Taru

Editor: Audience Engagement @the_core_in | Previously with @scroll_in @htTweets, @governancenow

[The Core @the_core_in]

India’s new income tax rule requires businesses to back up their accounts daily on a machine physically located in India. While firms scramble to understand what “daily” and “physical backup” really mean, the added compliance burden is likely to hit MSMEs, the backbone of India’s economy, the hardest.

Meanwhile, owners of data centres and server infrastructure on Indian soil stand to benefit the most.

"It’s a rule written in the wrong decade, by people who didn’t ask what happens when the disk fails, or notice that the smallest firm was made to stand in the same queue as the largest," writes Dev Chandrasekhar.

[Cockroach is Back @Cockroachisback]

मेरी माँ को बहुत डर था की मुझे ये सरकार जेल में डाल देगी। इस देश में उस हर माँ को ये डर होता है जब उनका बच्चा इस सरकार के ख़िलाफ़ आवाज़ उठाता है।

कब तक हम इस सरकार से डर कर जियेंगे?

#cjpprotest

[هارون خان @iamharunkhan]

This is Armaan, Owner of mattress shop in Malviya Nagar. He laid out all his mattresses so that people trapped in the burning hotel could jump onto them and save their lives. in this way, several lives were saved too.

Armaan is a real life Hero❤️

[Kaushik Raj @kaushikrj6]

As you move around in Delhi, you realise that there are certain places in South Delhi where there are trees on both sides of the road, and the air turns just a little cooler. This cool air should not be a privilege only available to a certain section of the society.

At some point of time, we will have to realise that we are making our cities unlivable for the poor and the working class. Summers now, and winter pollution later, both are experienced quite differently by different sections of the society.

We need better urban planning. We need accountability. Our people deserve better.

[Vir Das @thevirdas]

Whether the cockroach janta party is a legitimate movement or not, is not the question. Time will tell. But the traction they received, the sentiment behind it, the rhetoric from the youth, all legitimate. And if all that wasn’t legit enough, the utterly dumb move of shutting down their accounts legitimised everything.

[The Core @the_core_in]

NEW EPISODE: Even if the war ends today and oil prices come down tomorrow, will that solve India's problem? No, economist @surjitbhalla tells @govindethiraj.

It won't solve the weakness in India's economy because the deeper problem is a crisis of confidence, he says.

"The fact is that we are not growing as per Viksit Bharat. We're growing much at the same rate as we've been growing for the last 30 years."

He says that the question India needs to answer is why investments, foreign and domestic, the biggest and most important contributor to growth, are declining. "That's the issue that we need to tackle."

On The Core Report Weekend edition, the economist goes beyond the headlines about the falling rupee, oil prices, West Asian tensions, and global uncertainty to discuss the real crisis India is facing. Tune in now!

[The Core @the_core_in]

Story of the day: India has spent an enormous amount of money to expand its power generation capacity. Yet the question of who pays when things go wrong has never been honestly answered. Follow the money, and the answer is almost always the same person: the consumer.

As Dev Chandrasekhar writes, electricity companies have been allowed for decades to recover their costs regardless of how efficiently they operate. A distribution company that wastes 15% of the electricity it carries bills consumers for those losses rather than fixing them.

Households and businesses spend close to Rs 18,500 crore a year to create the reliability that India’s electricity system has failed to provide.

Every inverter on a rooftop in Lucknow or Ludhiana, every diesel genset humming behind a Mumbai hospital, is a receipt for a risk the system passed on and never resolved.

Proof exists that things can be done differently. Visit https://t.co/DSL6rtn118 to read the full article.

[Ayush Tiwari @sighyush]

An American firm is recording Indian workers inside factories and selling their videos to Big Tech to train robots.

@raghavKakkar30 and I report for @scroll_in:

https://t.co/AEmbcFOADD

[m rajshekhar @mrajshekhar]

REPORTAGE: 2.5 months into the Iran war, India’s LPG market is splitting into parallel economies. In parts of the country, gas cylinders are available as before. Elsewhere, LPG prices have soared so high families are falling back on firewood. Here is why. https://t.co/0w98KfyDIq

[The Core @the_core_in]

India's output per worker, which was growing nearly 6% annually, has flattened since 2017. This trend, @econarjun, co-author of the CSIE working paper India’s Labour Productivity Puzzle, may explain why wages are not rising.

If India's economy is booming, then why is labour productivity declining? He joins @pujamehra on How India's Economy Works to unpack. Listen in!

[The Core @the_core_in]

The global natural diamond trade is collapsing, and Surat, which polishes 9 out of every 10 diamonds traded globally, is at the centre of it. Exports are falling, losses are mounting, and the listed universe is thinning. Is this the beginning of the end for natural diamonds? And what does it mean for India's diamond industry? Dev Chandrasekhar unpacks.

[Hims 🪷 🚴 🌱 🧘 @maveinlux]

India 🇮🇳 Must Act Like the World’s 4th Largest Economy — Not Market Mangoes and Ancient Glory

Indian embassies are busy promoting mangoes, pulses, and yoga as if that defines our global brand. Meanwhile, as the fourth-largest economy on the planet, we remain psychologically and diplomatically stuck at the level of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Every time I interact with any staff from any Indian embassy, the mindset is still largely colonial. The ambassador is treated like a god and everyone else around him is busy ensuring that he is treated like one. It’s embarrassing specially outside India, in the west where ambassadors and diplomats are treated like common people. I had breakfast with a European ambassador last week in a cafe with everyone else. He travelled in the tram and then walked on foot.

I find it awkward how the Indian diplomats behave when the Indian ambassador or ministers are visiting us. Common Indians, even in the west are treated like nothing, if the ambassador meets you, the minister smiles at you, you should be grateful. More than the ministers, ambassadors, it’s the diplomats and staff around them that treat it like their moral obligation to ensure commoners are treated like shit.

We desperately need to start behaving like a serious global power. Yet every speech from the Prime Minister and the Ministry of External Affairs keeps circling back to what India was, our ancient culture, our ancestors, our civilizational greatness.

We have almost nothing contemporary, forward-looking, or world-beating to showcase with pride. That vacuum is not just embarrassing, it’s a bloody shame for a nation of our size and potential.

Time to stop romanticizing the past and start building and projecting a present that actually commands respect.

Enjoy Kesar Mangos!!

@DrSJaishankar @narendramodi

[naresh fernandes @tajmahalfoxtrot]

In half the seats BJP won in Bengal, total SIR deletions outnumber victory margin
The bulk of these seats are ones that the Hindutva party has never won before, reports @AnantGuptaAG
https://t.co/XM5QYsgSvX

[Suhasini Haidar @suhasinih]

‘I am one of the six victims’, reveals Vinesh Phogat; opposes tourney at former WFI chief Brij Bhushan’s hometown. What kind of government repeatedly puts its world-class women athletes through such trauma?
https://t.co/gZurBPNV2B

[Taru @_tarubhatia]

SAVE THE NICOBARS - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/DA6N30wdne

[ranjona banerji 🇮🇳 @ranjona]

Please sign this petition to save Nicobar.
Delhi people: the island, not the shop.
https://t.co/s05s0I5s2d

[M V Nikesh Kumar @mvnikeshkumar]

NDTV’s 10th straight quarterly loss says everything we need to know about the takeover.
A media company that is reportedly losing nearly ₹100 crore in just three months is still being kept alive, not because it makes business sense, but because it serves a larger political purpose. No corporate house keeps losing money like this out of love for journalism. The point is simple - this was never a business decision. It was about control. It was about owning a platform, shaping the narrative, and keeping a propaganda machine running for a political master.
The Delhi High Court quashing the Income Tax notices against Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy, and imposing a ₹2 lakh cost on the department, makes the picture clearer. Those cases now look exactly like what many had said from the beginning - pressure tactics to weaken the founders before the takeover.
So this is not just about NDTV’s losses. This is about media capture. A big corporate house willingly bleeding money to run a news channel tells us what the takeover was really for. Not profit. But
Propaganda.
Not business.
But political obedience.
Nothing we did not know. Just saying it out loud again. #NDTV #MediaCapture #CorporateMedia #IndianMedia #MediaIndependence #PropagandaMachine #PoliticalControl

[Taru @_tarubhatia]

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan? Delhi roads are more filthy than ever. Garbage is scattered all over, roads are broken, exposed manholes...and I'm not even talking about the whole city. I'm talking about places where politicians and rich don't live! This is so pathetic!

[Taru @_tarubhatia]

.@tkarun on India's silence on Trump's threat to Iran: "It is strange leadership of the Global South for India to stay mute when the leader of the most powerful nation on earth threatens a fellow developing country with annihilation."

[The Core @the_core_in]

Opinion: Trump's threat to erase civilisation in Iran drew criticism from world leaders. Still, India continues to behave as if studied silence is the best foreign policy. https://t.co/rpXESGRwze

Never mind that India leads the BRICS grouping this year and is a self-avowed champion of the Global South, writes @tkarun. Read on!

[The Core @the_core_in]

The West Asia war has exposed India’s heavy import dependence on LPG, leaving millions of households vulnerable to geopolitical shocks. This could be avoided with domestic coal. What’s missing is the political will to make that switch. @tkarun writes.
https://t.co/AGXlyGavG3