Indian Subcontinent Watch Thread

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caltrek
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U.S. Firm First Solar Announces $684 Million India Investment
October 29, 2021

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-ne ... 54167.html

Introduction:
(Hindustan Times) US company First Solar has formally announced an investment of $684 million in Tamil Nadu for a solar photovoltaic (PV) thin film module manufacturing facility that will support 1,000 jobs, with 60% of them women.

The announcement came at the fourth annual meeting of the Indo-Pacific Business Forum (IPBF), a US initiative which was co-hosted for the first time in South Asia. Held virtually this time, the forum advances US vision for an open, interconnected, resilient, and secure Indo-Pacific region.

It is the premier annual US government-sponsored commercial diplomacy event for the region, which was attended by more than 2,300 business and government leaders, the state department said.

Indian companies and entities that participated included Bharti Airtel, the Confederation of Indian Industry, the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Tata Steel, the State Bank of India, Wipro and the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum.

The First Solar announcement formalised an investment that the company had teased months ago. It will create a new, vertically integrated solar module manufacturing facility for photovoltaic films, the state department said. The company had earlier stated it plans to go operational from 2023.
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caltrek
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Bowing to Protests, India’s Modi Agrees to Repeal Farm Laws
November 19, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/bowing-t ... farm-laws/

Introduction:
NEW DELHI (AP via Courthouse News) — In a major reversal, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Friday that he would repeal the controversial agriculture laws that sparked yearlong protests from tens of thousands of farmers and posed a significant challenge to his administration.

Farmers, who form one of India's most influential voting blocs, have camped out on the outskirts of the capital since November of last year to demand the withdrawal of the laws, which they feared would dramatically reduce their incomes.

Modi's surprise decision, in a televised national address, came ahead of elections early next year in key states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab that are significant agricultural producers and where his Bharatiya Janata Party is eager to shore up its support. Experts said it was too early to say if it would work.

The prime minister urged the protesters to return home, but the farmers have said they will stay put until the laws are gone — a process that will begin in December when Parliament sits for its winter session.

“While apologizing to the nation, I want to say with a sincere and pure heart that maybe something was lacking in our efforts that we could not explain the truth to some of our farmer brothers," Modi said during the address. He added: “Let us make a fresh start."
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Yuli Ban
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India's national Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has fallen below 2.0 for the first time, as per the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The findings covered 11 states and three union territories that were not included in the first set of data released in December 2020.

The latest set of findings of the NFHS 2019-21 survey released by the Union Health Ministry on Wednesday revealed that the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime has dropped below the replacement level for the first time.

The national Total Fertility Rate was found to be 2.2 in the NFHS 2015-16 survey, down from 2.7 in the NFHS 2005-06 survey. The same has now declined to 2.1 in rural areas and 1.6 in urban areas, as per the latest NFHS survey.
So it seems even India won't escape the demographic bomb forever. I want to talk more about this, actually, about how the global population decline that's coming is completely unprecedented, but I'll save that for another time.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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erowind
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/\ What's striking to me is just how wrong UN population projections were and how wrong GDP growth projections were in general. I personally wasn't expecting slowdown like this until the later 2030s, early 2040s but who knows maybe it's here now. I still somewhat expect the 2020s to kick back up at some point and for the financial system to keep on chugging simply because the real resource constraints on the economy to my knowledge are not causing true supply crunch yet. I could be wrong, but it seems like the global economy is experiencing layers of financial, bureaucratic, and logistical mismanagement in various forms of both malice and or incompetence. Which, you know, should be expected because of capital accumulation and monopoly and all those wonderful things marxists rattle on about. But I didn't think it would really break down until the ecological crisis reached a more advanced stage.
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caltrek
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Who’s Afraid of the Indian Constitution?
by Aditya Nigam
December 5, 2021

https://janataweekly.org/whos-afraid-of ... titution/

Introduction:
(Janata Weekly) The Indian constitution is best seen as the social contract for a new India. It is the only document that was arrived at by intense debate, arguments and negotiations among all the political currents within the Constituent Assembly – from members like K.M. Munshi, who clearly occupied the Hindu nationalist end of the spectrum, to the Muslim League, which occupied the other. Indeed, the position represented by Munshi was quite powerful in the Assembly. Therefore the final document that came to be adopted was something almost all political strands had committed to upholding.

It needs to be underlined that the mainstream nationalist struggle was only one of the many currents within the freedom struggle, where many other sections were fighting their own battles for liberation – often from their native/local oppressors. There was the Dalit struggle for liberation from the yoke of caste oppression, the Adivasi struggles for self-assertion and innumerable struggles of the peasants and workers for a better deal – and they often ran parallel to each other, occasionally intersecting, often colliding with the mainstream nationalist movement.

They came together for the first time in the Constituent Assembly, which in that sense, represented a break in the logic of the freedom struggle. The only political formation (as distinct from ideology) that was not represented in the Assembly was the one that had studiously stayed away from all these currents within the freedom struggle, the one that is associated with the current political dispensation and which has mounted continuous attacks on the constitution from the very moment of its adoption.

One line of attack against the constitution by this formation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which runs right up to the present, is that it is based on Western and foreign ideas and has no relation to ‘our’ traditions. Leaders and pracharaks of the RSS have therefore always upheld the Manusmriti as ‘our own’ indigenous code of law.

This charge needs to be answered...
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caltrek
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India's OfBusiness Valued at $5 Billion in $325 Million Funding
by Manish Songh
December 19, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/19/india ... n-funding/

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) OfBusiness, a New Delhi-headquartered startup that sells industrial goods and provides small businesses with credit, has secured its fourth financing round this year and is now valued at about $5 billion.

Alpha Wave Global, Tiger Global, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the startup’s $325 million Series G financing round. Alpha Wave Global, formerly known as Falcon Edge Capital, invested in OfBusiness through its new $10B+ fund called Alpha Wave Ventures II.

TechCrunch, which first reported about Falcon Edge Capital’s new fund and rebranding, reported in October that OfBusiness was in talks with Tiger Global and Alpha Wave Global to raise a new round at over $4.6 billion valuation.

This is the fourth financing round for OfBusiness this year. The startup was valued at about $800 million in a round it closed in April this year.

OfBusiness operates as a raw material aggregator and procurement finance provider. The startup works with banks to offer credit lines to small and medium enterprises that have an annual turnover of over $3 million. The six-year-old startup, co-founded by Asish Mohapatra, a former VC, says it operates in nine business-to-business raw material supply chains.
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World Inequality Report: India Stands Out as a Very Unequal Country
by Bharat Dogra and Newsclick
December 19, 2021

https://janataweekly.org/author/bharatd ... newsclick/

Introduction:
(Janata Weekly) The World Inequality Report (WIR) is widely regarded as a highly credible and comprehensive report on the extent of inequalities in world. The latest WIR for year 2022 has been released very recently. It has been authored by Lucas Chancel, co-director of the World Inequality Lab, with other coordinators, including France’s Thomas Piketty, and presents a damning indictment of the very high level of inequalities in India. As presented in WIR, the levels of wealth and income inequalities in India are among the worst that prevail in the leading countries of the world.

These statistics for wealth inequality tell us that the share of the bottom 50% of the households in wealth is just 6% in India. At the same time the share of the top 10% in wealth is 65% in India, a very high figure indeed. What is perhaps even more shocking is that the share of the top 1 per cent in wealth is a whopping 33%.

The average household wealth in India is equal to 35,000 Euro or Rs 983,010, as per the data shared by the World Inequality Lab. The bottom 50% own almost nothing, with an average wealth of 4,200 Euro or Rs 66,280. The middle class is relatively poor, with an average wealth of only 26,400 Euro or Rs 723,930, the report said. This constitutes 29.5% of the total wealth. The top 10% of the population have an average wealth at 231,300 Euros or Rs 6,354,070.

Coming now to income inequality the share of the bottom 50% in income is just 13% in India. On the other hand the share of the top 10% in income is 57% and the share of just the top 1% is as high as 22%.
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caltrek
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Rahul Gandhi’s Speech Differentiating Hinduism and Hindutva was a Watershed Moment
by Badri Raina
December 26, 2021

https://janataweekly.org/rahul-gandhis- ... ed-moment/

Introduction:
(Janata Weekly) With Rahul Gandhi’s boldly informed enunciation of the difference between being Hindu or Hindutvadi in his address to a massive gathering at Jaipur on December 12, the Congress party may have ceased to walk over egg shells.

Although such discrimination has been made by book writers and hacks like the present one, such an enunciation made by a leader of the Indian National Congress at a public gathering just months before important state assembly elections is tantamount to a significant political initiative.

Many will hope that it will be a long-lasting one.

It is just as well that the coercive and hegemonic appropriation of Hinduism over the past three decades or so should have yielded from the Congress, finally, a crucial distinction, one that must be emphasised with conviction if the secular republic is to be retrieved for India’s overwhelmingly secular polity.

Taking the bull by the horns, Rahul underscored the distinction that whereas the Hindu seeks after the truth (satya), the Hindutvadi pursues state power (satta) by hook or by crook
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Indian Startups Raise $39 Billion in 2021
by Manish Singh
December 31, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/31/recor ... n-in-2021/

Extract:
(TechCrunch) Scores of startups (in India), many operating in edtech and fintech categories, began to report fast growth. “We started to see three years and five years of growth in one year,” said Ashish Dave, chief executive of Mirae Asset Venture’s India business.

While several investors, including many tier 1 funds that are generally very active in India, were still cautious, a group of investors including Tiger Global, Falcon Edge Capital, and SoftBank shifted into a higher gear.

Several factors worked in India’s favor, many investors said. There’s an abundance of dry powder in the market and investors are increasingly looking at growth avenues such as emerging regions as their next big bets. It also helped that Beijing enforced a series of crackdowns on its own startups and made it difficult for foreign money to flow into China.

Another thing swinging in favor of India was the record number of IPOs that we saw this year. Food delivery firm Zomato made a stellar debut. Fashion commerce Nykaa, online insurer PolicyBazaar also made strong debuts on the stock exchanges. Paytm filed for the nation’s largest IPO, though the public market is still giving it less valuation than it sought.

In total, capital flowing to private Indian startups surged over four times to about $39 billion this year and nearly three times from the previous best of $14.6 billion in 2019, according to data from insight platform Tracxn, which has also filed for an IPO.
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‘Kisan-Mazdoor Ekta’: A Slogan to Unify Farmers and Labourers – and Break Caste Barriers
by Shivam Mogha
January 16, 2022

https://janataweekly.org/kisan-mazdoor- ... -barriers/

Introduction:
(Janata Weekly) A simple line ‘kisan-mazdoor ekta zindabad’ (‘Long Live Farmer-Labourer Unity’) reverberated at the Delhi borders as one of the most popular slogans of the year-long farmers’ protest, which led Prime Minister Narendra Modi to repeal the three contentious farm laws.

The slogan contains a sense of unity and solidarity which was needed to win the fight against crony capitalism and feudal divisions. It exuded a sense of ‘social solidarity’ which was necessary to produce egalitarian social relations between farmers and agricultural labourers. It was not just a slogan which emerged in the meetings of Sanyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) with top-down approach; rather it was envisioned by the protesters themselves in a holistic manner and that is why this slogan has no ‘feeling of imposition’, which also strengthens the organic solidarity of the toiling masses, farmers and labourers.

The slogan did not evolve in one day and from one particular social group; it was the result of a continuous process which was achieved over days. As someone who has been associated with the protest since its inception as part of the Trolley Times team, I have seen a positive change in the politicisation of farmers’ unions by being a part of organising this movement.
Conclusion:
If moral hegemony won by farmers and attributed to them seems to be a novel line of thought, then we must consider it a consequence of organised efforts by both Jats (caste members residing in the Punjab and other areas of northern India and Pakistan, comprising Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh groups) and Dalits (lowest stratum castes in India), to permeate across feudal barriers. He (Gopal Guru in his latest editorial of the Economic and Political Weekly) further talks about framework for “solidarity in itself” which also needs to be extended to “solidarity for itself” standing with the long-term aspirations of social groups from the margins.

This movement has revealed some crucial insights to see what would work out on the ground and taught us how to create the working conditions for a victorious movement. Everyone part of the protest should know that a dent in this unity will sharpen the already existing fault lines among farmers and marginalised groups, giving the actually existing capitalism a push which the ruling class will certainly take advantage of.
Don't mourn, organize.

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