIPATE IT.

Have you heard about vorfreude? I recently came across this lovely word, which my German-speaking friend translated as “the anticipation of joy”. It struck me as such a hopeful concept – surely we could all do more vorfreude. So what exactly is anticipatory joy, how do we cultivate it and will it make us happier?

“The idea is to find joy in the lead-up to an event,” says Dr Sophie Mort, a clinical psychologist and mental health expert at the meditation and mindfulness app Headspace. “For example, we often feel joy and excitement when planning a trip, thinking about going on a date or anticipating a special meal.” It’s easy

to look forward to holidays and special occasions, but a joy-filled life is also about everyday occurrences.

Rory Platt, a writer at the personal development company The School of Life, says: “The trick lies in filling our calendar with lots of little moments to look forward to – like tiny baubles that, when seen from a distance, combine to make a more glittering future.”

But vorfreude is not about wishing your life away and thinking you will be happy in an imagined future. “Looking forward to something can trigger joy in the present moment,” says Karen Neil, a health coach and the founder of Mindful Medicine. This can boost your mood, reduce your stress levels and help to avoid

burnout. A 2017 study published in Frontiers of Psychology found that anticipating positive events activated the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with a higher level of wellbeing.

Doesn’t getting your hopes up risk disappointment? Perhaps it’s safer to keep expectations low. Emma Mills, a mindfulness expert and the author of Inhale Exhale Repeat, begs to differ. “There is a saying: ‘If you worry, you suffer twice.’ Anticipatory joy is the opposite of that.” Even if an anticipated event turns out to be a letdown, vorfreude helps people bounce back. “Optimists have improved coping abilities when dealing with unplanned distress and they tend to recover far faster,” says Tania Taylor, a psychotherapist and vorfreude advocate.

If you are going through a tough time and feel as though you have nothing to look forward to, don’t beat yourself up. “It’s important that positive psychology doesn’t get confused with toxic positivity,” says Taylor. “When I was going through cancer treatment, I spent most days binge watching television. It’s OK to sit tight when everything feels overwhelming without feeling guilt that you are not looking for joy.” If feelings of hopelessness persist, she stresses, it’s important to seek help from a GP, a therapist or charities.

If, however, you are ready for vorfreude, it shouldn’t feel like a chore. “Mostly, it will involve exploring what you already have in your life that you look forward to,” says Taylor. Willem Kuyken, a professor of mindfulness at the University of Oxford, has researched the benefits of cultivating joy. In his book Mindfulness for Life, he writes: “It takes only a small step out of habit and into awareness to enjoy the people we love around us, to savour food or to dance to music in our kitchen while cooking. These moments are available to us all the time.”

With that in mind, here are 30 simple ways to get more vorfreude in your life.

Start (really) small

If the concept of vorfreude is completely alien to you, take baby steps. “Try to notice one joyful thing each day,” says Neil. You could frame this as a photo challenge: spend a little time every day looking for one beautiful flower, interesting sight or cute dog to photograph.

Think positive

“Plan a morning affirmation or positive statement and look forward to starting your day with it in your mind,” says Taylor. “Some people create a screensaver with it on their phone so it’s the first thing they see.” An example she gives is: “Today I will look for good moments and remember them.” Mort suggests: “May I be open to joy and have many moments of joy ahead.”

Turn routine into ritual

“A very small thing that I get vorfreude from is anticipating my first coffee of the day,” says Mort. “When I wake up, it’s the first thing I think about: how it will smell, how it will taste and how I will feel while drinking it. It’s a ritual that I love and I really allow myself to focus on it.”

Find joy in the everyday

“At the end of my evening meditation classes, I suggest people consider three things they are looking forward to tomorrow,” says Mills. “It could be their morning walk in the park or listening to a podcast on their commute; maybe sitting down to enjoy their packed lunch at work or looking forward to having a bath at the end of the day.”

Come off autopilot

“Perhaps you have a hobby such as gardening, or a pet to spend time with,” says Karen Atkinson, the CEO of MindfulnessUK. “Coming out of SEASONAL MAGAZINE

autopilot and consciously looking forward to these moments is an achievable way for anyone to experience vorfreude.”

Avoid mind traps

“To change your mindset to become more joyful, you must first become familiar with your own negative thought patterns,” says Atkinson. These “mind traps” include catastrophising and discounting the positive. “For example, instead of thinking: ‘I’m only going away for one night – it’s hardly a holiday,’ say to yourself: ‘What a treat – a night away, going out to dinner and meeting friends. How lovely.’” The “shoulds” are another trap. “You may think: ‘I should have a more thriving social life, like everyone else.’ Instead, recognise that Fomo [fear of missing out] can add stress. Remember how fortunate you are to go out and have fun once in a while – really cherish the opportunity.”

Savour the moment

“There is a small moment just before you eat your pastry, or the movie begins, or as you get in your bubble bath,” says Mills. “In that moment, the pastry hasn’t been eaten yet – it’s a joy about to be enjoyed. Savour the moment and think how lucky you are.” She likes a Kurt Vonnegut quote: “And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point: ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

Treat yourself

“Schedule brief excursions and small indulgences,” says Platt. “Perhaps aim to finish work an hour early on Fridays to get dinner with a friend, visit an art gallery or take yourself on a solo cinema trip.” Don’t feel guilty about it. The team at The Mindfulness Project says: “Giving yourself permission to look forward to these pleasures can prepare you to enjoy them.”

Put plans in writing

One of the exercises in I Am Here Now, a book by The Mindfulness Project, is getting into the habit of writing down plans. The authors suggest rating your anticipation levels, but even the simple act of putting pen to paper can make plans feel more real and increase excitement.

Keep a joy journal

“Joy is individual,” says Neil. “There are common themes – we can all appreciate a happy child playing –but it’s about finding what brings you joy.” She advises people to keep a joy journal, noting down what has made you happy that day, week or month. That way, you can plan more of it in the future.

Schedule movement

“I’ll plan 10 minutes of gentle stretching or book an activity session such as a yoga, pilates or a sound bath class,” says Taylor. If that sounds more like punishment than pleasure, remember exercise is individual, too – so find something you enjoy.

Try meal planning

“Creating a meal plan for the week means you can look forward to what you are going to eat,” says Taylor. She suggests using a slow cooker if you are pushed for time: “This week, I’m looking forward to making rice pudding in mine.”

Make a date with a friend

Kareen Griffiths, a mindful change consultant, likes to plan a big night out. “I relish the moments in the buildup: putting on my outfit, the train journey, the feeling of excitement,” she says. Taylor gets just as much vorfreude out of arranging for a friend to come over to watch a film. The important thing is making time to meet up with someone you care about.

Plan a fantasy holiday

“The other day, I saw a social media post about a cheap mini-break to Rome. It had me getting excited about a variety of really affordable getaways – even though my passport has expired,” says Taylor. “I must get around to renewing it, but it doesn’t stop me from getting enjoyment out of the anticipation of what might be.”

… and enjoy the buildup to a real one

“Some research shows that planning and anticipating a holiday can make you happier than the holiday itself,” says Mort. “This switched me from being a spontaneous ‘Oh, I’ll leave it till the last minute and book just before I go away’ person to being someone who takes time to mull over where I want to go, why I want to go there and how it might be when I get there.”

(Credit: Rachel Dixon for The Guardian)

5 PRODUCTIVITY HACKS FROM STANFORD

STANFORD PROFESSORS BOB SUTTON AND HUGGY RAO ARE THE AUTHORS OF ‘THE FRICTION PROJECT’, AND HERE

THEY SHARE 5 FRICTION-BUSTING MINDSET SHIFTS TO FAST-TRACK PRODUCTIVITY.

ob Sutton is a professor of management science at the Stanford University School of Engineering. Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

1.YOU ARE A TRUSTEE OF PEOPLE’S TIME.

Leaders and teams that are especially good at making the right things easy and the wrong things hard embrace a similar mindset or mission. They have an attitude that we call the trustees’ mindset. They see themselves as trustees of others’ time. When we were at Stanford preparing a class for 60 executives, our colleague Jeremy Utley stood up in the middle of the meeting and bellowed, “I hate wasting other people’s time!” That is the embodiment of the trustees’ mindset—a leader who feels obligated to assure that their employees, customers, or students have every minute of their time used well. Being a trustee is never a one-and-done situation. Back in 2015, I wrote an article about how Dropbox had this amazing intervention called Armeetingeddon in 2013, where leaders removed standing meetings from everybody’s calendar, and employees couldn’t add new meetings back in for about a week. During this time, they were asked to think about which meetings were essential. Dropbox also made all these new rules and displayed them on the walls, like, for example, that you

should keep meetings as small as possible, and you should even leave a meeting if it wasn’t effective or you weren’t adding value. They did reduce the number of unnecessary meetings for a while, but when we wrote it up for Inc. two years later, their CEO, Drew Houston, told us, “It’s worse than ever. It’s like mowing the lawn; you’ve got to do it over and over again with discipline where you never fix anything.” Adopting the trustees’ mindset is like mowing the lawn. It’s a way of life, a discipline.

2.ADOPT A SUBTRACTION MINDSET.

When we see people and organizations that are skilled at fighting bad friction, they adopt what

we call the subtraction mindset. This is not something that comes naturally to human beings. A series of 20 studies done by researchers from the University of Virginia shows that humans are wired to solve problems by adding rather than subtracting complexity. Adding complexity is our natural tendency, whether we’re planning a vacation, fixing a Lego model, or fixing a university. The organizations we studied made this problem worse by rewarding people who build fiefdoms, start initiatives, and add software—and not rewarding people who reduce complexity.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are many things in the organizations we studied that people do using the subtraction mindset.

A great example happened at Hawaii Pacific Medical, Hawaii’s largest healthcare system. A woman named Dr. Melinda Ashton was concerned about the excessive time that doctors, nurses, and so forth were spending on the electronic patient record system instead of focusing on patients directly. So she started the Get Rid of Stupid Stuff campaign. She had people make suggestions from throughout the system about parts of the electronic record process that

could be subtracted or simplified. She described it as “parts that were poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid.”

People in the system suggested 188 subtraction targets, and her team made 87 improvements. Here is one, just to give you an example: They eliminated one mouse click that was made for every patient as nurses and nurse assistants made rounds. With just that one little click removed, they saved 24 seconds per click, which saved approximately 1,700 nursing hours per month at their four hospitals. Embrace the subtraction mindset.

3. AVOID JARGON MONOXIDE.

Our third lesson is to watch your language; avoid using what Huggy and I call jargon monoxide. All sorts of destructive friction is caused when people routinely use overly complex or incomprehensible language.

Just one example is jargon mishmash syndrome. This is when a certain kind of language or phrase means so many things to so many different people that it is meaningless. We’re taking a cue from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. He talks about noise being a big problem when it comes to figuring out the correct action because recommendations, data, or definitions that people use are so varied and inconsistent that people can’t figure out what to do, whom to trust, or what some idea “really means.” Kahneman defines noise as situations where there is “a random scatter of ideas” rather than a discernable pattern.

An example that illustrates noise is a speech given by an Australian agile consultant. This fellow Craig Smith gave a rollicking 40-minute speech describing 40 different kinds of agile—everything from holacracy, scrum plop, deming, beyond budgeting, and lean startup. Many were methods that, frankly, I’ve never heard of. If under the tent of agile

there are 40 different meanings of the word agile, then agile means at least 40 different things to different people. This fits Kahneman’s definition of a “random scatter of ideas,” and thus, it means nothing.

When you get in a situation where you’ve got the jargon mishmash syndrome, the best solution is just to stop using the worn-out term in question. Clean up your language, and people will be less confused, communicate better, and know what the heck to do!

4. NOT ALL FRICTION IS BAD.

There are situations where friction is good. Friction fixers banish bad friction and identify things that ought to be difficult, slow, or impossible. To give you one example, let’s look at research on creativity. Teresa Amabile, a professor from Harvard Business School, explains that when you put creativity under the gun and rush people too much, all sorts of bad things happen. Creativity is a fundamentally inefficient process. It entails a lot of dead ends, failure, and constructive conflict—when you’re doing it right.

The lesson here is Jerry Seinfeld. The famous comedian and cocreator of the TV show Seinfeld says, “When it comes to comedy, the hard way is the right way; there is no natural way to make it efficient.” When he prepares a show, he will try hundreds and hundreds of jokes, and maybe 1% or 2% will survive. When it comes to many things in life, they should be

slow, difficult, and complicated. Trying to build a frictionless organization is a fool’s errand.

5. EMBRACE THE MESS.

The best leaders are of two minds. Their first perspective is focused on being good organizational designers: removing bad procedures, weaving together knowledge and action from different corners of the company, making unethical or dumb things impossible, and a host of other changes in how the organization operates. So they’re constantly thinking about ways to clean up the mess by improving organization design.

But they also are of another mind that knows that there will be procedures, laws, and rules that are dumb, dangerous, and impair progress, which leaders and teams can’t escape or repair—at least for now. As in the rest of life, there will always be difficult stretches, times when people in workplaces are confused, upset, and can’t figure out how to fix things. Being a friction fixer means figuring out how to cope with and navigate messy situations. Here’s what great leaders do in such situations. Clara Shih is CEO of AI at Salesforce, a member of Starbucks’s board since she was 29, and the chair and founding CEO of her own company, Hearsay Systems. Shih says that when she launches something new, she urges her team to embrace the mess. She uses an approach called separation of concerns, which is from computer science. She has one team that focuses on implementing things that are working well, and she has another team whose job is to clean up the inevitable messes that arise.

As a friction fixer and trustee of others’ time, you often have to do two things at once: keep people charging ahead on the things going right and as planned, and handle the inevitable surprises, setbacks, confusion, and other messes that need cleaning up. (Credit: Next Big Idea Club)

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BEWARE, AI SCIENTISTS THEMSELVES CAN’T EXPLAIN AI’S STUNNING FEATS ANY MORE

Will Douglas Heaven is the senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review, and himself a PhD in computer science from Imperial College London who has earlier worked with robots. Earlier he was the founding editor at the BBC tech-meets-geopolitics website Future Now and chief technology editor at New Scientist magazine. In this article for MIT Technology Review, this ace AI writer sounds the alarm about where AI is heading. For instance, large language models like ChatGPT can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why. And that’s a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

Two years ago, Yuri Burda and Harri Edwards, researchers at the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, were trying to find out what it would take to get a language model to do basic arithmetic. They wanted to know how many examples of adding up two numbers the model needed to see before it was able to add up any two numbers they gave it. At first, things didn’t go too well. The models memorized the sums they saw but failed to solve new ones.

By accident, Burda and Edwards left some of their experiments running far longer than they meant to—days rather than hours. The models were shown the example sums over and over again, way past the point when the researchers would otherwise have called it quits. But when the pair at last came back, they were surprised to find that the experiments had worked. They’d trained a language model to add two numbers— it had just taken a lot more time than anybody thought it should.

Curious about what was going on, Burda and Edwards teamed up with colleagues to study the phenomenon. They found that in certain cases, models could seemingly fail to learn a task and

then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on. This wasn’t how deep learning was supposed to work. They called the behavior grokking.

“It’s really interesting,” says Hattie Zhou, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal and Apple Machine Learning Research, who wasn’t involved in the work. “Can we ever be confident that models have stopped learning? Because maybe we just haven’t trained for long enough.”

The weird behavior has captured the imagination of the wider research community. “Lots of people have opinions,” says Lauro Langosco at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But I don’t think there’s a consensus about what exactly is going on.”

With hopes and fears about the technology running wild, it’s time to agree on what it can and can’t do.

Grokking is just one of several odd phenomena that have AI researchers scratching their heads. The largest models, and large language models in particular, seem to behave in ways

textbook math says they shouldn’t. This highlights a remarkable fact about deep learning, the fundamental technology behind today’s AI boom: for all its runaway success, nobody knows exactly how—or why—it works.

“Obviously, we’re not completely ignorant,” says Mikhail Belkin, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “But our theoretical analysis is so far off what these models can do. Like, why can they learn language? I think this is very mysterious.”

The biggest models are now so complex that researchers are studying them as if they were strange natural phenomena, carrying out experiments and trying to explain the results. Many of those observations fly in the face of classical statistics, which had provided our best set of explanations for how predictive models behave.

So what, you might say. In the last few weeks, Google DeepMind has rolled out its generative models across most of its consumer apps. OpenAI wowed people with Sora, its stunning new text-to-video model. And businesses around the world are scrambling to co-opt AI for their needs. The tech works—isn’t that enough?

But figuring out why deep learning works so well isn’t just an intriguing scientific puzzle. It could also be key to unlocking the next generation of the technology—as well as getting a handle on its formidable risks.

“These are exciting times,” says Boaz Barak, a computer scientist at Harvard University who is on secondment to

OpenAI’s superalignment team for a year. “Many people in the field often compare it to physics at the beginning of the 20th century. We have a lot of experimental results that we don’t completely understand, and often when you do an experiment it surprises you.”

Most of the surprises concern the way models can learn to do things that they have not been shown how to do. Known as generalization, this is one of the most fundamental ideas in machine learning—and its greatest puzzle. Models learn to do a task—spot faces, translate sentences, avoid pedestrians— by training with a specific set of examples. Yet they can generalize, learning to do that task with examples they have not seen before. Somehow, models do not just memorize patterns they have seen but come up with rules that let them apply those patterns to new cases. And sometimes, as with grokking, generalization happens when we don’t expect it to.

Large language models in particular, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini, have an

astonishing ability to generalize. “The magic is not that the model can learn math problems in English and then generalize to new math problems in English,” says Barak, “but that the model can learn math problems in English, then see some French literature, and from that generalize to solving math problems in French. That’s something beyond what statistics can tell you about.”

When Zhou started studying AI a few years ago, she was struck by the way her teachers focused on the how but not the why. “It was like, here is how you train these models and then here’s the result,” she says. “But it wasn’t clear why this process leads to models that are capable of doing these amazing things.” She wanted to know more, but she was told there weren’t good answers: “My assumption was that scientists know what they’re doing. Like, they’d get the theories and then they’d build the models. That wasn’t the case at all.”

The rapid advances in deep learning over the last 10-plus years came more from trial and error than from understanding. Researchers copied what worked for others and tacked on innovations of their own. There are now many different ingredients that can be added to models and a growing cookbook filled with recipes for using them. “People try this thing, that thing, all these tricks,” says Belkin. “Some are important. Some are probably not.”

“It works, which is amazing. Our minds are blown by how powerful these things are,” he says. And yet for all their success, the recipes are more alchemy than chemistry: “We figured out certain incantations at midnight after mixing up some ingredients,” he says.

The problem is that AI in the era of large language models appears to defy textbook statistics. The most powerful models today are vast, with up to a trillion parameters (the values in a model that get adjusted during training). But statistics says that as models get bigger, they should first improve in performance but then get worse. This is because of something called overfitting.

When a model gets trained on a data set, it tries to fit that data to a pattern. Picture a bunch of data points plotted

on a chart. A pattern that fits the data can be represented on that chart as a line running through the points. The process of training a model can be thought of as getting it to find a line that fits the training data (the dots already on the chart) but also fits new data (new dots).

A straight line is one pattern, but it probably won’t be too accurate, missing some of the dots. A wiggly line that connects every dot will get full marks on the training data, but won’t generalize. When that happens, a model is said to overfit its data.

According to classical statistics, the bigger a model gets, the more prone it is to overfitting. That’s because with more parameters to play with, it’s easier for a model to hit on wiggly lines that connect every dot. This suggests there’s a sweet spot between under- and overfitting that a model must find if it is to generalize. And yet that’s not what we see with big models. The best-known example of this is a phenomenon known as double descent.

The performance of a model is often represented in terms of the number of errors it makes: as performance goes up, error rate goes down (or descends). For decades, it was believed that error rate went down and then up as models got bigger: picture a U-shaped curve with the sweet spot for generalization at the lowest point. But in 2018, Belkin and his colleagues found that when certain models got bigger, their error rate went down, then up—and then down again (a double descent, or W-shaped curve). In other words, large models would somehow overrun that sweet spot and push through the overfitting problem, getting even better as they got bigger.

A year later, Barak coauthored a paper showing that the double-descent phenomenon was more common than many thought. It happens not just when models get bigger but also in models with large amounts of training data or models that are trained for longer. This behavior, dubbed benign overfitting, is still not fully understood. It raises basic questions about how models should be trained to get the most out of them.

Researchers have sketched out versions of what they think is going on. Belkin

believes there’s a kind of Occam’s razor effect in play: the simplest pattern that fits the data—the smoothest curve between the dots—is often the one that generalizes best. The reason bigger models keep improving longer than it seems they should could be that bigger models are more likely to hit upon that just-so curve than smaller ones: more parameters means more possible curves to try out after ditching the wiggliest.

“Our theory seemed to explain the basics of why it worked,” says Belkin. “And then people made models that could speak 100 languages and it was like, okay, we understand nothing at all.” He laughs: “It turned out we weren’t even scratching the surface.”

For Belkin, large language models are a whole new mystery. These models are based on transformers, a type of neural network that is good at processing sequences of data, like words in sentences.

There’s a lot of complexity inside transformers, says Belkin. But he thinks at heart they do more or less the same thing as a much better understood statistical construct called a Markov chain, which predicts the next item in a sequence based on what’s come before. But that isn’t enough to explain everything that large language models can do. “This is something that, until recently, we thought should not work,” says Belkin. “That means that something was fundamentally missing. It identifies a gap in our understanding of the world.”

Belkin goes further. He thinks there could be a hidden mathematical pattern in language that large language models somehow come to exploit: “Pure speculation but why not?”

“The fact that these things model language is probably one of the biggest discoveries in history,” he says. “That you can learn language by just predicting the next word with a Markov chain—that’s just shocking to me.”

Researchers are trying to figure it out piece by piece. Because large models are too complex to study themselves, Belkin, Barak, Zhou, and others experiment instead on smaller (and older) varieties of statistical model that

are better understood. Training these proxies under different conditions and on various kinds of data and observing what happens can give insight into what’s going on. This helps get new theories off the ground, but it is not always clear if those theories will hold for larger models too. After all, it is in the complexity of large models that many of the weird behaviors reside. Is a theory of deep learning coming? Daniel Hsu, a computer scientist at Columbia University who was one of Belkin’s coauthors on the doubledescent paper, doesn’t expect all the answers anytime soon. “We have better intuition now,” he says. “But really explaining everything about why neural networks have this kind of unexpected behavior? We’re still far from doing that.”

In 2016, Chiyuan Zhang at MIT and colleagues at Google Brain published an influential paper titled “Understanding Deep Learning Requires Rethinking Generalization.” In 2021, five years later, they republished the paper, calling it “Understanding Deep Learning (Still)

Requires Rethinking Generalization.” What about in 2024? “Kind of yes and no,” says Zhang. “There has been a lot of progress lately, though probably many more questions arise than get resolved.”

Meanwhile, researchers continue to wrestle even with the basic observations. In December, Langosco and his colleagues presented a paper at NeurIPS, a top AI conference, in which they claimed that grokking and double descent are in fact aspects of the same phenomenon. “You eyeball them and they look kind of similar,” says Langosco. He believes that an explanation of what’s going on should account for both.

At the same conference, Alicia Curth, who studies statistics at the University of Cambridge, and her colleagues argued that double descent is in fact an illusion. “It didn’t sit very well with me that modern machine learning is some kind of magic that defies all the laws that we’ve established so far,” says Curth. Her team argued that the double-descent phenomenon—where models appear to

perform better, then worse, and then better again as they get bigger—arises because of the way the complexity of the models was measured.

Belkin and his colleagues used model size—the number of parameters—as a measure of complexity. But Curth and her colleagues found that the number of parameters might not be a good stand-in for complexity because adding parameters sometimes makes a model more complex and sometimes makes it less so. It depends what the values are, how they get used during training, and how they interact with others—much of which stays hidden inside the model. “Our takeaway was that not all model parameters are created equal,” says Curth.

In short, if you use a different measure for complexity, large models might conform to classical statistics just fine. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot we don’t understand about what happens when models get bigger, says Curth. But we already have all the math we need to explain it.

A great mystery of our time

It’s true that such debates can get into the weeds. Why does it matter whether AI models are underpinned by classical statistics or not?

One answer is that better theoretical understanding would help build even better AI or make it more efficient. At the moment, progress has been fast but unpredictable. Many things that OpenAI’s GPT-4 can do came as a surprise even to the people who made it. Researchers are still arguing over what it can and cannot achieve. “Without some sort of fundamental theory, it’s very hard to have any idea what we can expect from these things,” says Belkin.

Barak agrees. “Even once we have the models, it is not straightforward even in hindsight to say exactly why certain capabilities emerged when they did,” he says.

This isn’t only about managing progress—it’s about anticipating risk, too. Many of the researchers working on the theory behind deep learning are motivated by safety concerns for future models. “We don’t know what capabilities GPT-5 will have until we train it and test it,” says Langosco. “It might be a medium-size problem right now, but it will become a really big problem in the future as models become more powerful.”

Barak works on OpenAI’s superalignment team, which was set up by the firm’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, to figure out how to stop a hypothetical superintelligence from going rogue. “I’m very interested in getting guarantees,” he says. “If you can do amazing things but you can’t really control it, then it’s not so amazing. What good is a car that can drive 300 miles per hour if it has a shaky steering wheel?”

But beneath all that there’s also a grand scientific challenge. “Intelligence is definitely up there as one of the great mysteries of our time,” says Barak.

“We’re a very infant science,” he says. “The questions that I’m most excited about this month might be different to the questions that I’m most excited about next month. We are still discovering things. We very much need to experiment and get surprised.”

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PERMA+, A PSYCHOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR HEALTH, HAPPINESS & WELLBEING

The pursuit of happiness is one that humans have been working toward since the beginning of time. Yet the concept of “happiness” is often hard to accurately define. Living the good life, flourishing, self-actualization, joy, and purpose are words that come to mind with happiness. Is it possible to experience any of these in the middle of a chaotic world and negative circumstances? Can we learn to grow or find skills that lead to this “good life?”

ccording to Prof. Martin Seligman, renowned professor of psychology at University of Pennsylvania, positive psychology takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment, meaning and purpose. This article will outline the Prof. Seligman’s PERMA+ model and the theory of wellbeing, and provide practical ways to apply its components in your private practice or personal life.

Abraham Maslow was one of the first in the field of psychology to describe “wellbeing,” with his characteristics of a self-actualized person. The description of self-actualization is a foreshadowing of the PERMA model, which outlines the characteristics of a flourishing individual and Wellbeing Theory (WBT).

In 1998, Dr. Martin Seligman used his inaugural address as the incoming president of the American Psychological Association to shift the focus from mental illness and pathology to studying what is good and positive in life. From this point in time, theories and research examined positive psychology interventions that help make life worth living and how to define, quantify, and create wellbeing.

In developing a theory to address this, Seligman selected five components that people pursue because they are intrinsically motivating and they contribute to wellbeing. These elements are pursued for their own sake and are defined and measured independently of each other. Additionally, the five components include both eudaimonic and hedonic components, setting WBT apart from other theories of wellbeing.

These five elements or components are Positive emotion, Engagement Relationships, Meaning &

Accomplishments. The PERMA model makes up WBT, where each dimension works in concert to give rise to a higher order construct that predicts the flourishing of groups, communities, organizations, and nations.

Research has shown significant positive associations between each of the PERMA components and physical health, vitality, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and commitment within organizations.

PERMA is also a better predictor of psychological distress than previous reports of distress. This means that proactively working on the components of PERMA not only increases aspects of wellbeing, but also decreases psychological distress.

P – Positive Emotion

Positive emotion is much more than mere ‘happiness.’ Positive emotions include hope, interest, joy, love, compassion, pride, amusement, and gratitude. Positive emotions are a prime indicator of flourishing, and they can be cultivated or learned to improve wellbeing. When individuals can explore, savor, and integrate positive emotions into daily life (and visualizations of future life), it improves habitual thinking and acting. Positive emotions can undo the harmful effects of negative emotions and promote resilience. Increasing positive emotions helps individuals build physical, intellectual, psychological, and social resources that lead to this resilience and overall wellbeing. Ways to build positive emotion may include: Spend time with people you care about, Do hobbies and creative activities that you enjoy, Listen to uplifting or inspirational music, Reflect on things you are grateful for and what is going well in your life.

E – Engagement

According to Seligman, engagement is “being one with the music.” It is in line with Prof. Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow.” Flow includes the loss of selfconsciousness and complete absorption in an activity. In other words, it is living in the present moment and focusing entirely on the task at hand. Flow, or this

concept of engagement, occurs when the perfect combination of challenge and skill/strength is found. People are more likely to experience flow when they use their top character strengths. Research on engagement has found that individuals who try to use their strengths in new ways each day for a week were happier and less depressed after six months. The concept of engagement is something much more powerful than simply “being happy,” but happiness is one of the many byproducts of engagement. Ways to increase engagement: Participate in activities that you really love, where you lose track of time when you do them, Practice living in the moment, even during daily activities or mundane tasks, Spend time in nature, watching, listening, and observing what happens around you, Identify and learn about your character strengths, and do things that you excel at.

R – Positive Relationships

Relationships encompass all the various interactions individuals have with partners, friends, family members, colleagues, bosses/mentors/supervisors, and their community at large. Relationships in the PERMA model refer to feeling supported, loved, and valued by others. Relationships are included in the model based on the idea that humans are inherently social creatures. There is evidence of this everywhere, but social connections become

particularly important as we age. The social environment has been found to play a critical role in preventing cognitive decline, and strong social networks contribute to better physical health among older adults. Many people have a goal of improving relationships with those they are closest to. Research has demonstrated that sharing good news or celebrating success fosters strong bonds and better relationships. Additionally, responding enthusiastically to others, particularly in close or intimate relationships, increases intimacy, wellbeing, and satisfaction. How to build relationships: Join a class or group that interests you, Ask questions of the people you don’t know well to find out more about them, Create friendships with people you are acquainted with, Get in touch with people you have not spoken to or connected with in a while.

M – Meaning

Another intrinsic human quality is the search for meaning and the need to have a sense of value and worth. Seligman discussed meaning as belonging and/or serving something greater than ourselves. Having a purpose in life helps individuals focus on what is really important in the face of significant challenge or adversity. Having meaning or purpose in life is different for everyone. Meaning may be pursued through a profession, a social

or political cause, a creative endeavor, or a religious/spiritual belief. It may be found in a career or through extracurricular, volunteer, or community activities. A sense of meaning is guided by personal values, and people who report having purpose in life live longer and have greater life satisfaction and fewer health problems. Ways to build meaning: Get involved in a cause or organization that matters to you, Try new, creative activities to find things you connect with, Think about how you can use your passions to help others, and spend quality time with people you care about.

A – Accomplishments

Accomplishment in PERMA is also known as achievement, mastery, or competence. A sense of accomplishment is a result of working toward and reaching goals, mastering an endeavor, and having self-motivation to finish what you set out to do. This contributes to wellbeing because individuals can look at their lives with a sense of pride. Accomplishment includes the concepts of perseverance and having a passion to attain goals. But flourishing and wellbeing come when accomplishment is tied to striving toward things with an internal motivation or working toward something just for the sake of the pursuit and improvement. Achieving intrinsic goals (such as growth and connection) leads to larger gains in wellbeing than external goals such as money or fame. Ways to build accomplishment: Set goals that are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound, Reflect on past successes, Look for creative ways to celebrate your achievements.

The Plus (+) in PERMA

Since happiness can be influenced by factors beyond these five core elements, the + can include other important areas we well, such as optimism, nutrition, physical activity and sleep. These are areas equally important to mental wellbeing.

Optimism

Optimism is a positive emotion critical to building resilience and wellbeing. Optimism is the belief that life will have

more good outcomes than bad. People who are optimistic are more likely to be resilient to stressful life events. Optimistic people tend to live longer, have better postoperative outcomes and lower levels of depression, and adjust better to college life. Encouraging youth to become more resilient would build help in establishing a more optimistic outlook on life. Our article, How to Build Resilience in Children, as well as Teaching Resilience in Schools, are great starting points to have youth who are optimistic, resilient, and can handle life’s stressful events better.

Physical activity

Physical activity has been linked to wellbeing in numerous ways. Negative emotions are associated with an increased risk of physical disease and poor health habits, and people with mental illness are more likely to be physically inactive. There are obvious physical benefits to being active, but increasing movement or activity also decreases symptoms of depression, anxiety, and loneliness and improves mental focus and clarity.

Nutrition

Poor nutrition leads to physical health problems such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer, but there is significant research demonstrating a relationship between diet and mental health. Eating a balanced diet rich in vegetables and nutrients (and limiting processed or sugary foods) has been associated with wellbeing. High levels of wellbeing were reported by

individuals who ate more fruits and vegetables. A review of research on children and adolescents found that a poor diet (high levels of saturated fat, refined carbohydrates, and processed foods) was linked to poorer mental health. So what should we eat? There are many “super foods” found in nature, such as berries, cruciferous vegetables, avocados, nuts, and seeds. A Mediterranean diet that is high in vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, beans, cereals, grains, fish, and unsaturated fats has been shown to reduce depression symptoms and provides an array of physical health benefits.

Sleep

Neuroimaging and neurochemistry research suggests that good sleep hygiene fosters mental and emotional resilience, and sleep deprivation leads to negative thinking and emotional vulnerability. Further, sleep problems are more likely to affect people with psychiatric disorders and may increase the risk of developing mental illness. Particularly, insomnia increases the risk of developing depression. Getting seven to nine hours of quality sleep during the same hours every night is recommended. Lifestyle changes such as avoiding caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol; getting physical activity; decreasing screen time; and using the bedroom only for sleep and sex can improve sleep quality. Relaxation techniques and cognitive behavioral techniques to reduce stress and anxiety can also be effective ways to improve sleep and overall wellbeing.