⚡️ Transformer: A video call, obscure bank accounts, ₹6.5 crore stolen—but who’s to blame?
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Dear reader,
As journalists, we report on a wide variety of incidents. Often, they make for stories that hit very close to home. One such story, this week, found us investigating deep into three individual cases of theft—which led to more than ₹23 crore being stolen from these people.
By now, we’ve all heard of cases of digital arrests around us. For some of us less lucky ones, we’ve also been on the receiving end of it. For one such individual that we worked closely with over the past months, it was a hard-to-believe tale: she is a high-ranking corporate professional, with big-ticket degrees and a thoroughly worldly sense of knowhow.
When such a person falls prey to scam callers who eventually ran away with more than ₹6 crore of her life’s earnings and savings, you can’t help but question—how is that even possible! It is this seemingly simple question that led us to an investigation team in Bhondsi just outside Gurgaon’s sprawling underbelly. There, we encountered a web of bank accounts—some belonging to students, others to people who didn’t even know they had these very accounts.
This week, a Mint investigation takes you inside the courtroom of India’s top consumer grievance authority—which received its first responses from India’s top two private banks to investigate whether the entire banking and financial system is, in fact, negligent towards us, the common citizens of India. The ramification of this case, incidentally, could be bigger than what any of us can imagine today.
Read our full story for a deep-dive.
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The business of birth
On the other hand of corporate India, venture capitalists seem to have spotted the massive surge in fertility clinics across the country. In fact, in certain pockets of the National Capital Region, there are dizzying neon displays and hard sales pitches advertised by innumerable in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) clinics—all promising to help you ‘start a family’.
On 18 July, my colleagues Sowmya Ramasubramanian and Jessica Jani reported on this rising phenomenon. But, there’s more—turns out, investors are finding them to be a great bet going forward. Startups, seizing this opportunity, have started throwing in generous dollops of tech keywords to the surge in demand for IVF services—many of them even promising a large chunk of the tech being DIY and doable from the confines of your home. Surely, given the various societal pressures and stigmas associated with or around this feat of science, there is a massive market that could benefit from it—and ample private capital is here for it.
Catch Mint’s deep dive on how IVF startups have emerged as a hot favourite for VCs, here.
Our great gig in the sky
From IVF clinics to outer space, there’s likely no direct link. But, turns out, India’s startups are excelling at both.
Earlier this week, Mint reported about a rising area of business for India’s space startups—offering surveillance technologies to the world. Turns out, we’re quite good at it, too. Take, for instance, Ananth Technologies—a long-time friend of India’s famed, storied space agency, ISRO. Ananth, led by a former ISRO engineer Subba Rao Pavuluri, today has three satellite factories spread across Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram. Today, alongside serving ISRO’s demand, they’re also tapping into demand for surveillance satellites from West Asia, Europe and Africa. Australia, too, is in the list of India’s space clients.
This has sparked a host of startups to join the fray. Digantara, led by its sharp-eyed chief Anirudh Sharma, is in process of making its own satellite assembly line. Bellatrix Aerospace is venturing into making full-scale surveillance satellites after space-testing its green propulsion systems. And, Suyash Singh’s GalaxEye is also gearing up to launch its own surveillance satellite, Drishti, in order to take a Maxar-like approach to serving space-based data to various nations.
Let’s face it: the world we live in today is far more divided than it was even as recently as half a decade ago. But, a global wave of nationalist sentiments has sent the alarm bells ringing for geopolitics and defence consultants—who all believe that surveillance satellites and allied services are of crucial importance, and India is here to tap the market.
Intrigued? Here’s the full saga.
India’s $280-billion headache
We all have friends and acquaintances who work in some capacity with the likes of TCS, Infosys, HCLTech, Wipro and others. At the turn of the millennium, these companies were the breakout ones to be at: recruiting at breakneck pace as India become the back office to the world’s rising technology use cases.
Over the years, these companies have emerged to be vital cogs of our societal wheel: so vital, in fact, that they became pivotal to how most things work. Yet, you probably wouldn’t even know about their involvement today. One such example: for Niva Bupa the health insurance provider, tech services firm Genpact has remained its back office for making its products work seamlessly, for close to two decades now.
Last week, as five of India’s six top tech service providers announced their financial earnings, there emerged a significant threat: barring HCLTech, none offered much optimism for growth.
So, why should you care? The biggest reason for this is that the $280-billion IT services industry today offers employment to over 6 million people, and over the past two decades, has been the single largest employer for the 1.5 million engineering graduates that come out from colleges in India each year.
With the entire industry now staring at a near-unprecedented slowdown, there is reason enough to say that India’s tech services industry could well see reductions of its workforces. Analysts also believe that the advent of AI is making the market even more uncertain.
Read Mint contributor Shelley Singh’s take on what this slowdown truly means, here.
You might want to subscribe to Mint’s newsletter on Climate Change, brought to you by my colleagues Sayantan Bera and Bibek Bhattacharya:
And in other news…
Tesla is finally here, with a rather compact new showroom in Mumbai’s posh work district: Bandra-Kurla Complex. They’re starting sales here with the Model Y, which the company classifies as an SUV. If you’re looking to get one, prices begin at ₹60 lakh. Interestingly, the company is also selling an add-on ‘full self-drive’ mode, which you can get for ₹6 lakh. The question is, where would you use it?
Meanwhile, if you don’t want to spend so much but still get access to cutting-edge tech, Airtel has teamed up with Silicon Valley’s tech upstart Perplexity to offer its ‘Pro’ tier to its 360-million users for free. If you haven’t tried it yet, go for it now. If not anything else, it’ll make AI seem less intimidating to you for sure.
Transformer by Mint is a weekly newsletter that brings India’s most important and interesting technology updates under one umbrella. As the world transforms with every day of innovation, Transformer will keep a tab on the impact that technologies will make in each of our lives. Published every week, the newsletter brings some of India’s tech landscape’s most insightful coverages until date.
Written by Shouvik Das. Edited by Rashmi Sanyal. Produced by Shashwat Mohanty.
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