Seasonal Magazine's Latest Issue - Cover Story on ESAF SFB by John Antony

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MAGAZINE

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Managing Editor Jason D Pavorattikaran Editor John Antony Director (Finance) Ceena Associate Editor Carl Jaison Senior Editorial Coordinator Jacob Deva Senior Correspondent Bina Menon Creative Visualizer Bijohns Varghese Photographer Anish Aloysious Office Assistant Alby CG Correspondents Bombay: Rashmi Prakash Delhi: Anurag Dixit Director (Technical) John Antony Publisher Jason D Pavorattikaran

Firstly, you should understand how Covid-19 complications and death arise. Mostly, these complications are connected with pneumonia and blood clots. Most people, especially of the healthy age and disposition, are not prone to such complications. But who is prone and who is not, we can’t be very sure.

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But as a general rule, those who are prone include the aged and those with major lifestyle diseases like diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, organ failures, cancer, dementia, autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and several other such diseases. So, the first thing you can do is if you have any of these diseases already, to make sure that they are in perfect control. In case you don’t have such diseases, but you have a familial risk for some diseases like diabetes, to ensure that you don’t develop such diseases which act as co-morbidities for Covid-19. Those with such genetic risks, as well as all of us, can benefit much from drastic lifestyle modifications by way of optimum sleep, exercise & diet. All these are proven by multiple studies to boost overall health as well as immunity, which should be your primary defence against not only this pandemic but any more pandemics to come. With serious health risks of some of the vaccines for some persons coming to light in recent days, it is safer to consult your doctor before opting for vaccination, if you have any special health condition of concern, or if you haven’t done a medical check-up in years.

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With an unprecedented global vaccination drive underway, it is natural for all across the world to pin all the hopes on these new vaccines created by less than a dozen companies worldwide, two of them in India.

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You Can Do a Lot More Against Covid-19 If you are an average citizen, by now, you are wearing masks in public, social distancing yourself, and if you are above 45, taken the first dose of the vaccine too. But did you know you can do a lot more than all these to save yourself and your loved ones?

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All health related articles are for first information purposes only. Always consult your doctor before taking any decison affecting your health.

EDITORIAL

There is no doubt that Covid-19 is a disease that warrants a vaccine. In a world where even the seasonal flu has its own vaccine, SARS Cov-2 definitely needs one. Covid-19 is much more lethal than the flu, and it has proven itself so. But Covid-19 is no small pox, malaria, polio or Ebola. The death rate of 2.14% implies that the recovery rate is 97.86% and not what is commonly reported in the media like 71.42%, which includes only the confirmed recoveries at any point of time and not the on-going recoveries. In reality, the death rate is much lesser and the recovery rate is even higher, as the actual cases are much higher than the reported cases. Many people readily develop a strong natural antibody response and therefore don’t progress to the reporting stage. This has been well documented from antibody studies worldwide.

What this points to is that vaccination is at best an essential but ad-hoc strategy. Since nearly 98% of human beings can recover from this disease on their own, the real solution is correcting and fortifying the defences of the rest 2% of human beings. Of course, 2% of the human population is a huge number, translating to over 2 million deaths, and that is what made Covid-19 such a global catastrophe. As such, it is this 2% that needs urgent vaccination along with frontline health workers. All human life are valuable and this 2% especially so, as they are mostly seniors and those affected by multiple other diseases. But what is unnerving about this vaccination drive is a feeling that knowingly or unknowingly gets propagated that this is the only solution to this vexing problem. Not so. Vaccinating this vulnerable 2% is essential, but also to be equally attended is fortifying the health of this susceptible population. Why? If not for anything else, for the undeniable fact that such fortifying of the health and immunity defends them also from upcoming pandemics, not just Covid19! But who needs such holistic solutions? Certainly not the pharma majors which are designed to profiteer from each disease. But governments should look at such holistic solutions as it is ultimately the nation which will bleed from unbearable vaccination bills. And there are other equally compelling reasons too for fortifying the health and immunity of the vulnerable segment. It is now clear that it was not just Covid19 that killed people, but its co-morbidities like age, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, organ failure etc. Most of these are bigger killers than Covid-19 on their own, and nothing makes more sense than their holistic management. People mistake the holistic management of such lifestyle diseases, as just testing for sugar or pressure and popping a pill daily. In fact, this one-pill-a-day culture is what compounded this health crisis facing humanity today. Of course, it has revolutionized longevity to unprecedented levels with many people in Europe and North America easily living past 90 years now. But such longevity based on chronological age was found to be so hollow when a real crisis like Covid19 struck. That explains the high death rate in USA & Europe. What is more important is the biological age, which is all about how really aged our cells are, compared with cells from healthy people. The one-pilla-day culture can increase chronological longevity, but can’t do much for biological aging. This is because the daily pill strategy just manages the

disease but never cures it. Lifestyle diseases, as their very definition implies, are triggered by poor lifestyles and the way to cure them holistically is by replacing such poor lifestyles with healthy lifestyles like proper nutrition, proper exercising, proper sleep and proper stress management. Unfortunately, neither doctors nor patients want to put in the hard work required to address lifestyle diseases holistically, and they both fall in for the easy solutions touted by pharma majors – have a pill a day and enjoy your food and your comforts. If you have two diseases, take two pills a day, and if you have three, three pills and so on. And now this culture is advancing to its natural progression – one vaccine a year, because SARS Cov-2 is likely to mutate enough like flu that by next year you will need another version of the vaccine. And if there are two simultaneous infections going on, two vaccines a year. By all means get yourself vaccinated if the official medical advice for you is that, but never believe that this is the only thing you can do. The best you can do is change your lifestyle to a healthy lifestyle so that you can prevent, postpone or even reverse most lifestyle diseases. The official advice from World Health Organization (WHO) as well as most governments is that everyone needs to be vaccinated, as new super-spreader variants or mutations that is forcing many contries to fully lock down again, spreads easily among children and young adults too, unlike the original Wuhan flu. But by that same logic, everyone including young adults can also take better care of their health by adopting healthy lifestyles for reducing the chances for developing lifestyle diseases, as at the end of the day Covid-19 complications and fatality are decided by the presence of such co-morbidities. John Antony SEASONAL MAGAZINE

CONTENTS Meeting Sustainable Development Goals Through Higher Education

ESAF SMALL FINANCE BANK

Turning 4 Years by Providing Opportunities to Prosper

It has been almost three decades since ESAF started as a grassroots level movement and microfinance institution, and four years since it started functioning as ESAF Small Finance Bank. Led by microfinance pioneer, K Paul Thomas as its Founder, MD & CEO, ESAF SFB is growing from strength to strength by offering a full bouquet of banking services, all based on its philosophy of providing opportunities to common people to pursue their big dreams of prosperity. This

Mercedes India CEO How Dependent is Says India on Suez Canal?

India is the top importer of crude and products via the Suez Canal, higher than China, South Korea or Singapore. As such, India may face larger trade hit from logjam, even if it resolves soon as more than 450 ships have queued up unable to pass through the vital

Abu Dhabi Flexes its Oil Muscle

India Checks for Reinfections Amidst Covid-19 Resurgence

Abu Dhabi Flexes its Oil Muscle

Among all the 17 sustainable development goals, SDG4 is the one that directly addresses higher education. And at the core of SDG4 lies the twin challenges of access and inclusion in higher education. As such, the summit’s first session focused on

Health researchers in Chennai and Pune plan to systematically test blood samples from newly infected Covid-19 patients to determine if re-infections are contributing to India’s sharply

Sustainable Development, The Manav Rachna Way The Who, What, When & Where of NEP Rollout With Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself calling for a fast rollout of the National Education Policy (NEP), different stakeholders starting from Ministry of Education led by Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, to UGC, to AICTE, Central

SEASONAL MAGAZINE

Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion

Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion in Higher Education

Key speakers for this summit session included Dr. Manzoor Ahmed, Professor Emeritus at BRAC University, Bangladesh, & former Senior Education Adviser;

AUTO

Mercedes India CEO Says Sedan Demand Strong

The E-Class midsize luxury sedan is the brand’s best-selling model in India and arrived a few days ago, earlier than its previously scheduled arrival.

push ahead.”

Martin Schwenk, MD & CEO, Mercedes-Benz India says that the company enjoys a 50:50 share of sales between SUVs and sedans, despite the global popularity of SUVs, and it expects demand for sedans to stay in India with several new launches planned. he SUV rage has been constant across the globe as more and more carmakers have gone off script to make SUV/crossovers that meet customer demand. Even marquee brands like Lamborghini and Aston Martin joined the bandwagon, while Ferrari’s FUV is also in the works. However, that does not mean sedans are obsolete by any length. In fact, the recently concluded 2021 carandbike awards stood testament to the same as the Honda City won the Viewers’ Choice Car of the Year, whilst competing against some extremely popular SUVs. And Mercedes-Benz India MD and CEO, Martin Schwenk too agrees with the same. Speaking exclusively to carandbike on the recent episode of Freewheeling with SVP, Schwenk iterated that despite the influx of SUVs in its portfolio and the rising global demand, the company still witnesses strong demand for sedans. He said, “We have roughly 50:50 in

India in terms of SUVs and sedan. And I always say that we have two strong legs to stand on. In India, the feeling of elegance and luxury combines very well with the sedan shape. Also the comfort of driving is obviously in our S- and E-Class, and also the C-Class, and that transfers to the A-Class Limousine. So overall, I do think there is space for this body shape [sedan] of a vehicle, and for us, we don’t see any drastic shift. We have seen growth in the SUV segment, but at the same time, combined with the luxury aspiration that comes with Mercedes-Benz, I think it is a good fit also on the sedan shapes.” In fact, demand is so strong for sedans from Mercedes-Benz that the company had to fast-track the launch of the E-Class facelift in the country. Explaining the decision, Schwenk said, “We didn’t want to launch that car [E-Class] that early. We were planning to do it later. But the previous model was launched faster, so we decided to

The E-Class midsize luxury sedan is the brand’s best-selling model in India and arrived a few days ago, earlier than its previously scheduled arrival. The global facelift was launched in the second half of 2020. Meanwhile, the Mercedes-Benz A-Class Limousine is the brand’s new entry-level model in India and is on sale in both petrol and diesel options, along with the locallyassembled AMG version as well. The A-Class Limousine replaces the CLA and the A-Class hatchback that were previously on sale in the country. However, Mercedes says its confidence in sedans has been amplified by the response the new-generation S-Class and the C-Class received respectively on the global front. Both models are slated to arrive in India as Completely Knocked Down (CKD) kits, but the launch timeline has not been confirmed yet. Mercedes-Benz India is known to be quick with bringing its new models after the global launch but this year has seen multiple issues right from the pandemic, global container supply constraints to the shortage of microprocessors, all of which bring a level of uncertainty towards introducing new models across brands. However, the firm has promised 15 new models lined up for launch in 2021, at least seven of which will be AMG cars. Mercedes will also bring the second batch of the EQC electric SUV and the much-delayed new-generation GLA later in the year. (Credit: carandbike) SEASONAL MAGAZINE

health

Serious Health Risks of a Common Preservative in Processed Foods Some food preservatives that are used to prolong shelf life of processed foods, suppress immune function and decreases vaccine efficacy while another research has also found a link between high levels of these chemicals in the blood and the severity of Covid-19. food preservative that is used to prolong the shelf life of almost 1,250 popular processed foods might cause harm to the immune system, suggest the findings of a new peer-reviewed study by Environmental Working Group. For the study, published this week in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, EWG researchers used data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxicity Forecaster, or ToxCast, to assess the health hazards of the most common chemicals added to food, as well as the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, which can migrate to food from packaging. EWG’s analysis of ToxCast data showed that the preservative tertbutylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, has been found to harm the immune system both in both animal tests and in nonanimal tests known as high-throughput in vitro toxicology testing. This finding is of particular concern during the coronavirus pandemic. “The pandemic has focused public and scientific attention on environmental factors that can impact the immune system,” said Olga Naidenko, Ph.D., EWG vice president for science investigations and lead author of the new study. Naidenko added, “Before the pandemic, chemicals that may harm the immune system’s defense against infection or cancer did not receive sufficient attention from public health agencies. To protect public health, this must change.” TBHQ is a preservative that is pervasive in processed foods. It has been used in foods for many decades and serves no function besides increasing a product’s SEASONAL MAGAZINE

shelf life. Using new non-animal test results from ToxCast, EWG found that TBHQ affected immune cell proteins at doses similar to those that cause harm in traditional studies. Earlier studies have found that TBHQ might influence how well flu vaccines work and may be linked to a rise in food allergies. Using ToxCast, EWG analysed all publicly available studies that show how PFAS migrate to food from packaging materials or processing equipment. This is the first known compilation of available research on PFAS migration from packaging to food. In 2017, nationwide tests showed that many fast-food chains used food wrappers, bags, and boxes coated with highly fluorinated chemicals. Human epidemiological studies show that PFAS suppresses immune function and decreases vaccine efficacy. Recently published research has also found a link between high levels of PFAS in the blood and the severity of Covid-19. Surprisingly, for most PFAS, the ToxCast results did not match previous animal and human test data. This illustrates the limitations of this new chemical testing method. More research is needed to understand how PFAS harms the immune system.

The Food and Drug Administration’s approach to the regulation of food additives does not consider the latest science on the health harms of additives that may be legally added to processed foods manufactured in the US last year, EWG published Food Additives State of the Science, which highlighted additives known to increase the risk of cancer, harm the nervous system, and disrupt the body’s hormonal balance. Chemicals linked to health harms can be legally added to packaged foods because the FDA frequently allows food manufacturers to determine which chemicals are safe. Additives like TBHQ were approved by the FDA decades ago, and the agency does not consider new science to reassess the safety of food chemicals. “Food manufacturers have no incentive to change their formulas,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at EWG. Faber added, “Too often, the FDA allows the food and chemical industry to determine which ingredients are safe for consumption. Our research shows how important it is that the FDA take a second look at these ingredients and test all food chemicals for safety.” Processed foods can be made without these potentially harmful ingredients, so shoppers should read labels carefully. TBHQ is often, though not always, listed on the ingredient label. It will be listed if it has been added to the product during manufacturing. But it can also be used in food packaging, particularly plastic packaging, in which case it may migrate to food. EWG’s Food Scores database helps consumers find products made with healthier alternatives, and our Healthy Living app allows shoppers to scan products while in stores to choose a better option. EWG recommends that immunotoxicity testing be prioritised for chemicals in food and food contact materials in order to protect public health from their potential harm to the immune system. EWG also called on the FDA to close the regulatory loophole that allows potentially unsafe food additives to remain on the market. The FDA should also promptly review additives like TBHQ to reflect new science.

COVID-19

India Checks for Reinfections Amidst Covid-19 Resurgence Health researchers in Chennai and Pune plan to systematically test blood samples from newly infected Covid-19 patients to determine if re-infections are contributing to India’s sharply rising second wave of the epidemic. he National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai, and the Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Government Medical College, Pune, independently plan to look for IgG antibodies a sign of earlier infection in blood samples from confirmed Covid-positive patients. “Such studies will be very useful we need to know who is getting infected,” said Dileep Mavalankar, a senior infectious disease epidemiologist with the Indian Institute of Public Health, Ahmedabad, who is not associated with the Chennai or Pune efforts. The initiatives come amid what the Union health ministry described on Saturday as India’s “sharpest rise” in weekly new Covid-19 cases and deaths since May 2020 a 7.7 per cent rise in new cases and a 5.1 per cent rise in deaths. India’s seven-day average of daily Covid-19 cases has nearly doubled in less than two weeks from 24,400 on March 15 to 50,500 on March 26 and the daily deaths have increased from 131 on March 15 to 291 on March 26. The epidemic’s current resurgence in places such as Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Chennai, Mumbai and Pune that were among the hardest hit during the previous wave in 2020 has puzzled researchers and triggered speculation about possible re-infections by mutated versions of the coronavirus. “It would be premature to say for now that variants are contributing to either re-infections or to the observed surge in different states,” said Samiran Panda, head of the epidemiology division at the Indian Council of Medical Research, the country’s apex health research agency. Doctors and health researchers know from studies worldwide over the past year that Covid-19 re-infections are rare. Among India’s more than 11.9 million cases, researchers have documented

confirmed re-infections in less than 100 cases. “However, re-infection, although rare at this point, is a reality,” Panda sais. “But people need to remember that protective measures such as wearing face masks, avoiding crowds and frequent hand-washing reduce the risk of both new infections and re-infections.” The plan by the Chennai and Pune researchers to look for IgG antibodies in newly infected patients can be tricky and challenging to interpret. People infected by the virus develop antibodies anyway and the samples should ideally be taken at the time of Covid-19 diagnosis or as close to it as possible. “We would ideally need at least a few hundred samples to make meaningful interpretations,” said Manoj Murhekar, director of the NIE, an institution under the ICMR that plans to collaborate with the Chennai city corporation for the study. A senior health researcher in Pune said that though there were rare anecdotal accounts of re-infections, the IgG study would help quantify the proportion of re-infections, if any, among the newly infected patients in areas under fresh epidemic waves. India’s seven-day average of daily Covid-19 cases has nearly doubled in less than two weeks from 24,400 on March 15 to 50,500 on March 26 and the daily deaths have increased from 131 on March 15 to 291 on March 26.

While India’s vaccination campaign is expected to enhance the number of people protected from the infection, officials underline that vaccinated individuals might still be able to pass on the infection. “The vaccines in use are able to prevent severe forms of the disease after infection, but might not prevent people from acquiring the infection,” Panda said. The health ministry on Saturday asked 12 states, including Bengal, to bolster public health responses and enforce precautionary behaviour by the public amid concerns that only 44 per cent of people wear masks and one infected person could spread it to 406 others over a month. Health secretary Rajesh Bhushan, in a videoconference with local authorities from the 46 hardest-hit districts, including Calcutta and 24 NorthParganas in Bengal, called for increased testing, efficient isolation of cases and quarantining of contacts, and improved hospital preparedness for a surge. Twenty-five of these 46 districts are in Maharashtra and account for nearly 60 per cent of the 332,000 new cases detected across the country over the past week. Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Bangalore, Bhopal, Chennai, Durg, Nagpur, Pune, Raipur, Surat and Thane are among the most affected districts. The ministry has flagged the high fatality rates in Chhattisgarh and Punjab and urged authorities to get doctors to ensure that patients with severe illness are moved to hospital in time and that doctors adhere to standard treatment protocols. The ministry has also asked the states to accelerate the vaccination campaign to immunise all those in the priority population groups in the districts with large numbers of Covid-19 cases as early as possible as an aid to the containment measures. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

BUSINESS

Abu Dhabi Flexes its Oil Muscle

Abu Dhabi has begun selling futures contracts for its oil and then shipping the barrels from Fujairah, it will mark an aggressive shift by the emirate. It hopes to change the way nearly one-fifth of the world’s crude is priced. Abu Dhabi is removing the curbs with aim of opening up its oil to financial as well as physical traders. ucked between the Gulf of Oman and a craggy mountain range, the dusty port Fujairah isn’t an obvious base from which to try and revolutionize the Middle East’s oil markets. But on Monday, when Abu Dhabi begins selling futures contracts for its oil and then shipping the barrels from Fujairah, it will mark an aggressive shift by the emirate. It hopes to change the way nearly one-fifth of the world’s crude is priced. Persian Gulf states pump nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day and Abu Dhabi wants the futures for its flagship Murban grade to become the region’s main benchmark. The Gulf’s biggest producers -- including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is the capital -- have traditionally priced their barrels based on benchmarks from other regions. They’ve mostly sold their crude directly to refiners or international companies with stakes in their fields. Crucially, they’ve prevented those customers from re-selling the oil and benefiting from arbitrage opportunities that exist in energy markets. Now, Abu Dhabi’s removing those curbs with the aim of opening up its oil to financial as well as physical traders. Investors globally are clamouring for commodities because of their high yields relative to other assets and to protect themselves against any rise in inflation. Once sold on an exchange, Murban will be sent by pipeline to Fujairah, where Abu Dhabi’s desert fields physically connect with global markets. “If successful -- and I think the chances are good -- Murban futures could be a pivotal moment for Middle East crude pricing,” said Vandana Hari, founder of Singapore-based Vanda Insights, which provides oil analysis. If “a sizable chunk of Middle Eastern crude trades freely in the spot market,” that could push SEASONAL MAGAZINE

other regional producers to follow Abu Dhabi’s lead, she said. To help its cause, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., the state energy firm, is spending around $900 million to build 40 million barrels of storage space in caverns beneath Fujairah’s mountains. That, and tanks Adnoc already has at the port, will ensure there’s plenty of Murban on hand to manage any future supply disruptions, Khaled Salmeen, the company’s head of marketing and trading, told reporters

this month. Adnoc can pump about 2 million barrels a day of Murban and has pledged to provide the exchange with half that amount over the next year -- in line with or greater than the supply of today’s major oil benchmarks such as Brent and West Texas Intermediate. Liquidity’s “critical to the whole equation,” said Chris Bake, a director at Vitol Group, the largest independent oil trader, which is backing the exchange. Creating a new benchmark will hardly be easy. Oil traders dislike change, especially when they believe markets already do a good job matching supply and demand. S&P Global Platts caused uproar this year after announcing it would overhaul Dated Brent, the world’s main crude price. It was forced to shelve the plan indefinitely. Murban will also face competition regionally. Platts publishes price assessments for Dubai oil and the Dubai Mercantile Exchange trades futures for Omani crude. Both act as benchmarks for Middle Eastern shipments to Asia.

The benefits from trading Murban, a crude first exported in 1963, are worth the effort, according to Sultan Al Jaber, Adnoc’s chief executive officer. “Price transparency will allow our customers to better hedge and manage their market risks,” he wrote Sunday in The National, a local newspaper. Abu Dhabi says the combination of high supply, easy access to oil-consuming markets from Fujairah and the absence of trading restrictions will attract plenty of buyers to its exchange. Philippe Khoury, a former HSBC Holdings Plc energy banker who Adnoc hired in 2018 to build its trading operations, said Murban may even compete with Brent and WTI. The futures platform will be run by Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange Inc. and called ICE Futures Abu Dhabi. Last week, ICE approved Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and 22 other banks and brokers as exchange members. Adnoc’s plan underscores the UAE’s wider ambition to monetize its hydrocarbon resources faster in case oil demand starts shrinking with the global shift to greener energy. The country aims to increase output capacity from about 4 million barrels a day now to 5 million by 2030, which would make it OPEC’s biggest producer after Saudi Arabia. The Murban exchange and the capacity boost could raise tension within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, according to Hari of Vanda Insights. The Gulf states dominate the cartel and tend to prize unity. They also began unprecedented production cuts last year to bolster prices as the coronavirus pandemic spread. Still, the UAE says Murban futures won’t affect OPEC or its ability to stabilize oil prices. “We definitely hope” other regional producers adopt Murban as a benchmark for their own crude, Adnoc’s Khoury said this month at the Fujairah Bunkering & Fuel Oil Forum.

How Dependent is India on Suez Canal? India is the top importer of crude and products via the Suez Canal, higher than China, South Korea or Singapore. As such, India may face larger trade hit from logjam, even if it resolves soon as more than 450 ships have queued up unable to pass through the vital trade route.

Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley Sell Billions Worth of Shares in US A wave of selling in a clutch of companies recently was driven by sales of more than $10 billion executed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Shares in ViacomCBS and Discovery tumbled around 27% each recently, while U.S.-listed shares of China based Baidu and Tencent Music plunged during the week, dropping as much as 33.5% and 48.5%, respectively. Eric Handler at MKM Partners, who covers Discovery, on Friday said that large blocks of shares in both Viacom and Discovery companies were put in the market on Friday, likely exacerbating the declines.

s the prospect of the Suez Canal blockage turning into the longestever accidental closure of this vital trade passage looms large, the resultant impact on crude and tanker rates could progressively show up in the form of higher crude prices. This could eventually trickle down in retail price terms. India is the top importer of crude and products via the Suez Canal, higher than China, South Korea or Singapore, according to data from Vortexa. More than two-thirds of India’s crude comes from the Gulf region. For India though, the main hit could be seen on the import and export of ethane with the US, and the imports of crude from Latin America, the uptake of which was recently increased. India imports around 500,000 barrels per day of crude products via the

Suez Canal, followed by China, which imports just above 400,000 barrels per day, and South Korea and Singapore, which import a little less than 400,000 barrels per day from the Suez Canal, according to Vortexa. Reportedly, at its peak in December 2020, India imported nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil per day. Among exporters of crude products via the Suez Canal, India is sixth in the pecking order behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya and Algeria at a little less than 200,000 barrels per day. The biggest impact on the oil trade and crude prices will be if the freeing of the container ship ‘Ever Given’ takes weeks, as is now being predicted. The longer the closure, the more disruptive the impact is likely to be. The 440 meters long, 59 meters wide ship is badly stuck, with its bow crammed into the eastern bank of the canal and its stern on the opposite bank.

An email to clients seen by Bloomberg News said Goldman sold $6.6 billion worth of shares of Baidu Inc, Tencent Music Entertainment Group and Vipshop Holdings Ltd, before the U.S. market opened on Friday, the report on Saturday said. https://bloom.bg/3lYOrZm Following this, Goldman sold $3.9 billion worth of shares in ViacomCBS Inc, Discovery Inc, Farfetch Ltd, iQIYI Inc and GSX Techedu Inc, according to the report. A source familiar with the matter said on Saturday that Goldman was involved in the large block trades. Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The Financial Times reported that Morgan Stanley sold $4 billion worth of shares earlier in the day, followed by another $4 billion in the afternoon. Morgan Stanley declined to comment. The Financial Times reported that Goldman told counterparties that the sales were prompted by a “forced deleveraging”, citing people with knowledge of the matter. CNBC reported that the selling pressure was due to liqudation of positions by family office Archegos Capital Management, citing a source with direct knowledge of the situation. A person at Archegos who answered the phone declined to comment. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

ESAF SMALL FINANCE BANK

Turning 4 Years by Providing Opportunities to Prosper It has been almost three decades since ESAF started as a grassroots level movement and microfinance institution, and four years since it started functioning as ESAF Small Finance Bank. Led by microfinance pioneer, K Paul Thomas as its Founder, MD & CEO, ESAF SFB is growing from strength to strength by offering a full bouquet of banking services, all based on its philosophy of providing opportunities to common people to pursue their big dreams of prosperity. This fifth year of operation is also likely to be a landmark year due to its planned IPO.

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When ESAF Small Finance Bank goes for its IPO, it will be another phase of growth by providing opportunities to prosper for others, this time, for India’s capital market investors, both retail and institutional. ESAF SFB is one of India’s most well run small finance banks, and is likely to be a good opportunity for investors. Being a lending institution growing at a rapid pace, ESAF SFB’s IPO will involve predominantly fresh issue of shares, by which the bank will raise around Rs. 800 crore for itself. Apart from this, there will be an Offer for Sale (OFS) by promoters and two early institutional investors , Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company and PI Ventures. This will be for around Rs. 198 crore. Around five years back, when several SFB licences were given out, ESAF SFB was quick to sprint off the block, as basically it was long prepared for the transformation from being a Non Banking Finance Company in Microfinance (NBFC-MFI) to being a regular bank. Today, it leads its peers in terms of yield on advances, AUM growth rate, share of retail deposits, and several other such metrics. ESAF SFB has well utilized its strengths in its home turf of Kerala. Its parent ESAF was the first microfinance institution in the state. And four years back, ESAF SFB became the first entity in Kerala since Indian Independence to bag a banking licence. Soon after becoming a bank, ESAF

As of H1 end, the bank had 40 lakh customers through its banking outlets across 19 states and two union territories. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

SFB made significant forays into NRI banking and overseas remittances, which is a stronghold of Kerala. When Reserve Bank of India made it a Scheduled Bank in December 2018, ESAF SFB became the fifth scheduled bank from the state, which was traditionally a cradle of private sector banking. At the same time, ESAF SFB leveraged its deep experience due to microlending operations in several states across India, to expand its geographic footprint across India. It’s 500th branch was opened in Ahmedabad in Gujarat late last year, and ESAF SFB is well on track to have 535 branches before the end of this year. As of H1 end, the bank had 40 lakh customers through its banking outlets across 19 states and two union territories. Its core retail products include fixed and recurring deposit

schemes with attractive interest rates, gold loans, and affordable loans for small and micro entrepreneurs and individuals. ESAF SFB’s Founder, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer is K Paul Thomas, one of India’s microfinance pioneers, who was inspired and mentored by none other than Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, who founded Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, the world’s first large scale micro-lending bank. Paul Thomas takes most pride in the fact that ESAF’s and later ESAF SFB’s growth has always been powered by its commitment to provide its customers opportunities to prosper. He feels that despite all the lip service, when it comes to actual delivery of such services, many financial institutions fall short. In sharp contrast, ESAF’s and ESAF

SFB’s history of nearly three decades has always been of serving the unbanked and the under-banked, with a focus on financial inclusion. The bank has more than 96% of its exposure to the micro segment, with the average ticket size of their loan portfolio being just Rs 33,000. While this is one of the finest examples of inclusive and responsible banking, ESAF SFB’s additional edge has been providing these needy clients, customer-centric products and services through the extensive application of technology. Based on such a visionary combination of strategies, the bank has been growing impressively. The bank has reported 41% year-on-year growth in net profits and its total business has grown by 35%. As of the first half of this fiscal, H1, total business stood at Rs. 15,582 crore.

Both assets and liabilities have grown proportionately. Deposits increased by 35.38% to Rs. 8,208 crore and advances by 34.70% to Rs. 7,374 crore. Having seen many storms in the microfinance sector, and having come out unscathed from it all, ESAF SFB is a very conservative player when it comes to safety and sustainability of its lending. It follows the practice o proactive provisioning, with its provision coverage ratio now standing at 93.45% as against 81.53% last year. It has a robust infrastructure for collections, due to which collections have fared very well even during the pandemic. Due to this, ESAF SFB’s asset quality has been improving steadily. Gross NPAs, as a percentage of gross advances, decreased from 1.76% as of September 30, 2019, to 1.32% as of September

P R Ravi Mohan, Chairman 30 this year. The net NPA, as a percentage of net advances, reduced from 0.62% to 0.19% this year. The conservative and highly prudent nature of its operations is also reflected in its capital adequacy. It is one of the most well capitalized SFBs with CRAR at 24.29% with Tier I CRAR of 21.10%, against a regulatory requirement of 15% and 7.50%, respectively. With such a sustainable growth model in place, it is no wonder that ESAF SFB had won the Global Sustainability Award 2020 organised by Energy and Environment Foundation. Bank founder and CEO K Paul Thomas received the award from Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat in an online summit attended by Marise Payne, Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. The bank was selected for this year’s award in recognition of its outstanding contributions, commitment and actions that have made a positive impact on the environment. Receiving the award, Paul Thomas said: “The award is a recognition of ESAF’s unique social business strategy with a triple bottomline approach emphasising people, planet and prosperity throughout our journey of three decades impacting over 4.4 million people and their families spread across different States of India as a social bank.” SEASONAL MAGAZINE

SDG4

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LESSONS FROM SOUTH ASIA

Top level experts in higher education and sustainable development goals from South Asian countries including India, Maldives, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka & Nepal, as well as from World Bank, UNESCO, and several international think-tanks joined forces recently in a virtual summit, and produced some pathbreaking insights into how higher education can further several of the 17 sustainable development goals beyond just SDG4. The summit was organized by The Bridge Project in partnership with the South Asian University, with the Print Media Partner being Seasonal Magazine.

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Staying the Course in SDGs Amidst a Crisis LESSONS FROM INDIA & MALDIVES

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A pandemic of Covid-19 scale is sure to hit sustainable development goals hard. But the keynote session of the summit by Dr. Ibrahim Hassan, Honourable Minister of Higher Education, Maldives, was striking in its impact and hope, especially on how the unique island nation has risen to the challenges posed by the pandemic, to ensure that higher education in Maldives was not disrupted in any way. Dr. Hassan explained in detail how various measures like fee assistance, loan repayment extensions, and restructured operations of colleges, had helped the Higher Education Ministry that he heads to continue its pursuit of SDGs, unfazed by the crisis. He also highlighted India’s exemplary assistance to Maldives in skill development programs under the Neighbourhood First Policy. The session was chaired by Akhilesh Mishra (IFS), Additional Secretary, Development Partnership Administration, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. He stressed on the importance of the current demographic dividend of South Asia, but warned that to utilize it, the governments of South Asia need to undertake more initiatives. From the Indian experience, Akhilesh Mishra spoke about various initiatives, especially innovating in digital learning solutions, government initiatives like Prasar Bharti DTH channels which exclusively focus on education and E-vidya scheme which is a multi-modal access platform benefiting 250 million school kids. He also mentioned that Top 100 universities in India have been asked to increase the number of online courses.

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Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion LESSONS FROM INDIA & BANGLADESH Among all the 17 sustainable development

much as possible, even while pursuing lofty

goals, SDG4 is the one that directly addresses

ambitions about equity. Dr. Leena Chandran-

higher education. And at the core of SDG4 lies

Wadia had many interesting stats & insights

the twin challenges of access and inclusion in

to share. She shed light on the fact that

higher education. As such, the summit’s first

India has too many institutions, as we have

session focused on these challenges, and top

40,000 colleges and 1000 universities offering

rung experts from India & Bangladesh weighed

education to 37 million students. On the other

in with their insights, thereby producing a

hand, China offers education to 45 million

memorable session. Key speakers included

students with just 3000 universities. So what

Dr. Manzoor Ahmed, Professor Emeritus at

that does is fragment our education system

BRAC University, Bangladesh, & former Senior

and create colleges that support only 100 to

Education Adviser; Prof. Dr. Anil Sahasrabudhe,

500 students. Meeta Sengupta, FRSA, then

Chairperson, AICTE; Meeta Sengupta, Founder,

spoke about how access to higher education

Centre for Education Strategy & Fellow, Royal

is a game changer. According to her, it is

Society of Arts (FRSA), London; Dr. Leena

also an intergenerational and societal game

Chandran-Wadia, Senior Fellow, Observer

changer. So, when you are investing in one

Research Foundation (ORF); and Sudhakar

student, the the payoffs are going to come

Rao, Director, Branding, of the ICFAI Group. It

to the student’s family, generations and also

was a very lively discussion with Dr. Manzoor

to the student’s region. Sudhakar Rao of

Ahmed explaining the gravity of the current

ICFAI stressed on the importance of diversity

situation with regards to equity in higher

and the tolerance of it. Said Rao, “If we do

education. According to him, higher education

not tolerate these differences, if we do not

is basically inequitable and elitist, and as

appreciate why the people are different, and

such reflects the situation in society, and even

therefore the other consequential issues of

worse, furthers the inequity in society. Prof. Dr.

having different opinions, having different

Anil Sahasrabudhe who spoke next, explained

tastes, having different appearances, and

further that in a huge and diverse population

I am also including the fact that persons

like India, there are different kinds of inequities

with disability and in persons with from

which complicates the issue further. As per his

different regions, culture, religion, language,

opinion, it is more practical to aim at diversity as

appearance.”

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Beyond SDG4: Mainstreaming the Goals in Teaching & Research

LESSONS FROM INDIA, NEPAL, BANGLADESH & UNESCO

The uniqueness of higher education in all the 17 sustainable development goals is that it is the domain which has influence over the maximum number of other domains, beyond its own SDG4. It has direct influence over poverty (SDG1); health and wellbeing (SDG3); gender equality (SDG5); governance, decent work and economic growth (SDG8); responsible consumption and production (SDG12); climate change (SDG13); and peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG16). Hence, the second session of the summit focused on how to mainstream all these concerned SDGs into teaching and research in higher education. Renowned experts from India, Nepal, Bangladesh & UNESCO shared their wisdom, thus delivering a lively session. Noted speakers were Dr. Dhananjay Tripathi, Assistant Professor, Dept of International Relations, SAU; Dr. N. V. Varghese, Vice Chancellor, National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) & Founding Director of the Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education (CPRHE), NIEPA; Dr Nishchal Nath Pandey, Director, Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Kathmandu; Dr. Rajesh Tandon, The UNESCO Co-Chair in Community- Based Research and Social Responsibility and Founding President of PRIA; and Dr. Sadeka Halim, Dean, FSS, University of Dhaka. Dr. Rajesh Tandon started off by mentioning that the general theory and universal knowledge are available worldwide, but that it is the practically implementable knowledge solutions that need to be SEASONAL MAGAZINE

produced for Sustainable Development Goals to be contextualised locally. And this is where higher education institution can play a role. Dr. Sadeka Halim started her contributions by speaking about the experience of Bangladesh. The 17 SDGs are universal, and Bangladesh is facing big challenges, just in terms of addressing all 17 SDGs by 2030. And since without meeting 17 sustainable development goals, it will not be possible to be recognised as a developed country in the world, it is quite inevitable. And we all need to actually ensure the inclusiveness and the equitable quality of education and promote lifelong learning by 2030. Dr. N. V. Varghese, Vice Chancellor, NIEPA, who spoke next, tried to pin down the biggest challenge facing SDGs – very little research. According to him, one of the reasons, is that SDGs is an area where you need mostly interdisciplinary research, that is not something that is promoted. He then gave the example of references in research articles, in which still more than 80% are coming from the same or main subject, be it economics, political science or sociology. Dr Nishchal Nath Pandey who spoke next from Kathmandu University, informed that SDG as a subject is already there in the Bachelors of Social Sciences, Bachelors of Development Studies, Masters of Political Science etc, but not gone into subjects of Science or into the subject of Business Administration. Thus if you are a BBA or BSc graduate, then you will have not studied anything about SDGs when you come out of college, but if you have studied social sciences, then there is great likelihood that SDGs will be covered. Dr. Dhananjay Tripathi of South Asian University then explained beautifully why SDGs are interconnected and why it calls for interdisciplinary work. According to him, when we are discussing about poverty, gender equality immediately comes into focus, when we are discussing about poverty, climate change immediately comes into focus, quality education immediately comes into focus, because if you have to remove poverty, how can you ignore quality education? That means we cannot do any of these goals alone, we have todiscuss it with other goals as well. So that explains the need for interdisciplinary research. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion in Higher Education LESSONS FROM INDIA & BANGLADESH Key speakers for this summit session included Dr. Manzoor Ahmed, Professor Emeritus at BRAC University, Bangladesh, & former Senior Education Adviser; Prof. Dr. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairperson, AICTE; Ms. Meeta Sengupta, Founder, Centre for Education Strategy & Fellow, Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), London; Dr. Leena Chandran-Wadia, Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation (ORF); and Mr. Sudhakar Rao, Director, Branding, of the ICFAI Group. This being the first session after the keynote session, it perfectly followed upon the broad themes of the keynote and set the stage for the further sessions, apart from being one of the most informative sessions of this summit. Off to the lively transcript of this session: We would like to commence with our first session on “Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion in Higher Education”. I am delighted to introduce our panelists for this session. Dr. Manzoor Ahmed. He is Professor Emeritus at BRAC University, Bangladesh. Until recently, he was the Senior Adviser at the BRAC University Institute of Educational Development (BRACU-IED) in Bangladesh. Prof. Anil Sahasrabudhe. He is currently Chairman of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). He is also a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Dr. Leena Chandran Wadia. She is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Mumbai. Dr. Wadia has been engaged in research and policy SEASONAL MAGAZINE

advocacy primarily in education and has contributed to the preparation of India’s Draft National Education Policy 2019, as a member of the technical secretariat to the Dr Kasturirangan committee. Ms. Meeta Sengupta. She is the founder of the Centre for Education Strategy, a Delhi based think tank that builds bridges between policy and practice for educators, educationists and Institutions. She was a member of the FICCI Skills Development Forum. Mr. Sudhakar Rao. Mr. Rao is the Director, Branding of the ICFAI Group that includes 11 Universities, 9 Business Schools, 7 Tech Schools, 7 Law Schools and a Distance Learning Program. The moderator for this session is Ms. Apurwa Shrivastava from The Logical Indian, an independent and publicspirited digital media platform for Indian millennials. Moderator: Thank you very much. In this session, our eminent panel will take us through the various aspects of SDG 4, addressing themes and issues running along the lines of affordability, accessibility and inclusion in higher education. In addition, we will look at how the youths of today can prepare themselves to become global citizens of the 21st century, the post pandemic scenarios and the relevance of edtech among other things. So before we begin our introduction, I’d like to request Dr. Mansoor to take the floor for his opening remarks.

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Dr. Manzoor Ahmed Dr. Mansoor : Thank you very much. I’m very happy to be in the company of these luminaries in this panel. And the topic we have of course, is a very critical one is access and inclusion, equitable inclusion in higher education as part of our overall goal for SDG 2030.This is a very large complex topic. And it is, of course, very much linked to the larger issues of equity and access and participation in education and development in general. And when we talk about access to higher education, inclusive higher education, we have to consider the larger context. Higher education itself, if we look at the large picture, higher education all over the world, and in our region, is inherently basically, inequitable. It is a system that is designed to be kind of elitist and it reflects the larger inequities, even pre existing inequality in the society, that is very much reflected in that. And so far, historically, I don’t think higher education as a system has really contributed enough to be able to challenge and fight the larger inequalities that exist in society. In fact, it will not be very unfair to say that it has kind of reinforced the existing inequality. And then with that larger context, then we are now talking about greater equality, greater access, greater participation, inclusion in higher education. So, we already have an inherent tension and a challenge here in this proposition. So what do we do? I think we have to first of all, recognize this basic tension and this inherent challenge, that higher education system all over the world has and particularly so in our part of the world and after recognizing this, there is a SEASONAL MAGAZINE

need to see how we can overcome the inherent characteristics of higher education as an inequitable and elitist system that exists now. Secondly, then what do we do? Of course, the larger society remains inequitable, we have to expose the characteristics of that part of the duty of higher education and its research and in challenging the norms and mores in society, that’s part of the higher education job. So we can try to bring this out more clearly. And then in the system itself, one of the questions would be how we can recognise that it cannot be totally equitable, as long as the whole society remains unequal. But the some of the things that can be done is to how to make it more diverse, more diversity in participation, and how we can change or bring about some transformation in the class system that exists in higher education itself, we have the elitist institutions where privileged ones go, and then we have the other general higher education of poor quality, where the poor people, the disadvantaged ones go. So we need to recognize that unequal structure and how to bring about change and hear more diversity, bringing in more diversity in the participation of it.

Then thirdly, perhaps make it a more open and flexible and lifelong process rather than what we have right now, particularly in South Asia, you finish your secondary education, and then you have to immediately get into higher education, and you go to a four year program. And then once you get in, then if you get into an elitist institution, you have better prospects in life. If you don’t, then you are handicapped from the beginning. And if you don’t get into an institution, then you don’t have much opportunity, beyond that. It’s not a flexible system. One is not making it a continuing lifelong education process. So now we need to ask, how some of these changes can be brought about making it more flexible, more open, and particularly with the use of technological means one can open universities. This can create a continuing education opportunity, and then we need to look at the whole financing of higher education, how to make it open financially, so that the ability to pay for your higher education doesn’t become the main barrier to see how we can make it more open in a financing way. So these are some of the challenges that we have to consider. So maybe I can come back later. But I want to present these as sort of challenges, the larger picture and the situation that we face and what we can try to do. Thank you. Moderator: Thank you so much, Dr. Mansoor, for your enlightening words, I think we will talk at length about overcoming, you know, the reflection of elitism in higher education. But before that, I would now like to request Professor Saharsabudhe, to deliver his opening remark. Thank you.

Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion in Higher Education

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Prof. Anil Saharsabudhe Prof. Saharsabudhe: Thank you, Dr. Mansoor from Bangladesh, who has pitched initial few sentences which really want to take off from where he has left and we have Dr. Leena Wadia who was associated with India’s new national education policy 2020. She would also be talking about all these issues, but essentially right from independence of India in 1947, when gross enrolment ratio and higher education was mere point 7%. We have come a long way to 27%. But this policy talks about taking it forward to nearly 50% in the next 15 years. And it’s a humongous task for what we had to build in 70 years. We need to double it in the next 15 years, and the mantra of access and equity which has been followed all along in the post independence era in India has to be continued. But this access and equity has to be looked at from various angles, rightly pointed out by Dr. Manzoor. What kind of access we are talking about and what kind of inclusion we are talking about? When we say about equity, the inclusion equity is in terms of rural and urban, we have our tribal areas in India, very, very remote forest areas, hilly terrains, the difficulty exists in terms of building the educational institutions, then women, no diversity in terms of the gender then we have physically challenged large population different physically challenged people, how do we make education accessible to them, when we say accessible it is not only movement within the campus, but the tools and technologies which can be used in order to help them in understanding learning and such kind of technologies which are available today? How do we make them available, how can we also involve dyslexic children into the system, because we have found that some of the greatest scientists of the SEASONAL MAGAZINE

world today, were dyslexic. And if we had given up hopes on them, probably we wouldn’t have gotten Einsteins of the world and therefore, how do we take care of them. There are also gifted children, some of them are so gifted that at a very young age, they are capable of doing much more than what about 1015 years older than them can do. And if they are also put into the same school probably they will get lost, they feel that everything that is happening there is boring, and therefore, we need to take care of inclusion means all over it. It is rural, urban, rich poor, it may be dyslexic, physically challenged women, rural, tribal, all of that, and these are the challenges, especially in a country of our size, where today in higher education sector, Gross enrollment ratio is of 27%, 35 million students are studying and when we want to make it to 50% in the next 15 years, population continuously again growing, this number is going to be 100 million. This is not the population of several countries put together. And that is the challenge which India has. And at the same time while talking about access and equity, inclusion, we should not lose sight of quality. If you are giving substandard education, there’s no point in giving that education at all. And therefore quality and excellence are again other benchmarks which we are allowed to see. And finally, the talk about fees was set by Dr. Manzoor and therefore, affordability. And this policy also talks about affordability and accountability. The institutions who are well off, often have charged high fees, are they accountable, are they giving back that return on investment, what the student and his parents have put in? That accountability is also important and but affordability, so many children may not be affording the kind of fee that is being charged in some of the higher education

institutions. There are certainly excellent institutions like IITs, IISc, brands of such institutions in India, where the admission is at a very, very competitive level. In fact, it is stated many times that getting admission into maybe Oxford, Cambridge, MIT,

Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion in Higher Education Stanford may be easier, but much more difficult to get into IITs, that being the case having come here, the fee is very high and some people will not be able to afford that. And that is where there are multiple things which should happen so that the education really is affordable. And there are no haves and have nots existing in the system. Maybe the government should have scholarships for those people whose parental income is low. This is already happening. Minimum students from

different categories of background are getting full scholarships while they’re studying their undergraduate education, they get scholarships during postgraduate education and so on. Second part is, if the income is at a borderline, it’s neither very high or low, then naturally, these are the people who suffer the most. The people with the lowest income, the people with the disadvantage in terms of schedule caste, schedule tribe, the government takes care of their education. On the other

hand, people whose parents have these reasonably decent incomes, they can pay that fee. But those who are in the border line are the worst affected and that’s why the government has to provide enough loans, which are at a very affordable interest rate and to be even returned two to three years after the graduation is over. If such a principle is adopted, I think they are also taken care of. Additionally, we have Industries who ultimately get benefited by such educated class when they come and join the industry. So why can’t they through their Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR), take a cue out of this and say that they will manage for example 100 students and their requirement will be met by us. And all institutions which are more than 10 to 15 years old have their alumni who are earning decent income, some of them may take care of the students in terms of both mentoring and taking care of one student at a time. So I think there are hundreds of ways by which we can create an environment where this affordability part of it can be taken care of directly or indirectly. Lastly, the Swayam platform which the Government of India has made, which is a MOOC platform, indigenously developed, more than 3000 courses are existing today, these courses are all free. Only the requirement is access in terms of good bandwidth or a mobile connectivity through which one can look at those courses. And devices required. And there are many possibilities of even engaging in giving those devices to those people who cannot afford. I think that is how access, equity quality, affordability and accountability can be managed. Moderator: Thank you very much, Prof. Professor Sastrabuddhe, I’m sure all of us are very curious to understand, you know, the systems that can be put together to facilitate access to quality, quality education and affordable education for all. Dr. Wada, the floor is now yours. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

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Dr. Leena Chandran-Wadia Dr. Wadia : Thank you. Apoorva. I will also then take off from where Dr. Mansoor Ahmed and Professor Anil Sastrabuddhe had talked about, and since I had the good fortune to work on the national education policy, I will just talk about some of the provisions of the policy that have tried to make higher education slightly less elitist. Prof. Anil Sastrabuddhe has already touched upon some of the sources of disadvantage, they are not just the, caste and STs, OBCs, and religious minorities and children with disabilities, but there are other things like gender, which is completely cross cutting across all categories. And there is evidence from research from NIEPA (National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration) to show that when combinations of categories occur together, like women in remote geographies, or women or girls with disabilities, or poor women, so on they have severe disadvantages. So when two categories combine, there is a severe disadvantage. So in the policy, we came up with a word called Socially and Economically Disadvantaged Groups, in the beginning, we got a lot of flack for it, because people didn’t understand, but I think now people understand that disadvantage, the sources of disadvantage are very large. Geography was mentioned, migrant children, orphans, was, are also very disadvantaged, poverty is a very important source of disadvantage, for example, poor nutrition, stunted growth, and that consequences are also very bad. And of course, language, this is something that we had not understood before we got started on this thing that, you know, a lot of children study in local languages, and then higher education is offered only in English. And that means that they have then they don’t understand that English very well, they’re not comfortable, and SEASONAL MAGAZINE

especially STEM subjects are taught only in English. And so, language is another problem. So, the National Education Policy has tried to say that higher education should now start being offered in regional languages. And, one of the things that we have said is that, India has too many institutions, we have 40,000 colleges and 1000 universities offering education to 37 million students. On the other hand, China offers education to 45 million students with just 3000 universities. So what that does is fragment our education system and create colleges that support 100 students, you know, so many to a nearly 30% or 28%, if I remember correctly, please forgive me if I’m wrong, have only 100 students and 64% this number, I’m sure of colleges have less than 500 students. That’s not a good environment in which to learn because you don’t need enough students who are studying other subjects and you don’t discuss with them and there’s no cross fertilization of ideas. So, we wanted institutions to grow their enrollment to have more than 3000 students. And then we wanted to also reduce the number of colleges from 40,000 to say 15000 or 20,000 by weeding out colleges that are not accountable like Professor Sastrabudhe had said. But of course, everybody worries that, when you reduce the number of colleges, will it affect geography? Because geography is a very big source of disparity, people in troubled areas or in tribal areas and in remote areas like hilly regions don’t have access. But the policy has tried to make sure that, there are provisions for those kinds of areas andnd that new investment is going to come in. The NITI AYOG, has identified 115 aspirational districts and there is going to be investment in education in those aspirational districts in the form of special education zones. And then there are going to be some

new multidisciplinary education and research universities that are set up. And of course, if some college in a remote area is doing a good job, and is supporting their local community, there is no reason to shut that college down, they can actually become a constituent college or have a different relationship with their affiliating university where the university also takes partial responsibility for the quality of education that the students get. As Prof. Anil Sahasrabudhe said, if you are giving a bad education to people from disadvantaged backgrounds, then you are doing them more harm than good, actually. And of course, the policy has said that we should provide free education up till the age of 18, up till grade 12, that in itself will help a lot but we must also exercise a word of caution that, there are as we know that by the time we reach Senior Secondary School, we lose half the children who have enrolled in primary school. And half of that number goes out because of economic reasons, and of course in women 30% dropout for domestic reasons. So these are not reasons that will go away very quickly. And so the last point I wanted to make was that vocational education has a very big potential to help solve this problem to serve the cost of equity and inclusion. And today, vocational education should not be a bad word anymore as a stigma associated with low class jobs, because increasingly Industry 4.0 with white collar jobs as data analysts support data sciences, and a lot of areas in the Internet of Things which need 3D printing and all other kinds of things associated with New Age technologies or emerging technologies are part of vocational education. So the policy has recommended very strongly that vocational education should be part of school and higher education. I’ll stop here. I think I’ve overshot my time.

Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion in Higher Education Thank you. Moderator: Thank you so much. Dr. Wadia. I think there’s a lot more we need to know from you about policy provisions that can enable education to the last mile, you know, all the way to the socially and economically disadvantaged machine hooked on it all. Now we would like to hear your opening remarks, Ms. Meeta Sengupta.

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Ideas Put Forth by

Ms. Meeta Sengupta Ms. Meeta Sengupta: Hi, thank you for inviting me, I am absolutely in agreement, and therefore riding on the shoulders of the previous speakers. Because we all acknowledge and we all know that access to higher education is a game changer. It’s a game changer that is an intergenerational game changer. So you’re not investing only in that one student you are investing in the student, you’re still investing therefore, and the payoffs are going to come to the students family, and indeed into the students region. We know so many IIT graduates now who support four or five schools in the villages that they came from, just because 20 years later, they now have the wherewithal to do that. We know so many of our IIT alumni friends who support scholarships across higher education. This is not something that you talk about socially, but this kind of impact is absolutely real. And again, there is deep and interesting literature which I will defer to Dr. Lena Bhatia here to refer to. So we know that the impact is wide and deep, which is why it makes it even more important for it to not be elitist. And this is why I thank our first speaker, Professor Mansoor for bringing up the elitist concept, because this is about returns to education, it is about the returns on investment to higher education. And the payoffs here are not equitably distributed. This we will have to acknowledge. Now from a systemic point of view and from a provider point of view, when you look at it, you know that the payoff to first generation learners, the payoffs to women in higher education have far higher on a societal basis than the average payoff to them. So the three things that I want to talk about today in my opening remarks are one, the payoffs, two is the idea of excellence for all, which is again, building on the concepts that all our three speakers have SEASONAL MAGAZINE

spoken about. And the third, is the entry barriers, or the entry to university and the angst to the social and emotional angst that creates. So first, we know that the return on education, for example, is something that our students watch very carefully. So for example, in England, we know for sure, we know that when the returns on education fell, we realized that the gender skew in education changed more women went into higher education, but both men and boys tended to go for wherever the returns were for example higher investment banking had easy access. At one point of time, returns are something that the demand side watches very carefully. So if we are not being able to get enough students into higher education, we also need to pay attention to the kind of payoffs that they get, are we able to reward them enough? And that speaks directly to the quality of education? Are we able to give them an education that is going to give them what they need in life? Is our education at this stage in the economy, especially in South Asia- Is it about training? Is it about social mobility? Or is it about economic mobility? Or is it about geographic mobility? Which then leads to the first two? So again, what kind of mobility payoffs do we experience and deliver in our higher education should be an article of faith and an article of action for all of us, because we know for a fact right now that the highest ROI in education is not available to the least abled. Dr. Leena just described the types of disability and the types of disadvantage beautifully as well as Prof. Anil before me. So I don’t need to repeat that. But we do know that those, for example, in far off areas are not able to access, the better extension of the aims, the intention of the new education policy, of course, serves to mitigate that. But that we have to remind ourselves, we are at the beginning of

the journey, very beginning of this journey. The second is excellence for all. And again, speaking of elitism very quickly, we must not get trapped in mediocrity for the masses, and excellence only for the super abled, which is the elitist approach of the IITs and very rightly so there was a reason for that, at that time. But now delivering excellence for all, again has to be an article of faith for us. And third, I do want to talk about the very pragmatic issue of the way we are able to access higher education and the entry percentages. Now this has been seen as a capacity issue. But obviously, we see we have done really well in terms of building capacity. But have we been able to build enough quality capacity down the line that will take the pressure off the 95% or 99%, cut off rates, and the drama that we see every year? I mean, we clearly see, for example, that so for some people, startups are a better alternative to an MBA for now, etc. So we are creating alternatives, we are creating discussions around this entry thing. Finally, within the entry thing, I think we really need to and I’m going to reiterate what previous speakers said, we really need to focus on funding, especially for women, where entry to education should actually be more advantages than entry into, say, the marriage world. Returns to marriage versus returns to higher education. I would love to see that. Moderator: Definitely. So breaking entry barriers, one of the many ways higher education, like you said, is a game changer now, looking at also in terms of ROI. Thank you so much, Ms. Gupta for your insight. And I’d now like to welcome Mr. Sudhakar Rao out to open his remarks.

Solving the Issues of Access & Inclusion in Higher Education

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Ideas Put Forth by

Mr. Sudhakar Rao, ICFAI Mr. Sudhakar Rao: Good morning, everyone on the panel discussion. I’m extremely delighted to be on this very important panel with the kind of topic that we are discussing today. It’s my honor and privilege to share the screen space with some of the most distinguished leaders from around the world including Professor Anil sir and also Dr. Mansoor from Bangladesh. So thank you very much for inviting me once again. I would like to keep it very simple without any jargon being used, because I would like to approach it from a very simple perspective. That is, we need to look at society and see what ails society at frequent intervals, and come back and someone has to take responsibility for what ails society. I think education, especially higher education will have to admit and, and also take the responsibility for at least addressing those ails. Now, when we take the responsibility, the real action begins. In simple terms, if educational institutions are taking the responsibility of shaping the society, the back and forth, that is happening will be more meaningful, instead of nobody taking the responsibility, and everybody trying to blame everyone else in the society, that is going to be very, very useless. In my view, the real world is plural, there are so many differences, the range of human differences that we have in the real world, in society, that’s supposed to be appreciated very well. And then that has to become the fundamental aspect on which we have to teach what is called tolerance. If we do not tolerate these differences, if we do not appreciate why the people are different, and therefore the other consequential issues of having different opinions, having different tastes, having different appearances, and I’m also including the fact that persons with disability SEASONAL MAGAZINE

and in persons with from different regions, culture, religion, language, appearance. And one important factor, which in simple language is also that, for example, a student in your class, is having a green neon color hair, we’re going to have a different opinion on the student, I think that is something which we need to learn and appreciate and tolerate that different individuals will have different choices to make in terms of their appearance or in terms of their expression. So, therefore, we will have to tolerate that and we need to exhibit how that has to be tolerated in educational institutions, and then practice those things in terms of a strategy. For example, if your institution by strategy is not attracting diversity into the institution, then there is no way that we all practice or exhibit or learn from this diversity. Inclusion is the action that we take and so, if the educational institution itself is taking this action of demonstrating how inclusive one can be, then I think the society will get the benefits very quickly and there is a direct relationship between what the institutions do and what the society will reflect and therefore, that the philosophy and the strategy of your institution will be borne out and will be seen in all the actions that you take in terms of where you establish your institutions, and what kind of institutions you establish and what kind of target segments that would like to admit,

in various regions of the country. For example, you establish your institutions only in metro cities or you establish them in bigger cities, or in smaller cities, you like to take affordable quality education to the nook and corner of this country or you keep on blaming the government that the government is not doing enough. The fact is that the government is trying to do whatever the government can, and therefore the private players also will have to take the responsibility of taking this mission of diversity and inclusiveness into all

corners of this country. I think that should be the most important responsibility and aim for higher education in order to make this very inclusive and increase accessibility by way of technology and also give human face to that technology, which is going to spark access. Here. I pause. And I would like to come back to specific questions, if any. Thank you.

About ICFAI Group Panelist and noted leader, Mr. Sudhakar Rao, is the Director, Branding of the ICFAI Group. ICFAI Group is a pioneer in the field of education for over 35 years. It has carved a niche for itself in delivering quality education through its innovative and in-depth knowledge programs to the students enabling them to match with the best in the global arena. ICFAI Group is present across 16 states with 17 campuses. The group comprises of 11 ICFAI Universities, 9 ICFAI Business Schools (IBS), 7 ICFAI Tech Schools, 7 ICFAI Law Schools and an ICFAI School of Architecture. In all the programs offered across these units, the emphasis is on academic rigor and differentiated curriculum that bridges the industry – academia gap. The ICFAI Group’s culture of teaching and learning supports and fosters intellectual and personality development among its graduating students. The program as a whole is designed in a way that it makes the students DO and ACHIEVE and not

just limit themselves to ivory tower thinking. Hyderabad based ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education (IFHE), the flagship deemed university of the ICFAI Group, as well as ICFAI Business School (IBS Hyderabad) which is a constituent of IFHE, are unfazed by the pandemic and moving into higher orbits. Armed to the teeth now with the coveted AACSB accreditation, which is considered as the gold standard in management education worldwide, IBS Hyderabad, already a global leader in the Business Case Study approach, is now in a position to attract the best of students and faculty. Only 14 B-Schools in India have so far succeeded in getting this accreditation including some of the IIMs. Other constituents of IFHE like ICFAI Law School is also upping its game with several initiatives including a recent landmark MoU with Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI), a unit of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India, by which IBBI will become the deemed university’s knowledge partner in offering specialized LLMs and MBAs in Bankruptcy and Insolvency, which is now a sunrise sector in corporate law

and management in the country. At the university level itself, IFHE is forging new strategic alliances with industry bodies, one of the most notable and recent ones being with ASSOCHAM for Green and EcoFriendly Movement Sustainability Certification Programme. The deemed university and especially its B-School, IBS Hyderabad, excel on several fronts like updated and interdisciplinary education, meaningful research, global mobility of students, and ever improving placement metrics. IFHE, it is blessed with a stellar leadership team, led by Dr. C Rangarajan, renowned economist, former Governor of RBI and former Chairman of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council under former PM Dr. Manmohan Singh as its Chancellor and renowned academician Prof. J Mahender Reddy as its Vice-Chancellor. NAAC, an autonomous body of University Grants Commission has accredited the IFHE with ‘A+’ Grade with an impressive score (institutional CGPA) of 3.43 out of 4. The students come from all over India representing every state and the campus resembles like a mini India. The strength of the girls form about 40 percent of the student population. IFHE has established The Center for Entrepreneurship Development which aims to foster the culture of entrepreneurship among the students and epitomizes the power of innovation. IFHE also established the Center for Women Development, to conduct Business Training Programs for Rural Women Entrepreneurs. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

Sustainable Development, The Manav Rachna Way Most universities across India are only awakening to the need for sustainable development as envisaged by United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. But Faridabad based Manav Rachna Educational Institutions (MREI) have already travelled thousands of miles along the sustainable route. hy is sustainable development yet to find significant traction in developing nations like India? The answer is pretty straightforward. When development itself is challenging due to higher population, fewer resources per capita and lower productivity per capita, the focus invariably gets struck at economic development without any regard for sustainability. Yet, the irony is that it is developing nations like India that needs sustainable development the most. This is to ensure that economic development doesn’t get stalled due to fast depletion of resources, rising social tensions due to rising income inequalities, and the emerging challenges due to rapid deployment of technology that can pose

serious threats to mass employment. That is why United Nations doesn’t have separate Sustainable Development Goals for the developed and the developing worlds. The 17 goals are the same in both East and West, but in the developing world it really calls for thought leaders who foresee the future to pursue sustainability. This is where the focus on sustainability by Dr. Prashant Bhalla, President, Manav Rachna Educational Institutions, assumes significance. Most universities across India, especially in the private sector, have been sharply focused on the placements front. This can’t be faulted too, as at the end of the day, students want well-paying jobs to make good their investment in higher education, and to remain upwardly mobile. Manav Rachna too has been

a stellar performer on the placements front, with more than 500 renowned MNCs and Indian firms recruiting from the university every year. In fact, Manav Rachna is rated at 5-Star by QS for Employability. But such achievements would have prompted most universities to rest on such laurels. But the thought leader that he is, Dr. Prashant Bhalla is foreseeing the future, which is already playing out in the Western world. To give just one example, it is enough to consider what a university like Stanford is increasingly famous for. Not for churning out highly valued professionals, but for literally producing game-changing startup ventures on a global scale. This is an often overlooked dimension of sustainability. If every university is only producing job seekers, how long will the party go on? A modern university should be capable of producing job creators and not just job seekers. That is what Stanford has done, by having a venture culture, which has produced more than 1000 company founders who went on to create giants like Google, Cisco, HP, Nike, Netflix, Paypal, Bain & Company, LinkedIn, Robinhood, Instagram and lots more. Companies founded by Standford alumni have created 5.4 million jobs and generates US$2.7 trillion in annual revenue. In the Indian context, no university

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comes anywhere close, but a few of them like Manav Rachna have made definitive steps towards making this venture culture of creating job creators and not job seekers alone, a reality. So far, Manav Rachna has incubated over 80 entrepreneurial ventures by its students and faculty. Manav Rachna is home to two universities, Manav Rachna International Institute of Research & Studies (MRIIRS), which was formerly called Manav Rachna International University. MRIIRS is a deemed-to-be university under the UGC Act. The other university under the Group’s fold is Manav Rachna University (MRU), which was formerly Manav Rachna College of Engineering. MRU is a State Private University in Haryana, and the Manav Rachna Business Incubator (MRBI) is functioning under its ambit. Promoting entrepreneurship and startups is only one way in which President Dr. Prashant Bhalla has been furthering sustainability. On a loftier level, he has ensured that Manav Rachna is a formidable player in environmental sustainability too. The number of environmental initiatives undertaken by Manav Rachna community of students, faculty and partner organizations are endless. In fact, every year, environmental sustainability initiatives are a year-long affair in the

sprawling Manav Rachna campus. The university had conducted one of the largest international conferences on environment that comprised over 32 technical sessions and presentation of over 100 environmental research papers. Other initiatives include Manav Rachna Paryavaran Awards, a Youth Jalsa, an exhibition on the Panch Mahabootaas, an Environment Parliament for school students and a Women Jalsa. However, in this new year of 2021, Manav Rachna took its environment initiatives to a new level by hosting the National Environment Forum 2021 organized by Paryavaran Sanrakshan Gatividhi (PSG). Even in a quite difficult pandemic year,

Promoting entrepreneurship and startups is only one way in which President Dr. Prashant Bhalla has been furthering sustainability. On a loftier level, he has ensured that Manav Rachna is a formidable player in environmental sustainability too.

Manav Rachna helped achieve the participation of over 25,000 students from over 250 affiliated colleges and over 75 universities across India in this edition of National Environment Forum. The Award Ceremony of the National Environment Youth Forum 2021 was presided by Shri. Prakash Javadekar, Honourable Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India. National Education Policy’s (NEP 2020) recommendations is another dimension of sustainability where Manav Rachna has made giant strides. This was echoed by none other than NEP’s Chief Architect Padma Vibhushan Dr Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, Former Chairman, ISRO. He was the Chief Guest at the recent Manav Rachna Convocation Ceremony which saw more than 2000 students being awarded doctoral, post-graduate and graduate degrees by Manav Rachna University (MRU), Manav Rachna Dental College (MRDC) and Manav Rachna International Institute of Research & Studies (MRIIRS). On the occasion, Dr. Kasturirangan said, “The diversity of courses offered at Manav Rachna represents the diversity and multi-disciplinarity that forms a rich backdrop for students to take full advantage of several aspects of the recommendations which are now a part of NEP 2020.” SEASONAL MAGAZINE

NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY

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The Who, What, When & Where of NEP Rollout With Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself calling for a fast rollout of the National Education Policy (NEP), different stakeholders starting from Ministry of Education led by Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, to UGC, to AICTE, Central Universities, State Universities, School Boards, Deemed Universities, Private Universities, Colleges, Schools and Teachers at various levels across India are getting ready to implement the policy as fast as possible. While some states like Himachal Pradesh have already claimed that they have implemented NEP, other states are soon to follow suit. It is also a fact that several higher educational institutions in the country, especially in the private sector, have already implemented several of NEP’s core recommendations. Some NEP guidelines like common entrance tests and entry-exit options in graduation are likely to be the first implementations on a pan-India basis, with adoption starting as soon as the new academic year commences by May. Other broader guidelines like shifting from an examcentred pedagogy to a child-centred pedagogy might take more time. Or the deployment of technical courses in the regional languages. The exhaustive suggestions of NEP also calls for not only changes in educational regulators and educational institutions like schools, colleges & universities, but in the very content they teach. This is also making the academic content creators starting from apex bodies like NCERT and SCERTs to the private publishers of textbooks and other resources to make farreaching changes in their content and content creation policies. Given that the core objective of NEP is universalizing education from preschool to higher education level, and since

it is replacing a 34-year old policy, such comprehensive changes are surely called for. For example, the 5+3+3+4 framework outlined in NEP is a big change in schools and colleges, and will require considerable time, resources and adjustments to be adopted fully across India. Another big change that institutions, academicians & content creators need to brace for is NEP’s multidisciplinary approach, which needs to be inculcated from the school level so that it bears fruit at the university level and in research initiatives. Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal has recently mentioned that several countries have evinced interested in NEP, and mentioned that they too want to implement such reforms in their countries. The Minister had recently chaired the IIT Council to discuss how this premier league of Indian Institutes of Technology is going to implement the NEP guidelines. The NEP recently got a shot in its arm when the UK based Cambridge International became the first school board in India to implement NEP by coming up with a curriculum based on it. On the higher education front, Lucknow University has become the first university in India to adopt the provisions of NEP in PG curriculum. Of course, private and deemed universities have also made several claims regarding NEP implementation. Seasonal Magazine brings out this comprehensive cover story on the potential and challenges in getting NEP deployed, by various stakeholders in the Indian educational universe, including an interview with Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal.

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HEALTH

WHY AND HOW TO AVOID LOW BLOOD SUGAR IN DIABETES PATIENTS

DAILY HUNT'S JOSH RAISES $100 MILLION FROM QATAR

HIGH SUGAR LEVELS IN THE BLOOD CAN DAMAGE THE HEART, KIDNEYS, AND OTHER VITAL ORGANS, AND THEREFORE NEED TO BE MANAGED WITH DIET AND MEDICATION. HOWEVER, DIABETICS CAN ALSO BE AT A HIGH RISK OF LOW BLOOD SUGAR. iabetes is a health condition that requires constant care and monitoring. Due to several reasons which also determine the type of diabetes you suffer from, the sugar levels in your blood start to rise, and the condition is collectively called diabetes. High sugar levels in the blood can damage the heart, kidneys, and other vital organs, and therefore need to be managed with diet and medication. However, diabetics can also be at a high risk of low blood sugar, or hypoglycemia. This happens when blood sugar levels drop too low. It can lead to fatigue, drowsiness, and even unconsciousness and death. It is, therefore, imperative to ensure you keep your blood sugar levels managed and in the correct, healthy range, to stay healthy and safe. “Low sugar, also known as hypoglycemia is a severe complication, commonly seen in patients with diabetes on treatment. Reports from various studies indicated that 2-4 per cent of people with diabetes die from hypoglycemia,” said Dr Anupam Biswas, consultant - Endocrinology, Fortis Hospital, Noida. “Patients of Type 1 diabetes, patients on insulin or sulphonylurea/glinides treatment, old age patients are at a higher risk for low sugar or hypoglycemia,” he added, as he shared tips for hypoglycemia management for diabetic patients. Low blood sugar is defined as a blood glucose level less than 70 mg/dl. Symptoms of low blood glucose include dizziness, confusion, shakiness, palpitations and hunger. If patients of diabetes on the treatment

Qatar Investment Authority and others' investments come just two months after Google and Microsoft made the India-made TikTok rival a unicorn.

experience any of the symptoms mentioned above, they should immediately check their blood glucose levels. If the blood glucose level is less than 70 mg/dl, the patient is advised to consume fast-acting carbohydrates. Pure glucose is a preferred treatment but any form of carbohydrates that contains glucose will raise blood glucose. In case the patient has become unconscious, they should be immediately rushed to a nearby hospital and get started on IV glucose therapy. Hypoglycemia prevention is a critical component of diabetes management. IMBG (self-monitoring of Blood Glucose) and for some patients (GM continuous glucose monitoring) may be required to detect incipient hypoglycemia. Patients should understand the situation that increases their risk of low sugars, such as when fasting for tests or procedures, when meals are delayed during and after consumption of alcohol, during and after intense exercise and during sleep. In case of any hypoglycemic event, Please consult your treating doctor as treatment modification may be required.

VerSe Innovation, the parent company of DailyHunt which runs the short video app Josh, has raised $100 million in a round led by Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign fund of Qatar, and Glade Brook Capital Partners. The investment also saw participation from Canaan Valley Capital and existing investor Sofina Group. The latest investment comes in just two months after VerSe Innovation became a unicorn in December 2020 after Google and Microsoft pumped in $100 million into the company. It is also backed by Goldman Sachs, Lupa Systems, Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge Capital and Omidyar Network, among others. The investment has come through for DailyHunt’s take on TikTok – the short video platform Josh. The news aggregator platform had launched Josh after the ban on TikTok in India, in 12 local Indian languages to capture the “Bharat” users, the term used for the next 200 million internet users in India. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

VACCINE

ARE VACCINES ENOUGH TO ERADICATE ERADICATE A VIRUS? VIRUS?LESSONS LESSONS FROM HISTORY FROM HISTORY SMALLPOX ERADICATION TEACHES THAT HIGH-TECH VACCINATIONS ONLY WORK WHEN THEY ARE EFFECTIVELY COMBINED WITH LOW-TECH PUBLIC HEALTH STRATEGIES.

mallpox killed countless millions – 300 million people in the 20th century alone – before it was finally declared eradicated on May 8, 1980. It was a momentous day, marking what the current director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called the greatest “public health triumph in world history”.

soon end the pandemic and return life to normal.

Smallpox, as one researcher has emphasised, “was eradicated solely through vaccination”. Today, this achievement feels particularly encouraging and seems ready for a reboot as governments worldwide tell the public that the Covid vaccine will

The current vaccination campaigns are not attempting to eradicate SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes Covid. But, based on the history of smallpox vaccination, even the much lower bar of herd immunity will be difficult to clear if we pin so much of our hope on vaccination.

Worldwide, advance reviews are flooding in. Vaccines are a “light at the end of the tunnel”, our ticket to “normality”. They have brought a “real end” into sight. From New York governor Andrew Cuomo came the inevitable military analogy: the vaccine was no less than “the weapon that is going to win the war”.

Although the eradication of smallpox is often held up as proof of the definitive success of vaccines, it should not be forgotten that smallpox raged for centuries before it was finally brought to an end. One of the first steps towards eradication took place in 1796 when, as the somewhat apocryphal story goes, Edward Jenner injected pus extracted from a dairymaid’s cowpox lesion into the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son. The following 150 years were marked by concern about the vaccine’s efficacy, safety and side-effects. As late as 1963, British doctors were still alarmed by the slow uptake of routine smallpox vaccination, warning that this “indifference” would require a “vast programme of re-education”. Hesitancy was not the only problem. Well into the 20th century, vaccines were unequally distributed around the globe, and periodic outbreaks ensured that smallpox remained endemic in much of the world, particularly in developing countries. By 1967, when the WHO launched the ten-year intensified smallpox eradication programme, four other eradication efforts (hookworm, yellow fever, yaws and malaria) had already failed, and many involved in such programmes had become sceptical about eradication as a goal at all. Indeed, the 1966 directorgeneral of the WHO, Marcelino Candau, believed that disease eradication was simply not possible. What they had come to realise was that vaccines alone are not enough to contain or eradicate a disease. Instead, it would be essential to combine technological developments – such as the introduction of heat-stable freeze-

THE CURRENT VACCINATION CAMPAIGNS ARE NOT ATTEMPTING TO ERADICATE SARS-COV-2, THE VIRUS THAT CAUSES COVID. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

dried vaccines and the bifurcated (twopronged) needle – with efforts such as surveillance, case finding, contact tracing, ring vaccination (controlling an outbreak by vaccinating a ring of people around each infected individual), and communication campaigns to find, track and inform affected people. This sort of programme would encounter various challenges from funding to political strife to cultural practices and norms. It would also cost a whopping 20% of the WHO’s budget and take a decade of intensive labour – and come at the expense of other, more basic healthcare interventions. But eventually, it succeeded. Smallpox, outside of the lab at least, was gone. All this time and coordinated effort, even though smallpox was in some ways an ideal candidate for eradication. For one thing, its symptoms were so obvious that it was easy to identify and track, and so also easier to contain. And smallpox was a disease unique to humans, affecting no other animals. Its eradication from human populations was its eradication from the planet. The history of smallpox eradication makes it apparent that high-tech vaccinations only work when they are effectively combined with low-tech

public health strategies. These low-tech strategies include isolation and quarantine, and especially tracking and tracing, as well as the increasingly elusive elements of public trust and effective communication. Perhaps most clearly, the smallpox story shows that the control of Covid requires a global effort that attends to local needs. This is partly an ethical imperative, partly a practical one. We live in a world with remarkably porous borders, even in times of lockdown. If the smallpox eradication programme has taught us anything, it is that lasting reprieve from pandemic disease is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve if nations insist on acting in seclusion. The glorification of the Covid vaccines follows a well-worn track in its presumption that the arrival of a vaccine heralds the pandemic’s end. Yet in the

VACCINATION DID NOT END SMALLPOX. THAT WAS DONE BY A SMALL ARMY OF PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS WORKING INTENSIVELY AND COOPERATIVELY ACROSS THE GLOBE, INVENTING AND IMPROVISING A SERIES OF PUBLIC HEALTH MEASURES.

case of smallpox, our most successful vaccine story to date, this has required the glossing over of centuries of suffering and death and the intense public health struggle to contain the disease. Vaccination did not end smallpox. That was done by a small army of people and organisations working intensively and cooperatively across the globe, inventing and improvising a series of public health measures. We have inherited a recent medical and political past that values quick fixes and cures, blindly embracing these to the exclusion of the messy details of how healthcare actually works. It is not just the final eradication of smallpox, then, but also the personal and public health havoc it wreaked across the centuries that should guide our efforts. For these supply the context we need to create reasonable expectations about what the end of our current pandemic might look like and what it will take to get there.

(Credit: The Conversation. By Caitjan Gainty & Agnese Vitali. Caitjan Gainty is a Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at King’s College London. Agnes Arnold-Forster is a Research Fellow, History of Medicine and Healthcare at the University of Bristol.) SEASONAL MAGAZINE

HEALTH

STUDY FIND 6-MONTHS OF LOW CARB DIET CAN FREE PATIENTS FROM DIABETES

not affiliated with the study, told Insider. "This meta-analysis is just one other collection of studies that shows that it's possible to do that." While the term doctors usually use to describe type 2 diabetes is "insulin resistance," Cucuzzella said people with the condition could alternatively be viewed as "carbohydrate-intolerant." "Their bodies do not metabolize and respond well to carbohydrates, and the end result is high insulin levels, which precede high hyperglycemia or high blood-sugar levels," Cucuzzella said. Fats and protein don't cause blood-sugar levels to spike as carbohydrates do, so cutting back on sweets and starches can help patients keep their diabetes under control along with medication. Other options for managing diabetes include bariatric surgery — removing the stomach and intestines — or subsisting on an 800-calorie shake a day, so reducing carbohydrate intake is a relatively simple solution, Cucuzzella said.

meta-analysis study found that sticking to a low-carb diet was linked to remission from type 2 diabetes after six months. Though the evidence suggested that low-carb diets worked better than low-fat alternatives, it also indicated the benefits might diminish within a year. More research is needed to understand the diet's long-term effects. A strict low-carbohydrate diet could be the best bet for patients with type 2 diabetes to enter remission, a new analysis of studies suggests. The findings of the meta-analysis, published Wednesday in BMJ, are consistent with the American Diabetes Association's official recommendation that cutting back on carbs is the best approach for lowering blood sugar. The analysis summed up data from 23 randomized controlled trials involving more than 1,300 participants with type 2 diabetes. Most of the studies compared a low-carb or very low-carb diet defined as less than 26% or 10% of daily calories from carbohydrates with low-fat diets. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

A strict lowcarbohydrate diet could be the best bet for patients with type 2 diabetes to enter remission Overall, patients who stuck to a low-carb diet for six months achieved higher rates of remission than those who tried other dietary changes. Dr. Mark Cucuzzella, a professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine who has published several studies on dietary changes and diabetes, said reducing carbohydrate intake and eating more nutrient-dense foods could help patients reverse the course of the disease. "The good news about diabetes is it's a dietary disease, so it is reversible with lifestyle measures which target the carbohydrates," Cucuzzella, who was

Most of the benefits of a lowcarbohydrate diet seen after six months — such as weight loss, improved body fat, and reduced medication use — diminished by the 12-month mark, the analysis found. The decrease in benefits could occur because patients stop sticking to the diet over time, the authors hypothesized, but more research needs to be done to explore long-term adherence and effects. Some participants also reported lower quality of life and worse cholesterol levels after 12 months. Keeping diabetes in remission is like holding a beach ball underwater, Cucuzzella said. If patients let their dietary changes slide, the disease can easily bounce back. He said the apparent short-term benefits boded well, however, for the diet's overall effectiveness and pointed to patient support as the next step. "If you can show something works for six months when nothing else works other than not eating and taking your stomach out," he said, "then we have to figure out how to help support people to continue on this plan."

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BANKING

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CSB BANK

BOOMING BEYOND ONE HUNDRED YEARS CSB Bank’s stock has nearly tripled during the past 12 months. The traditional private sector bank which completed 100 years in 2020, was literally reinvented in 2019 under a new promoter, the Canadian financial services leader Fairfax, and started its dramatic turnaround to profits soon after. The Thrissur, Kerala headquartered lender executed its much-awaited IPO too in 2019, and has continued to record quarter after quarter of significant growth in FY’21 too. In the most recent third-quarter earnings too, CSB Bank has almost doubled its profit, compared with the corresponding quarter last year. Under the visionary leadership of renowned banker, CVR Rajendran, the bank is executing both short-term strategies like growing its gold loan business and long-term strategies like growing its retail and MSME segments. The lender which is aspiring to be a more than a new generation bank, to a world-class financial institution, has inducted some high performers at the top management level, and has recently offered a lucrative VRS scheme to hundreds of its senior employees in a bid to make its operations more agile, to take on the dynamic and tech-driven opportunities emerging in the financial sector.

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In the third quarter of this fiscal ended December 31 2020, CSB Bank’s Net Interest Income (NII) has shot up by nearly 62% on a year-on-year basis to touch Rs 251 crore. Rise in Quarterly Net Profit was even more dramatic, soaring by nearly 89% to reach over Rs. 53 crore. Signaling effective cost containment measures and efficiencies, Operating Profit spiked by over 160% on a yearly basis. The bank which is on a strong wicket on the capital front too, thanks to promoter funds and IPO proceeds that came in 2019, has not done any dilution recently unlike most of its peers. As such, CSB Bank put up a good growth in its EPS too, increasing it to Rs. 3.06 in December 2020 from Rs. 1.63 in December 2019. EPS dilution is unlikely to occur going forward too, as MD & CEO CVR Rajendran has guided that the bank is unlikely to need any capital infusion for the next two years. The strong performance in Q3 was led by strong credit growth riding on the back of a stunning 60% rise in gold loans. Such loans now constitute 40% of the bank's loan portfolio, which is a 10% rise from the previous year. Despite the fluctuating prices of the precious metal, the bank is not unduly worried over the asset quality as, on an average, it loans only at 75% Loan-to-Value against RBI’s permission for LTVs up to 90%. In fact, with its decades old expertise in gold loans, CSB Bank enjoys excellent asset quality in this product with Net NPAs at only 0.28%. The bank continued its conservative

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stance on provisioning with an additional provision of Rs. 85.10 crore in the third quarter, which made total provisions to reach nearly Rs. 145 crore, which amounts to a Provision Coverage Ratio of 91%. The bank explained such extremely prudent measures as due to the still unknown impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is also holding a special provision of Rs. 154 crore on account of some special accounts and stressed assets. The CSB Bank Board has approved the roll out of a Voluntary Retirement Scheme for 223 employees above the age of 50 and with minimum 10 years

of service. Most of them are drawing up to Rs. 12 lakhs per annum now. Though the bank will have to spend Rs 80 crore if all of them opt for the scheme, the bank has decided that it will be beneficial in the long run as it will make the average age younger, with more employees capable of leading the bank in tech-led changes. Such prudent measures on every front testifies about the quality and farsightedness of the promoting group and management, which is a far cry from several comparable peers. The way Lakshmi Vilas Bank went

AFTER BEING TAKEN OVER BY CANADA BASED FAIRFAX INDIA HOLDINGS CORPORATION (FIHC) LED BY PREM WATSA, THE BANK HAS BEEN TRANSFORMING VIGOROUSLY UNDER THE VISIONARY LEADERSHIP OF ITS MD & CEO CVR RAJENDRAN. down and had to be amalgamated recently by RBI forcibly with an overseas bank, with no compensation to its equity investors, speaks volumes about the perfect rescue of CSB Bank in 2019. It was a rescue where all stakeholders including the bank’s new promoter entity led by billionaire investor Prem Watsa, its management led by veteran banker CVR Rajendran, its employee base, and its earlier shareholders all acted synergistically to protect the one hundred years old bank. However, the unsaid story is that much credit is also due to its customers whose two or three earlier generations have been banking with CSB Bank since 1920. The reason of course is the unshakeable trust that CSB Bank has garnered due to its steady operations over the ten decades since its inception. Now, under its promoter, the Canada based financial behemoth FairFax, and the expert leadership of its MD & CEO CVR Rajendran, the bank is on a

transformational journey from being an Old Private Sector Bank to a fullservice New Age Private Bank which deploys latest technologies like Whatsapp Banking as and when it happens. Confirming its turnaround in FY’20, the bank has put up a stellar performance in the first three quarters, growing not only headline numbers, but almost all core operational metrics. This centenary year has indeed went down in the history of the bank as the year in which it was truly reinvented. CSB Bank, formerly Catholic Syrian Bank, and Lakshmi Vilas Bank are classified by Reserve Bank of India as among the twelve remaining Old Private Sector Banks (OPSB), along with their peers like Federal Bank, South Indian Bank, Karur Vysya Bank, City Union Bank, Karnataka Bank, Tamilnad Mercantile Bank, Dhanlaxmi Bank etc. While there are some outperformers among OPSBs, generally most of them share problems more similar to India’s state-owned public sector banks like significant NPAs and poor profitability. OPSBs also have the issue of poor geographic spread. Not that India’s new private sector banks (NPSBs) are totally in the green. While some of the best managed banks in India belong to this category, it also gave rise to troubled players like Yes Bank, which is yet to find significant traction in the market even after being taken over by banking behemoth State Bank of India (SBI) and attracting investments from several other banks. Problems at such NPSBs tend to be scam-scale corruption at the highest offices that would continue to send

CSB BANK WHICH WENT FOR ITS SUCCESSFUL IPO AND LISTING IN DECEMBER 2019, SUFFERED THE WORLDWIDE SETBACK IN STOCKS DUE TO THE PANDEMIC, BUT HAS SINCE THEN RISEN BY 2.8 TIMES, DRIVEN BY STRONG FUNDAMENTAL PERFORMANCE.

shockwaves as they are unearthed. In sharp contrast, the problems at OPSBs like CSB Bank tend to be more manageable issues like stagnant strategies or lacklustre operational efficiencies from the past. In fact, after being taken over by Canada based Fairfax India Holdings Corporation (FIHC) led by Prem Watsa, the bank has been transforming vigorously under the visionary leadership of its MD & CEO CVR Rajendran, a banking sector specialist. The bank which went for its successful IPO and listing in December 2019, suffered the worldwide setback in stocks due to the pandemic, but has since then risen by 2.8 times, calculated from its April 2020 lows. The recovery in the CSB Bank stock was driven by soaring fundamental performance in recent quarters. The bank had turned around to profit in FY’20, ending a streak of losses for the past several years. CSB Bank posted a modest profit of Rs. 12.72 crore in last fiscal, but then accelerated its performance in Q1, Q2 & Q3 of this fiscal. In the June quarter, its net profit more than doubled to Rs. 53.6 crore from the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal. And in Q2, the bottomline has soared to Rs. 68.9 crore, which is a three-fold rise from the previous fiscal’s September quarter. Apart from such headline numbers, the finer details also speak strongly about the total turnaround happening at the Thrissur, Kerala, headquartered lender. The most crucial CASA (Current Account, Savings Account) ratio of the bank had improved from 27.84% of total deposits in FY’19 to 29.17% at the end of FY20. The bank is now in the process of augmenting this further by launching more CASA centric branches, as cheap source of funds like CASA deposits are crucial for driving credit growth and profits. The bank recorded strong growth in all core operational metrics including Net Interest Income (NII), Fee or NonInterest Income, Net Interest Margin (NIM) and Pre-Provision Operating Profit (PPOP). While NII grew by 56%, SEASONAL MAGAZINE

NIM expanded by 81 bps to reach 4.5%. Supporting the higher NIM was the rise in yield on advances which increased from 10.33% to 10.94%, fall in cost of deposits from 5.91% to 5.18% and the rise in yield on investments from 6.52% to 6.74%, all on a YoY basis. The bank has now become an agile player in the Fee or Non-Interest Income business with 80% growth witnessed in Q2, driven by increased treasury profits, processing fee and PSLC income. Growth in both interest and non-interest incomes helped the bank’s operating profit to surge by 172.6% in Q2. Other core metrics where the bank improved include Cost to Income Ratio, Return on Assets (RoA), Return on Equity (RoE) Provision Coverage Ratio (PCR) and Capital to Risk Assets Ratio (CRAR). CSB Bank is also steadily improving its asset quality. In Q2, Gross NonPerforming Assets (NPA) as a percentage of Gross Advances fell by 47 bps sequentially to 3.04%, while Net NPA fell 44 bps QoQ to 1.30%. Slippages in Q2 came in at Rs 3.7 crore, declining sharply from Rs 5.5 crore in the previous quarter and Rs 60.7 crore in the year-ago period. Provisions and contingencies increased significantly to Rs 80.72 crore in Q2, up by 40.3% QoQ and 228.5% YoY. The Provision Coverage Ratio (PCR) improved to 84.24% from 81.7% in the June quarter. The bank utilized the pandemic to start new branches and 35 new branches were opened, taking advantage of the availability of furnished office space that was coming cheaper than earlier. CSB Bank is now on track to start 101 branches before the end of FY’21. Apart from boosting CASA, such branches are also beneficial for the bank to grow gold loans, one of its core credit products. Being based out of Kerala, which is the stronghold of gold loans, CSB Bank is already a significant player in gold loans. The bank is leaving no stone unturned in its drive to boost this traditional strength in lending against gold. CSB Bank’s gold loan portfolio has grown SEASONAL MAGAZINE

47% year-on-year to touch Rs 4,938.98 crore during the second quarter. Signaling strong momentum, it has grown sequentially too, registering over 28% growth. During the first quarter of the current fiscal, the bank had reported gold loan advances at Rs 3,843.50 crore. The bank now plans to grow its gold loan business elsewhere in India too, as the whole of the country is waking up to the utility and safety of gold loans. The importance of gold loans in CSB Bank’s portfolio is evident from the fact that gold loans accounted for 31% of the bank’s total advances of Rs 12,240 crore as at the end of FY20. This was after the bank’s gold loan portfolio increased 28% year-on-year to touch Rs 3,799 crore in the last fiscal. In Q2 of this fiscal, the bank’s gross advances increased by 11.92% year-on-year to touch Rs 12,761.91 crore, and it was largely driven by the strong uptick in gold loans. The bank is utilizing the

IN THE LATEST Q3 QUARTER, CSB BANK HAS NEARLY DOUBLED ITS NET PROFIT, AND HAS SHOWN STRONG CREDIT GROWTH ON ACCOUNT OF HIGH DEMAND FOR ITS GOLD LOAN PRODUCT.

higher Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratio allowed by RBI in gold loans to grow this segment. The bank is on a strong wicket on the deposits front too. Including the growth in Current Accounts & Savings Accounts (CASA) mentioned earlier, the total deposits of CSB Bank in Q2 has increased year-on-year by 12.63% to touch Rs 17,468.73 crore, in which term deposits accounted for Rs 12,334 crore. The bank is now in the process of setting up an NRI Vertical to grow its overseas remittances and Non Resident External (NRE) deposits which account for 25% of its deposit base. While this has been a traditional stronghold, in recent years more room for growth has emerged in NRI deposits.

THE BANK HAS INDUCTED PRALAY MONDAL AS THE BANK’S PRESIDENT FOR RETAIL, SME, OPERATIONS & IT. MONDAL WAS EARLIER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & HEAD OF RETAIL BANKING AT AXIS BANK.

in the current fiscal due to this expansion plan.

THE BANK UTILIZED THE PANDEMIC TO START 35 NEW BRANCHES, TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE AVAILABILITY OF FURNISHED OFFICE SPACE THAT WAS COMING CHEAPER THAN EARLIER.

The overall direction of the bank is clearly along the most prudent retail path followed by some of India’s best run banks. This was as per MD & CEO CVR Rajendran’s vision, and the twowheeler vertical which was established in 2018 is growing rapidly, registering over 265% growth in Q1. But much more is being planned by CSB Bank in this regard, as so far this vertical has concentrated only on the hometurf of Kerala. With demand for two-wheelers surging across the country, CSB Bank is in the process of offering these loans in other states and cities where it has a sizeable presence. The one hundred year old CSB Bank has 411 branches across India. Out of these, 90% of the branches are in the four states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra. While it is not too bad as these states are home to India’s most buoyant metros like Mumbai, Chennai & Bengaluru, the bank has plans to target a wider geographic area and the new branch expansion plan in the current fiscal will greatly aid this. The bank which recruited 866 new employees in FY’20 is likely to recruit much more

However, for a bank which is aiming to be a new-age private sector bank, it is acutely aware of the more effective expansions possible in the digital realm. Hence, be it in gold loans or two-wheeler credit, a priority focus of the bank is in sourcing retail loans digitally from across India. Towards this, the bank has tied up with the leading NBFC, IIFL to originate gold loans from those regions where it doesn’t have its own branch presence. IIFL will act as a Banking Correspondent for CSB Bank and will also help the bank in sourcing from lower economic strata where there is more growth potential. The bank’s retail push has received significant momentum by the recent induction of Pralay Mondal as the bank’s President for Retail, SME, Operations & IT. Mondal has 30 years of experience in private sector banks, is a noted performer in growing retail & SME banking, and was earlier Executive Director & Head of Retail Banking at Axis Bank. His other noted assignments include a 12-year stint with HDFC Bank. According to CSB Bank’s MD & CEO CVR Rajendran, Pralay Mondal can be a candidate to eventually takeover as the Chief Executive Officer of the bank, when Rajendran retires by the end of 2022. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

STOCK MARKET

HEADWINDS THAT MAY AFFECT MARKET RALLY

MARKET WEALTH HAS BEEN SOARING AT THE BOURSES AS THE BUDGET GAVE THE NECESSARY BOOSTER SHOT TO A DILAPIDATED INDIAN ECONOMY. LACED WITH INFRASTRUCTURE PROGRAMMES, PRIVATISATION PROPOSALS, NOD TO PUBLIC SECTOR BANKS’ RECAPITALISATION, AND NO CHANGES IN THE DIRECT TAX REGIME, IT PROVED TO BE ONE OF THE “BEST IN DECADES” FOR THE ECONOMY. At the bourses, frontline indices are hitting record highs every day. With today’s gains, the S&P BSE Sensex and the Nifty50 are up over 11 per cent since January 29, and have more-than-doubled since their March 2020 lows. The BSE barometer of 30 constituents hit a new lifetime peak of 51,753 today while the broader 50share Nifty hit 15,238. From a medium-term perspective, Morgan Stanley sees the Sensex hitting the 55,000-mark by the end of 2021. That said, investors, whose wealth soared by a massive Rs 11 trillion since Budget day, should keep an eye on certain risks that may half the current rally.

FII SELLING: The current market rally has been fueled on the back of a substantial inflow of foreign capital into Indian equities. So far in CY21, FPIs have pumped in Rs 31,678 crore in the equities market, NSE data show. Adjusting for outflow from debt, debt-voluntary retention route (VRR) schme, and hybrid schemes, net inflow stands at Rs 28,537 crore. Any reversal in this trend, analysts fear, may also halt the market rally. “Liquidity is a friend of the trend. As and when the trend reverses in the economy, the FIIs may take the money out putting breaks on the rally,” says Ambareesh Baliga, an independent market analyst. Moreover, Neeraj Chadawar, headquantitative equity research at Axis Securities, says the continuous sell-off by domestic institutional investors (DIIs) remains a key risk. “If FIIs started selling and DIIs are unable to buy the positions, then we could see downward pressure in the market as most of the positives are already priced in,” he says. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

LESS THAN EXPECTED EARNINGS RECOVERY: The current rally, Chadawar of Axis Securities says, is built on the expectation of the sharp recovery in the corporate earnings. If recovery falls short, then it could be a challenge for the market to sustain at a higher multiple, he says. “Earnings have surprised positively in the past two quarters, largely on the back of cost-cutting, price hikes, and volume growth leading to overall improvement in margins and top-line. However, the same may be difficult to replicate in the coming months,” opines Baliga.

VALUATION: INTEREST RATE HIKE: Most central banks around the globe have held interest rates to bare minimum to enable credit off-take in the economy. “If interest rates begin to rise globally and FIIs find other alternate and attractive investment opportunities then flow of money from abroad may halt or reverse. If the current liquidity corrects, then our markets will also correct,” says Deepak Jasani, head of retail research at HDFC Securities. Last week, China decided to increase short-term interest rates with some key tenors approaching the higher end of the interest rate corridor.

DELAY IN EXECUTION OF BUDGET PROPOSAL: Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Rs 1.18 trillion-financial allocation for the highways sector in Budget 2021. However, any delay in roll out of such growth-driven projects may wear-off the bull-run, say analysts. “The investment-led growth augurs well for a sustainable growth recovery from a long-term perspective. However, we acknowledge the execution challenges to the stated intent and this is the key risk,” noted analysts at Japan-based brokerage Nomura.

The benchmark Sensex currently quotes at a trailing 12-month P/E of highest-ever 34 times. Analysts say valuations look optically high as earnings over the past one year have been depressed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Even on a twoyear forward basis, the benchmark indices quote at 22 times, much higher than the long-term average of about 16 times. Sustenance of earnings recovery, therefore, is essential.

DELAY IN VACCINE ROLL OUT: Any delay in nationwide roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccine or any news related to failure of one of the vaccines may sour sentiment, says Narendra Solanki, head of fundamental research at Anand Rathi Shares and Stock Brokers.

TECHNICAL TRENDS: "Till Nifty holds above 14,750, overall trend remains bullish for a potential move towards 15,500 and 15,750. If it drifts below 15,000 and holds below 14,750 only then the market stance could change for any profit booking decline.Those who are worried from over stretched market move can shift to Option and Option strategy to mitigate their risk and ride the ongoing market momentum with lesser cost," says Chandan Taparia, derivative & technical analyst at Motilal Oswal Financial Services.

AUTO

2021 MG ZS EV LAUNCHED IN INDIA; PRICES START AT Rs 20.99 LAKH THE UPDATED MG ZS EV 2021 GETS MINOR COSMETIC UPDATES ALONG WITH SUBSTANTIAL IMPROVEMENTS ON THE INSIDE. THE ALL-ELECTRIC SUV GETS A STARTING PRICE OF Rs. 20.99 LAKH (EX-SHOWROOM, INDIA).

G Motor India kick-started the year 2021 on a positive note by launching the Hector facelift in India. The Chinese-owned British carmaker now has introduced an updated model of its all-electric SUV, the ZS EV, in the country. The 2021 ZS EV now comes with all-new HT battery, 17-inch tyres, increased ground clearance and an ecotree challenge feature for i-Smart EV 2.0. The SUV has received its first update since its launch, which was more than a year ago. MG has priced the 2021 ZS EV at Rs 20.99 lakh for the Excite variant, while the Exclusive trim costs Rs 24.18 lakh (All prices, ex-showroom Delhi). It is MG's second product in India for the year 2021 after Hector facelift. Just like the outgoing model, it will be assembled locally at its Halol manufacturing plant in Gujarat. The carmaker continues to offer the SUV in two variants - Exclusive and Excite. Visually, the overall design remains unchanged and continues to sport a SEASONAL MAGAZINE

deep concave grille featuring chrome accents, London-eye projector headlamps with LED DRLs, LED tail lights, windmill inspired 17-inch diamond-cut machined alloy wheels, roof rails, rear spoiler, ORVMs with side indicators, body-coloured bumpers and more. Dimension-wise, the SUV measures 4314 mm in length, 1809 mm in width, 1620 mm in height and the wheelbase stands at 2585 mm. The company has increased the ground clearance to 177 mm and also raised the battery placement by 205 mm.

Mechanically, the SUV continues to come equipped with the same 44.5 kWh Hi-Tech IP6 certified battery pack that powers a permanent magnet synchronous motor.

The cabin of the 2021 MG ZS EV is neatly designed with all-black interiors along with leather dashboard, leather seats and chrome-finished door handles giving a premium look. There's also an 8-inch touchscreen infotainment system with MG's i-Smart EV 2.0 system. It also continues to get three driving modes Sport, Normal and Eco. The SUV also gets a dual-pane panoramic sunroof, rain-sensing front wiper, cruise control, auto headlamps, power-adjustable driver seat, push-button start-stop with smart entry, electronic gear knob, PM filter and more. As for safety, the SUV comes equipped with six airbags, ABS, brake assist, ESC, electric parking brake, tyre pressure monitor, ISOFIX mounts, hill start assist, hill descent control, rear camera, parking sensors, heated wing mirrors, and more. Mechanically, the SUV continues to come equipped with the same 44.5 kWh Hi-Tech IP6 certified battery pack that powers a permanent magnet synchronous motor. It develops 141 bhp of maximum power against the peak torque of 353 Nm. The carmaker claims that the battery pack offers a maximum range of up to 419 km when fully charged. It can clock 0-100 kmph in just 8.5 seconds thanks to power electronic (PE) solutions from UAES. The company claims that the SUV can be fully charged in six-eight hours through a standard AC charger. However, the 50kW DC fast charger is capable of providing the juice up to 80 per cent in just 50 minutes. The new MG ZS EV will now be available in 31 cities across the country. The all-electric SUV also continues to get MG's e-shield program including 5years of unlimited kms warranty, 5-years roadside assistance, 5 labour free service, 5-way charging infrastructure. The company is also offering a battery warranty of 8 years or 1.5 lakh kms. As far as price differences are concerned, the updated ZS EV is now costlier by up to Rs 60,000 over the outgoing model. The Excite trim of the EV is expensive by Rs 11,000, which was previously priced at Rs 20.88 lakh. The Exclusive trim was priced at Rs 23.58 lakh (all prices, ex-showroom, Delhi).

BANKING

IDFC FIRST BANK

THE POSTIVE BANKPRENEUR Anyone who knows V Vaidyanathan, knows he is a positive thinking banker. And the bank's robust Q2 numbers had come in as yet another endorsement for the positivity and pragmatism of this bankpreneur who already had some unique achievements in his chequered careers at ICICI Bank, Future Capital, Capital First, and now IDFC First Bank. While positive thinking and its mighty power is equally attested and refuted by its believers and detractors respectively, watching the manner in which the MD & CEO of IDFC First Bank leads his organization and articulates his positive thinking is enough to make anyone a believer. Vaidyanathan’s positive thinking is not something hollow like the ‘Law of Attraction’, but is based on a simple yet profound premise, that, one needs to be positive enough to see the hidden opportunities first, so as to capitalize on them! And apart from such opportunities in the bank's core activity of deposits and lending, some unique opportunities are emerging for the bank as it is a prime beneficiary of possible reverse mergers of banks with their parents as per a recent regulatory suggestion by Reserve Bank of India. Based on this, IDFC First Bank can reverse merge with its parent IDFC and that is sure to unlock valuations, and already multiple brokerages have revised their targets for the bank based on this. However, Vaidyanathan is not oblivious of the dangers ahead –in fact he would be the first person to warn you about it – but he is so positive that he doesn’t miss any of the hidden opportunities ahead, which is a prime reason why IDFC First Bank is the mid-sized bank to watch out for.

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tock markets across the world are soaring after the late March rout, and the Indian bourses are no exception. Every steep technical correction is again being brought into by investors. The rally has so far been powered by stimulus packages announced by all leading economies across the world. And stock market is always the most leading indicator, which means the collective intelligence of the market is betting on an economic recovery within the next few quarters.

IDFC First Bank’s stock too has made a smart recovery. The scrip has gone up as far as 2.5 times within the eight months since the markets crashed in late March. The recovery was powered by the bank’s turnaround to profits in three consecutive quarters, Q4 of FY’20 and the first two quarters of this fiscal. The bank’s Q2 numbers were robust as the private sector lender had been racing to normalcy all through the second quarter. IDFC First Bank reported a net profit of Rs. 101.47 crore in the second quarter of the fiscal, as against a net loss of Rs. 679.50 crore in the corresponding period a year ago. For the quarter ended September 30, the bank’s net interest income grew 22% to Rs. 1,660 crore as against Rs. 1,363 crore a year ago. Apart from such headline numbers, the fine print was also fine. Net interest margin rose to 4.57% in the second quarter of this fiscal. The provision for the second quarter was at Rs. 215.84 crore as compared to Rs. 317.35 crore a year ago. Continuing its conservative stance, the bank has taken additional provision of Rs. 1,400 crore towards Covid-19 to strengthen its balance sheet further. Including this, as of September 30, 2020, the bank holds such provision of Rs. 2,000 crore which is 2.21% of its standard advances. There was good news on the asset quality front too. The Gross NPA of the bank eased to 1.62% as of September 30, from 2.62% a year ago. The net NPA was at 0.43% at the end of the second quarter as against 1.17% as of SEASONAL MAGAZINE

September 30, 2019. While this was after the the impact of the Supreme Court's notification to stop fresh NPA classification post August 31, 2020, till further orders, the performance in asset quality was still good, as without this impact the GNPA as on September 30, 2020 would have been 1.87% and the NNPA as on September 30, 2020 would have been 0.60%. All these are more than enough for any banking sector CEO to turn positive. But V Vaidyanathan is not feeling positive for these factors alone. In fact, he regularly cautions those who ask him about what lies ahead for the banking sector. According to this young but veteran banker, who proved his mettle at ICICI Bank before turning into an entrepreneur, the real impact of the moratorium on the books of all the banks would be known starting in Q3, and fully only by Q4 end.

The MD & CEO of IDFC First Bank is positive despite these upcoming storms. The reason is that he is seeing a lot of opportunities for the banking sector and especially for IDFC First Bank. This is what makes his positive thinking robust and worth analysing. A most promising development for IDFC First Bank would be the possible reverse merger of the bank with its parent IDFC which is also a listed entity. This now looks possible after a proposed change in the NOFHC structure by RBI. There are several advantages if such a merger happens, with the prime being that it will do away with an expected future reduction in stake by parent IDFC in the bank, and the resultant selling pressure, to comply with regulations. Secondly, it opens up the possibilities for other key stakeholders like Warburg Pincus to up their stake if they desire so. On the core business side, the first

AS PER A RECENTLY PROPOSED CHANGE BY RBI, IDFC FIRST BANK CAN REVERSE MERGE WITH ITS PARENT IDFC AND THAT IS SURE TO UNLOCK VALUATIONS, AND ALREADY MULTIPLE BROKERAGES HAVE REVISED THEIR TARGETS FOR THE BANK BASED ON THIS.

development that makes Vaidyanathan positive is the green shoots he is seeing in the rural market. According to him, the government spending in the rural sector is already spurring on demand. While the same cannot be said of the urban markets, especially the metro cities, he is hopeful of the same happening sooner rather than later, as it is always the rural market that leads in demand recovery. Secondly, though IDFC First Bank had started out the post-lockdown phase with a slightly higher moratorium percentage than some of its peers, all through the second quarter and beyond the pace of collections have steadily grown, making him hopeful that performance on this front will be at par or better than most peers in the upcoming quarterly results. He is also a person who nurses no regrets regarding his strategies. Vaidyanathan says that the bank started off with a slightly higher moratorium than peers simply because it did not resort to any kind of talking-them-outof-it strategies with customers. This liberal stance was in perfect alignment with IDFC First Bank’s core strategy of putting customers first. Thirdly, even though IDFC First Bank was the first bank to raise equity capital to weather the likely pandemic storm, during the lockdown period itself, by raising Rs. 2000 crore from core promoters as well as blue-chip institutional investors, the bank still hasn’t dipped into it to make up for any losses. Vaidyanathan also doesn’t foresee such losses in the near term now,

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which means that the bank can use those funds purely to fund the growth ahead. Next in line comes the bank’s fundamental performance on its real engine of growth – CASA Deposits (Current Account Savings Account Deposits). For any young bank, CASA Deposits, or better put, the lack of CASA, is one of the main reasons hampering unlimited credit growth. IDFC historically being a wholesale lender before it received a banking licence, IDFC Bank had this issue, but under Vaidyanathan’s leadership and as IDFC First Bank, the lender has made giant strides on this front. By Q1 end or June 30th 2020, IDFC First Bank’s CASA deposits have increased by an impressive 145% to reach Rs. 23,491 crore, from just Rs. 9,594 crore as on June 30th, 2019. Contributing to the growth has been the bank’s industry leading savings bank interest rate that now stands at 7%, which is double that of what many peer banks offer their customers, and even higher than some banks’ Fixed Deposit rates! Apart from bolstering CASA, this single move has made IDFC First Bank a dearly loved brand among retail customers, which will help the bank in the long run while pursuing retail loan growth. Recent figures show that due to the uncertainties and risks with stocks and mutual funds, investors are making a beeline for bank deposits, especially to those banks that offer the best rates.

IDFC FIRST BANK’S STOCK HAS GONE UP AS FAR AS 2.5 TIMES WITHIN THE EIGHT MONTHS SINCE THE MARKETS CRASHED IN LATE MARCH, POWERED BY THE BANK’S TURNAROUND TO PROFITS IN THREE CONSECUTIVE QUARTERS.

IDFC First Bank is perhaps the only universal bank that offers 7% for SB accounts now, as all others with high interest rates are Small Finance Banks (SFBs). And if anyone thought that offering such high interest rates to Savings Bank customers would affect the bank’s margin, IDFC First Bank can disprove it too. It has exhibited high growth in Net Interest Margin (NIM) and has improved its Cost to Income Ratio too. The bank’s incremental lending on the retail side being at 15-16%, according to the different products, it still translates to an average 7-8% of incremental net interest margin. The bank’s Fixed Deposits enjoy the highest level of safety, being AAA rated by CRISIL. While the full impact of the Covid-19

moratorium on the asset quality will take two more quarters to unravel at all banks, for the time being, IDFC First Bank has been performing impressively on the NPA front. The bank saw its Gross Non Performing Assets (GNPA) reduce sequentially from 2.60% as of March 31, 2020 to 1.99% as of June 30, 2020. IDFC First Bank also saw its Net NPA fall sequentially from 0.94% as of March 31, 2020 to 0.51% as of June 30, 2020. This gives confidence that the bank can effectively overcome any new asset quality issues caused by the moratorium’s longer term impact. On the credit side, IDFC First Bank has been steadily improving its disbursals which had come to a standstill in April and which has now surpassed 60% of what it was pre-Covid, that is, in January & February 2020. With this kind of momentum in place, it is now only a matter of time before the loan book records significant growth again, feels Vaidyanathan. The bank has been witnessing strong growth on the consumer durables lending business, which is one of the two strongholds of the bank on the credit side. Lending for the consumption of appliances like televisions, air SEASONAL MAGAZINE

conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines etc has witnessed a strong rebound of 80% of pre-Covid levels at IDFC First Bank. This is especially important for the new generation lender as retail loans accounts for 61% of the loan book and consumer loans comes to 17% of the book. However, the same can’t be said about the other leg of credit growth at the bank, which is MSME credit, and which is now only 20% of the pre-Covid level. But here too, Vaidyanathan is optimistic as he knows that MSME has been the most affected sector and as consumption demand grows beyond a level, MSMEs would bounce back to expansion plans and credit growth. Vaidyanathan feels that the government’s Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme for MSMEs has been a good success. IDFC First Bank has utilized this scheme for delivering credit to small entrepreneurs. But he strongly feels that more should be done for MSMEs like cutting their tax rates and favourable treatment to them vis-à-vis

large corporate companies. Finally, what the IDFC First Bank CEO sees as the most powerful opportunity is that with such an unprecedented crisis, a large part of the banking system has gone into a coma. For lenders like IDFC First Bank that have both the capabilities to lend judiciously and the capital to support the same, this presents an unlimited opportunity. The bank continues to be a leader in technology deployment. In association with payments leader Visa, IDFC First Bank has launched SafePay, a digital facility that allows contactless debit card payments by simply waving your

smartphone against a Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled Point of Sale (POS) terminal. SafePay will enable contactless payments of up to Rs 2,000 per transaction and up to a limit of Rs 20,000 per day, making everyday purchases easy. Before Covid-19 struck and disrupted all sectors, including banking, IDFC First Bank has been growing its retail loan book admirably. The private sector lender, which was formed by the merger of IDFC Bank and Capital First, has a loan book that has two streams – the legacy infrastructure loans that basically came in from IDFC Bank, and the newer

IDFC FIRST BANK REPORTED A NET PROFIT OF RS. 101.47 CRORE IN Q2, AS AGAINST A NET LOSS OF RS. 679.50 CRORE IN THE CORRESPONDING PERIOD A YEAR AGO. NET INTEREST INCOME GREW 22% TO RS. 1,660 CRORE AS AGAINST RS. 1,363 CRORE A YEAR AGO.

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IN Q2, CASA RATIO HAS COME UP TO THE BEST INDUSTRY STANDARDS, NET INTEREST MARGIN HAS RISEN TO TO 4.57%, AND ASSET QUALITY BY WAY OF GROSS NPA AND NET NPA HAS IMPROVED OVER THE CORRESPONDING YEAR-AGO PERIOD. retail loan business that the combined entity has been pursuing. During the past year, the bank could grow its retail loan book by an impressive 30%. The bank’s stated aim is to grow this retail loan book to a dominant position and phase out the legacy loan book gradually. Before the lockdown came, this seemed achievable by IDFC First Bank, given how well its retail loan unit had performed over the last year, and even before it as the NBFC, Capital First. While Covid-19 and the resultant lockdown has thrown most banks into disarray, there is a high chance that IDFC First Bank would be among the first few banks to rebound in lending activity, due to its particular expertise in MSME credit. The mainstay of its retail loan book as well as of its former avatar Capital First, has been MSME loans. Since this sector has been one of the hardest hit in the lockdown, government support to revive it too has been to the

maximum extent, with the government facilitating a package of Rs. 3 lakh crore as additional debt for MSMEs. The government is also extending credit guarantees for all eligible MSME loans. And when that growth phase kicks in shortly, which Vaidyanathan expects to happen with a 3-6 months lag, IDFC First Bank would be one of the most ready banks to tap into it. And even if it takes more time than expected, the recent equity raise of Rs. 2000 crore would serve to meet any contingency arising from Covid-19. The bank’s Rs. 2000 crore equity raise was subscribed by two of its major stakeholders, IDFC and Warburg Pincus, which also served to maintain their stakes in the bank at the previous level. While the main promoter IDFC invested Rs. 800 crore, the US based private equity giant Warburg Pincus invested Rs. 200 crore. The other half of the issue was subscribed by noted institutional investors, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance which invested Rs 600 crore, and HDFC

Life Insurance and Bajaj Life Insurance which invested Rs. 200 crore each. Apart from its equity raise of Rs. 2000 crore and its fast growing CASA deposits, IDFC First Bank has enough headroom to raise further capital if growth warrants it, as the bank is yet to raise any significant Tier-II Capital. However, for the time being, Vaidyanathan is not eyeing any more fund raise, as it is still to use the Rs. 2000 crore it raised during the lockdown. IDFC First Bank grew its net profits for the quarter ending June 30, 2020 (Q1 FY’21), to Rs. 94 crore as compared to a loss of Rs. 617 crore for Q1 FY20 and as compared to a net profit of Rs. 72 crore in Q4 FY20, up by 31% (QoQ). The bank had thus reported its second consecutive quarter of profits in spite of providing liberally for COVID. Earlier, the new age private sector bank had also come out with an excellent set of numbers for Q4 that signal a positive turnaround on yearon-year basis. It had reported a net profit of Rs. 72 crore for the quarter ended March 31, compared to a loss of Rs. 218 crore a year earlier in the corresponding quarter. The turnaround was holistic as it was led by a 40% rise in net interest income, as well as fees. The young bank and its young CEO continue to capture mindshare across the young and older India. While the bank is doing it with its leadership in deposit rates and its hassle-free credit for consumer durables and MSME, Vaidyanathan is doing it with his positive thinking and much more. Recently, he stunned the nation and captured all hearts when he hunted down and gifted Rs. 30 lakh worth of his shares in IDFC First Bank to a former teacher who had given him Rs. 500 that enabled him to travel from Chennai to BITS, Mesra, where he had gained admission after his predegree, which eventually paved the way for his leadership role in the banking sector. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

STATE SCAN

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ATMANIRBHAR MADHYA PRADESH

A VISION TO MAKE MADHYA PRADESH SELF-RELIANT BY 2023 Madhya Pradesh has always remained one of India’s largest states by area. As its name implies it is the center of India, giving its great logistical advantages. But the state was historically slow to lead India in many core development metrics. All that is changing now under Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan with MP now leading in sectors like solar power, PPE kit manufacturing, wheat procurement, agri produce marketing, private mandis, crop insurance, labour reforms, and above all a great performance in fighting the pandemic including free Covid testing together with welfare reforms – all with a single agenda – self-dependent, Atmanirbhar Madhya Pradesh. The state has recently become the first state in India to bring out a detailed roadmap for Atmanirbhar implementation, which envisages that the state will be Atmanirbhar by 2023.

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hile all major states have started pursuing Atmanirbhar initiatives, Madhya Pradesh has become the first state in India to bring out a detailed roadmap for implementation of the program in the state. This was done in mid November after a mammoth exercise involving discussions, debates, webinars etc involving all ministries and departments of the state. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s aim is to make Madhya Pradesh self-reliant or Atmanirbhar within the next three years. MP’s roadmap is comprehensive in that there are clear strategies on all domains including infrastructure development, agriculture, healthcare, education, economy, employment, good governance and more. The preparation of the roadmap had active support from Central Government’s NITI Aayog, and its Chief Executive Officer, Amitabh Kant himself participated in the release of Atmanirbhar Madhya Pradesh Roadmap-2023, and was appreciative of MP’s pioneering step. On the agricultural front, focus would

NITI AAYOG CEO AMITABH KANT HAS APPRECIATED MP'S ATMANIRBHAR INITIATIVES. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

be on making the agriculture sector a profitable initiative by a total overhaul in irrigation management and by construction of supporting infrastructure like roads. Proper utilization of each drop of water including the Narmada water is targeted. For this, a network of small water structures will be laid and irrigated area will be increased to 60 lakh hectares from 31 lakh hectares. Farmers Producer Organizations (FPO) will also be expanded in the form of a movement. While the strengthening of FPOs will result in doubling of farmers’ income, extensive use of modern technology will be deployed in every activity of agriculture. Thus farming will be modernized and increased production and productivity ensured in a sustainable way that would benefit the large number of people involved in the farming sector in the state. Also, Rs. 10,000 of Samman Nidhi will be given to farmers every year in the form of PM Samman Nidhi and Mukhya Mantri Samman Nidhi. On the education front, MP had historically lagged and this roadmap has identified one important reason for

MP IS THE FIRST STATE TO PUBLISH A ROADMAP FOR ITS ATMANIRBHAR PROGRAM.

the same, especially at the school level. Students from deprived sections of the society have been finding it difficult to travel to their schools and back. Hence Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has highlighted that bus services would be provided to for the students to commute to their schools. This will ensure that access to quality education is provided to even the deprived section of society. One of the largest initiatives in Atmanirbhar Madhya Pradesh Roadmap-2023 is in power generation. In a pragmatic way, CM Chouhan is targeting significant growth in both thermal power and renewable power. In renewables, MP will be continuing its sharp focus on solar that was earlier seen in setting up the mega solar

project in Rewa. The new solar project will be at Omkareshwar, where extensive solar panels will be laid around the dam there to make the state Atmanirbhar in power. As a good administrator, who is forever pressed from all sides for resource allocation, Shivraj Singh Chouhan has also set the ball rolling on a new scheme for equal distribution of resources among all sections of the people. The government is working on a new formula according to which funds will be distributed in proportion with the population, so that precious funds and other resources reach every villages and community equitably.

BY NETWORKING WATER BODIES, IRRIGATED LAND IN MP TO BE DOUBLED TO 60 LAKH HECTARES.

On the industrial front, Madhya Pradesh has drawn up a mega plan to SEASONAL MAGAZINE

make the state self reliant. Remarkably, taking a deviation from many of its peers, MP’s plan is to promote all kinds of industries - big, small and cottage industries. For taking cottage industries to the next level, clusters would be developed at village level and special focus would be on developing food processing industries, so that farmers too will gain additional income from such small-scale industries. A complementary call for Atmanirbhar Bharat by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been his Vocal-for-Local initiative, which implies that not only local productivity but local sourcing and a passion for locally made products should be promoted. Madhya Pradesh is putting its whole weight behind this program too with special efforts made to market local products thereby realizing Vocal-for-Local. Also, private sector participation will be ensured at and special support given to women entrepreneurs.

MP TO HAVE SECOND MEGA SOLAR PROJECT AT OMKARESHWAR DAM.

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CM HAS ENTRUSTED CHIEF SECRETARY IQBAL SINGH BAINS FOR MONITORING THE ATMANIRBHAR PROGRAM

Atmanirbhar Madhya Pradesh has also become Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s personal vison and mission statement that he has articulated impressively. The Chief Minister said that the people of Madhya Pradesh is God like to him, and the state itself is his Temple. And he considers himself to be the Priest of this mega temple. Such a benevolent vision is very much needed for the state to effectively tackle the challenge of helping people come out of the economic crisis in this pandemic period. Despite an impressive roadmap, CM Chouhan realizes that no plan is complete without proper and effective implementation. To ensure this, as part of the roadmap, CM has also drawn up an effective framework for implementation and accountability, in which everyone from ministers to department heads,

MP WILL PROMOTE ALL INDUSTRIES - LARGE, MEDIUM AND COTTAGE INDUSTRIES INCLUDED.

to committees, to district and village level officials will be assigned responsibilities. However, CM’s masterstroke has been Deendayal Samitis, to be constituted at grassroots level to monitor the schemes and ensure community participation in development of state. With such diverse initiatives and framework to monitor the same in a transparent way, there is no doubt that not only will Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s plans for an Atmanirbhar Madhya Pradesh be a reality by 2023, but that it will also be one of the best states in the whole of India, in sync with its size and central location in India. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

BUSINESS

RISE OF INDIAN AMERICANS AS GLOBAL BUSINESS LEADERS Indian Americans have done exceedingly well in almost all walks of life. However, their relative success took many years to catch the attention of the world. In today’s climate, Indian-origin individuals are regarded as an integral part of American life. While the world is aware of the likes of Sundar Pichai (Google) and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) there are many more who have

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shown their exemplary traits in building businesses. A proud feat is the growing number of women business leaders, like for instance, Reshma Kewalramani (Vertex Pharmaceuticals) and Sonia Syngal (GAP Inc). This is an inspiration for the community’s next generation to achieve greater heights. Under the leadership of Indian Americans, these companies collectively employ more than 3.6 million worldwide and account for a combined USD $1 trillion in revenue and $4 trillion in market capitalization. The prestigious Indian American forum Indiaspora, in July 2020, published a list of business leaders of Indian Americans highlighting their contributions in business, government, philanthropy, academia and other areas.

uring my rise as a young business entrepreneur in the 1970s and beyond, this was scarcely imaginable. But I was always of the firm belief that with the right conditions and network, the Indian-origin entrepreneurs could turn the tide in their favour. In the 1990s, one could see the shifts in both the business and demographic landscapes. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1990 and 2000, the Indian American population in the U.S. grew 130% – 10 times the national average of 13% while they comprised 16.4% of the AsianAmerican community. The community was not only providing its famed highskilled labour, but also showcased its prowess as a leading contributor to the development of American society. One of the ways in which the community made its mark was through social impact work, donations and fundraising for charities, the acute need for which precipitated the current COVID-19 struggle for communities. Over the past several years the IndianAmerican diaspora through philanthropic activities have had a tremendous impact on the American soil. The COVID-19 pandemic has further made a systemic call to the diaspora to extend their Philanthropic arms. Indiaspora in its 2020 report, ‘Indian Diaspora in Action- Tracking the Indian American Response to COVID19’, has mentioned the unique ways Indian American Diaspora has adopted to come together and show their dedication in assisting those in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. Highly qualified medical professionals like Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Seema Verma, Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Trump Administration, along with many other doctors, nurses, researchers and other health professionals have been in the forefront of this crisis. Apart from contributing in the efforts of the medical sector, many philanthropic organisations have been contributing in some or the other way in the time of

pandemic. Sewa International has been championing in the efforts of providing masks and PPE kits to those in need and by far they have distributed more than 625,000 surgical masks made by over 1000 volunteers. Wadhwani Foundation, founded by Dr. Romesh Wadhwani- a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, has made a significant contribution during the pandemic. The foundation has committed $26 million to assist MSMEs and public health workers affected by the pandemic through its ‘Sahayata COVID-19 Skilling Program’. In terms of their political influence, Indian Americans in the early part of 1960s had limited representation. A notable exception was Dalip Singh Saund, Democratic Congressman from California who was also the first Indian American elected to public office. This was largely to do with the low political mobilization as the community did not regard itself as a voting bloc. There was not a single representative for almost three full decades before Bobby Jindal in 2005 became the second Indian American in Congress. Today, the veritable list includes the likes of Ami Bera (elected in 2013), Pramila Jayapal (2017), Ro Khanna (2017), Raja Krishnamoorthi (2017). Speaking to their Indian descent, Krishnamoorthi fondly refers to the quartet as the “Samosa Caucus”. But it is Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, the first Indian American to be elected to the Senate, whose initial candidature for U.S. President made the community the cynosure of all eyes. When I look back at the time when the community remained largely neglected in the political realm, the current situation has been a remarkable turnaround. “Whenever I’m asked about Indians taking away our jobs, I want to say, you know what... they’ve just created 50,000 jobs,” former U.S. President Barack Obama had once quipped in reference to Indian Americans. This statement of validation, coming from a shrewd politician and master communicator like Obama, did not surprise me at the least. He could have SEASONAL MAGAZINE

played to the stereotypical and xenophobic narrative of “the outsider” stealing away American jobs. The reason he didn’t is borne by hard evidence. While India earned the reputation of being the “back-office of the world” (a reference to its highly skilled workforce engaged in outsourced activities on the payroll of global firms), Obama’s impassioned appeal was in the context of the unprecedented rise of Indian-origin CEOs in America’s leading corporations. Be it Pao Alto Network’s Nikesh Arora, IBM’s Arvind Krishna or Berkshire Hathaway’s Ajit Jain, the Indian American executive is at the forefront of America’s economic progress through job creation. However, the Indian American community’s outsized influence that came to fruition was not always destined to happen. Coincidentally, Bob Dylan’s famous track released in 1964 “The Times They Are a-Changin” perhaps captures the impending change in fortunes that was in store for Indian immigrants in the years to come. Indian immigration to the U.S. had its share of enablers – some organic and the other accidental. Then U.S. President Lyndon B Johnson’s landmark Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 heralded one of America’s biggest success stories of the Cold War era: the ability to attract skilled labour for the country’s famed corporations. It had put an end to the long-standing nationalorigin quotas that favoured Europeans over people of colour. It was somewhat coincidental that this period also marked a boom in technical and medical education in India as prolific graduates from reputed institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) became attractive to global corporations and centres of excellence. In sum, the need for India’s highly skilled talent laid the foundations for today’s significant demographic shift in America that is emblematic of the community’s successful integration into a hitherto alien land.

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In the immediate decades following India’s independence, the movement of the country’s brightest minds to the farthest corners of the world including the “land of opportunity” underlined two things: firstly, the well-educated Indian was representative of the early globalization wave that broke cultural and geographical barriers and secondly, despite the need for a technically skilled workforce to drive the newbie nation’s growth, there was a perceptible lack of professional incentives that matched their talent capabilities. While Indians form a greater share of population in the UK (2.3%) as compared to the US (about 1%), however, the achievements of Indian Americans in businesses seem better as compared to others. The post World War II era enabled the U.S. to become a technological superpower and the growth of corporations acted as a magnet for Indian immigrants perhaps more than the U.K. which had a historical connection. On the other hand, the Indian diaspora in the Middle East constitutes approximately 9 million people and is one of the largest in the world in terms of immigrants. However, they mostly constitute low paid migrant workers in the oil fields and refineries. In the case of Africa, Indian-origin communities constitute 12.3% of the total population but are employed in relatively low-skilled sectors. The enabling environment for business opportunities provided by America is unmatched compared to these regions where the per capita income continues to remain low. Therefore, highly skilled

Indian immigrants graduating from institutes such as IITs favored the U.S. for its vibrancy and potential for growth. The relatively free environment to pursue employment and studies provided a perfect springboard for the community to achieve the success that we witness today. IITians have gone on to become CEOs of some of the top companies in the U.S. which shows that they are probably some of the most valuable imports by the U.S. from India. As a gutsy 22-year old, I was enthralled by the opportunities that a higher education degree in the U.S. would bring. The reputation of America’s great institutions left an imprint on me although my career trajectory was different from most who set foot on the land of opportunity. I decided to pursue a business career after completing a Masters degree in Operations Research in 1969 from Cornell University. I bucked the otherwise popular trend of desis who largely came here to continue their medical or engineering pursuits. I shall divulge my reasoning for this risky decision later in the article. The post-1965 wave witnessed the inflow of scientists, doctors and engineers (some still raw albeit armed with elite degrees along with seasoned practitioners, both lured by the common ideal of the American Dream) who went on to serve the country with utmost dedication. Fast forward to the present: Indian Americans have a critical role to play in America’s battle against COVID-19 with every 7th doctor supposedly of Indian-origin, a statistical

In another prestigious U.S. institution – NASA – the Indian connection stretches back to the time of 1983 Nobel Prize laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an eminent astrophysicist and nephew of the illustrious C.V Raman. A year later, a little known Kalpana Chawla completed her degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and applied to NASA’s famous Astronaut Corps in 1995. In the following year, she became the first woman of Indian-origin to travel into space.

enormity that would raise few eyebrows! A large number of scientists with Indian heritage are steadfastly working towards the development of the vaccine that earned special mention from the U.S. President. This is least surprising given that, almost a decade ago, as many as 12% scientists in the U.S. were Indians. Today, around 50,000 Indian-American physicians ply their trade while 10% of medical students are of Indian descent. Over the years, scientists and doctors of Indian-origin have been at the helm of America’s cutting-edge scientific and research institutes like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). For instance Dr. Subra Suresh, one of the many beneficiaries of the 1965 immigration reform, came to the U.S. in 1979 to pursue his graduation and went on to become the first Asian-born scientist to lead the prestigious NSF from 20102013. Even first generation Indian Americans, like Dr. Vivek Murthy who served as the 19th Surgeon General and first of Indian-origin, have done exceedingly well in recent times. Perhaps the most famous of them all was Dr. Har Gobind Khorana, the pioneering biochemist and 1968 Nobel Prize winner who independently discovered that genetic information was stored in our DNA.

While the profiles and backgrounds of Indian Americans largely comprised of those in the highly skilled technical sectors, there was significant churning taking place in corporate America. Therefore, my professional career took a trajectory that may not resonate with many of my contemporaries of the time. A sizeable number of feisty and ambitious Indian Americans began to assume corporate roles in finance and marketing and some even pursued MBA at night schools. In my first job, I joined Scott Paper Company in 1969 as a scientific analysis manager. Unfortunately, the company went through a rough patch and eventually started to lay off employees. Being one of the newest employees, I feared that my job was in jeopardy. Then, I got my lucky break: I joined Rohm and Haas as a financial analyst that would commence my 39-year long association with the chemical manufacturing giant. Even though I was only one among the handful of Indian immigrants that took the gamble of a business career, there was a notable trailblazer from a decade ago who set the precedent. If you grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and heard sound blaring from an audio/speaker system, chances are that it was a product of the famous audio equipment

company, Bose Corporation. At a time when stethoscopes and seminars were preferred over profits and products, the Indian-origin founder of Bose Corporation stood out from the crowd! Founded by Dr. Amar G Bose in 1964, a former Professor at MIT, Bose Corporation was born with initial funding from angel investors and currently employs over 10,000 people with revenue upwards of $3 billion. This trend remains unchanged with Indian Americans regularly featured as top innovators in the technology segment, especially those under the 35 age bracket. Sonia Vallabh, Maithilee Kunda, Dinesh Bharadia and Jagdish Chaturvedi are the four Indian American innovators under 35 on the MIT Technology Review list. Suhas Patil, also with an MIT connection as a graduate and professor, founded the semi-conductor supplier Cirrus Logic in 1984. He was one of the co-founders of TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs), the renowned not-forprofit organization that mentors young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Another Silicon Valley blue chip company, Sun Microsystems that was acquired by Oracle Corporation, was co-founded by Vinod Khosla in 1982 who then went on to become a leading venture capitalist. By the late 1980s, Indian American entrepreneurs and their companies started to acquire a household name in the tech arena. The likes of Sanjay Mehrotra (co-founder of SanDisk) and Pradeep Sindhu (cofounder of Juniper Networks) were among the many Indian-origin entrepreneurs who rose up the corporate ladder to lead global tech firms. Soon, Indian Americans established themselves in mid and senior-level leadership positions of companies mostly in the East Coast while a major chunk of the successful entrepreneurs and investors earned their reputation as leading voices in the West Coast. Today, Rajan Anandan, Nikesh Arora are among the many who provide support and guidance to the start-up ecosystem while the likes of Salil Deshpande (Bain Capital) and Sameer Gandhi (Accel Ventures) among many others who have reached top echelons of various investment arms. SEASONAL MAGAZINE

would, in fact, go to the extent of saying that a company’s long term performance is linked to the nature of diversity it offers. This requires the ability and fortitude to overcome biases about diversity. The Indian immigrants benefiting from the 1965 reforms formed a considerable knowledge bridge for later immigrants. The shared sense of community provided a social as well as professional bond that enabled valuable mentorship to successive generations of Indian Americans. My own climb to the top rungs of the Rohm and Haas corporate chain brought me to head the Asia-Pacific operations in 1993. Apart from Rajat Gupta’s appointment as Managing Director of McKinsey & Company in 1994 (he holds the distinction of being the first Indian-born CEO of an MNC), it was not until the latter half of the 1990s when we witnessed the rise of Indian Americans to CEO/executive positions. My own rise from being an assistant to the CEO to becoming CEO myself was a byproduct of the times. Between Hartford Insurance, US Airways Group, Rohm and Haas and Quest Labs, the common factor in each of these giant corporations was an Indian American at its helm. Heading a Global Fortune 300 company from 1999-2009, I realized the enabling level-playing field I was exposed to at Rohm & Haas. I was never made to feel that I had barriers to overcome and I can safely say that my distinguished compatriots in the industry felt the same. For the generation of Indian American leaders that rose to prominence in the succeeding decade, only the sky was the limit. The mid-2000s brought India and the U.S. to achieve close cooperation at the governmental level, culminating in the signing of the historic civil nuclear agreement. In business terms, a more accurate indicator of the growing clout of Indian-origin executives was their appointment as top honchos of some of America’s most profitable companies. Indra Nooyi (appointed CEO of PepsiCo in 2006), Francisco D’Souza (appointed President and CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions in SEASONAL MAGAZINE

2007), Vikram Pandit (appointed CEO of Citigroup in 2007), Shantanu Narayen (appointed CEO of Adobe Systems in 2007), Sanjay Jha (appointed co-CEO of Motorola Inc in 2008), Deven Sharma (appointed President of Standard & Poor’s in 2010) and Ajaypal Banga (appointed President and CEO of MasterCard in 2010) catapulted the Indian American community into instant stardom. Today, 7% of Silicon Valley hi-tech firms have Indian CEOs. This broadly covers sectors ranging from finance to FMCG and technology to pharma. There is always something poignant yet compelling about the story of an Indian immigrant in the United States. Making the long voyage traversing thousands of miles, having to leave every cherished childhood memory behind, is no small effort. It was perhaps this disposition for making hard choices and unwavering sacrifice that shaped the archetypal Indian American of today. Indian Americans provide the clearest example of how the diversity factor needs to be an important consideration for companies. In my view, diversity is not just a moral imperative but a business goal in many ways. It provides the opportunity to draw from the broadest possible talent pool. Personally, working in diverse environments like Rohm & Haas expanded my notion of mentorship. I

The reason for success of Indian CEOs as compared to others such as Chinese and Jewish can be attributed due the availability of market relevant IT skills that enabled their growth in this sector. One of the personal attributes is the ability to communicate in English, where business leaders of Chineseorigin fall short, and the other is the ability to argue and debate ideas as a part of assertive communication which is an intrinsic aspect of American culture. As Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, says in her recent book With All Due Respect that ‘there are a number of reasons for Indian Americans’ success in the United States’. “But mostly, we’re just good at being Americans. And that says as much about America as it does about us,” she says. Indian-Americans now make up the largest PIO community anywhere in the world with estimates showing around 4 million live in the U.S at present. Additionally, the diaspora community is also one of the wealthiest sub-groups by income, a testament both to their relative success and the hallowed tenet of the American Dream. This makes the Indian American story one for the ages. However, this journey was not an easy one. The acts of sacrifice, resilience and kindness jointly contributed to our achievements. However, most importantly, my sense is that the authenticity of Indian Americans is what has put us in good stead despite all the challenges along the way. My hope is that the future generation of Indian Americans can similarly become an exemplar for the larger society they live in. It is this quality that marks the globally-recognised Indian American.